A video debuting today in Times Square shows how, drop by drop, our groundwater is slowly disappearing.
In 2002, NASA launched a mission called Grace,
which sent two satellites into orbit to measure Earth’s gravitational
field. As NASA scientists looked at the data sent back from the mission,
they were finding strange aberrations in the data. The cause turned out
to be groundwater, the water under Earth’s surface that eventually
bubbles up as fresh, drinkable water. What was disturbing was that the
groundwater was disappearing.
In this video,
you can see that data used to show the yearly water cycle of the planet
for the last 10 years (ending in 2008). During the winter and spring,
you’ll see white areas flare up, which means an abundance of
groundwater. As the weather turns warmer, the water dissipates, only to
be replenished the next spring.
The red areas, however, tell a slightly different story. These are
where fundamental changes have happened to the groundwater levels. In
these places, water didn’t return to its normal winter levels. You can
also track some of these in the charts on the bottom of the video. For
instance, Las Vegas has actually reclaimed some of its groundwater,
while the North China Plain and Northern India’s levels continue to
plummet.
It pays to watch a few times to catch all the details, but the
general message is pretty simple: We need water to survive and we’re
using up all the easily accessible parts of it.
The video itself is being shown on World Water Day on the Thompson Reuters video screen in Times Square. It’s part of Heads Up!,
a competition about visualizing groundwater, which will continue to
produce visualizations about water throughout the year. This one was
designed by Richard Vijgen.
And if you really like the idea of seeing the animation small in Times
Square, not large on your computer, here is what it looked like:
HeadsUp! from Heads Up! 2012 on Vimeo.
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