Water storage in many of the world’s biggest lakes has declined sharply in the past 30 years, according to a new study, with a cumulative drop equal to the annual water consumption of the United States.
The loss of about 21.5 gigatons of water a year in natural lakes can “largely be attributed to climate warming,” a team of scientists said in a report on their research in Science for which they analyzed satellite data from 1,980 lakes and reservoirs between 1992 and 2020. When they combined the satellite images with climate data and hydrological models, they found “significant storage declines” in more than half of the bodies of water.
