You might not believe it if you’ve experienced one of the flash floods hammering the planet from Texas to Vietnam this summer, but the Earth is becoming drier — at least the parts where most people live. Given how this can affect every aspect of human existence, from farming to geopolitics, it’s past time we started treating this like the emergency it is.
Measurements from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites suggest the continents have been losing fresh water at an alarming rate since 2002, according to a recent study in the journal Science Advances. Some parts of the planet are becoming wetter, especially in the tropics, but the drying parts are drying more quickly than the increasingly wet parts are getting wet. The drying parts are also spreading, gaining roughly two Californias’ worth of land every year and recently merging into “mega-drying” regions sprawling across vast stretches of continents.