Emily Kwong

You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.

Okay, Burleigh, so aquifers are clearly very important to life on Earth.

Groundwater is responsible, you said, for half of the water people use globally.

Do we know how many aquifers there are in the world?

Are they drying up entirely?

Yeah.

If we don't recharge our aquifers, fill them back up with water, I imagine it can really alter the landscape.

So in the places where scientists saw water in decline in these aquifers, how much water are we talking?

So there really is a domino effect here.

In places where the aquifer is depleting the most, are people just they're going to run out of water entirely?

That is one possibility.

Yeah.

And our planet, I mean, it has more than 8 billion people at this point.

This is an uncomfortable question to ask, but does our planet have enough water for all of us?

So there is enough water, but not if certain groups of people are using a lot of it.

Oh, that sounds like a research nightmare.

Is there no other way to look at aquifer levels besides monitoring these wells?

So they're using changes in the gravitational field on the Earth's surface as kind of an indicator of water movement.

Can they see if there's more or less water in an area?

Yeah.