As the climate warms, new data shows huge swaths of land across the globe are quickly drying, threatening humanity’s supply of fresh water. In the far north, the detected loss is due largely to glaciers melting and subarctic lakes drying. But farther south — where most people live — it is largely the race to suck groundwater from aquifers that is removing the water from the continents.
As the planet gets hotter and its reservoirs shrink and its glaciers melt, people have increasingly drilled into a largely ungoverned, invisible cache of fresh water: the vast, hidden pools found deep underground.
