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.

One of these mega-drying regions starts in Alaska and covers much of Canada, from British Columbia to Manitoba. Another encompasses the U.S. Southwest and Central America. The largest covers three continents, from the British Isles, Europe and North Africa in the west all the way to China and Malaysia in the east. Three-quarters of the global population, or about 6 billion people, live in areas where fresh water has dwindled since 2002.

“Fresh water is finite, and we’re losing it,” Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar, a research scientist with Arizona State University and the........

© The Korea Times