Current Affairs - Science - Discussion

Scientists of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in the United States, have founded that, India is one of the places where overuse of water resources has led to a serious decline in freshwater availability. The scientists used data on human activities to map locations where freshwater is changing throughout the world. This is a first-of-its-kind study that used an array of NASA satellite observations of Earth. The study was published in the journal Nature. It revealed that Earth's dry areas are getting drier due to various factors like human water management, climate change and natural cycles. Areas in northern and eastern India, the Middle East, California and Australia are some of the hotspots where freshwater levels are reducing. The scientists used 14 years of observations from the US/German-led Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) spacecraft mission to track global trends in freshwater in 34 regions throughout the world. In northern India, groundwater extraction for irrigation of crops has led to a drastic reduce in available water, in spite of receiving normal rainfall throughout the period studied.