The largest lakes in the world are drastically diminishing, and experts believe they know why.
(CNN) - According to a recent study, more than half of the largest lakes and reservoirs in the world have lost substantial amounts of water over the last three decades. The report places the majority of the blame on climate change and unsustainable water use.
According to a study by a group of international scientists that was published on Thursday in the journal Science, almost one-quarter of the world's population resides in the basin of a drying lake.
While lakes only make up around 3% of the earth's surface, they contain approximately 90% of the planet's freshwater liquid surface, are important sources of drinking water, irrigation, and power, and they also serve as important habitats.
Although rain and snowfall variations in the environment naturally cause changes in lake water levels, human activities are also having an increasing impact.
The most important lakes are seeing rapid decreases all throughout the world. In the midst of a megadrought and decades of overuse, Lake Mead on the Colorado River in the Southwest United States has significantly shrunk. The largest inland body of water in the world, the Caspian Sea, which lies between Asia and Europe, has long been in decline as a result of water consumption and climate change.
Numerous lakes' decline has been well-documented, yet
According to Fangfang Yao, the study's principal author and a visiting scholar at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, the magnitude of change—and the causes behind it—have been less thoroughly investigated.
Nearly 2,000 of the greatest lakes and reservoirs on Earth, which collectively hold 95% of all lake water storage on Earth, were measured by satellite by the researchers.
Incorporating climate models and more than 250,000 satellite pictures from 1992 to 2020, scientists were able to retrace the history of the lakes over several decades.
The results were "staggering," according to the report's authors.
53% of the lakes and reservoirs were discovered to have lost water.
a net loss of about 22 billion metric tons of water annually, which the authors of the research compared to the volume of 17 Lake Meads.
The survey concluded that human activities and climate change are to blame for more than half of the net loss of water volume in natural lakes.
Everywhere decreases in lake water storage were detected, including in the chilly Arctic and the humid tropics, according to the paper. As a result, it appears that "drying trends worldwide are more extensive than previously thought," according to Yao.
Different drivers had an impact on certain lakes.
The Salton Sea in California and the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan have both shrunk due to unsustainable water consumption, while the Great Lakes have declined due to changes in rainfall and runoff.
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