America is using up its groundwater like there's no tomorrow (September 2023)
www.sltrib.com

... Global warming has focused concern on land and sky as soaring temperatures intensify hurricanes, droughts and wildfires. But another climate crisis is unfolding, underfoot and out of view.

Many of the aquifers that supply 90% of the nation's water systems, and which have transformed vast stretches of America into some of the world's most bountiful farmland, are being severely depleted. These declines are threatening irreversible harm to the American economy and society as a whole.

The New York Times conducted one of the most comprehensive examinations of groundwater depletion nationwide and found that America's life-giving resource is being exhausted in much of the country, and in many cases it won't come back. Huge industrial farms and sprawling cities are draining aquifers that could take centuries or millenniums to replenish themselves " if they recover at all.

States and communities are already paying the price.

Groundwater loss is hurting breadbasket states like Kansas, where the major aquifer beneath 2.6 million acres of land can no longer support industrial-scale agriculture. Corn yields have plummeted. If that decline were to spread, it could threaten America's status as a food superpower. ...

Draining Aquifers to Extinction (May 2024)
mrgwateradvocates.org

... Measurement data has shown regularly increasing drawdowns of aquifers in many, perhaps most, areas of the state, This is visible particularly in "closed" basins that don't have regularly flowing rivers to provide recharge. The State Engineer's rules do not currently provide a plan or mechanism to prevent (or delay) the aquifers' becoming dry or impractical to pump. ...

Lake Mead Water Levels -- Historical and Current
arachnoid.com

Good chart showing a trend.

... Lake Powell was 40 feet higher than 2023 in March, now it's 6 feet higher. ...

Lake Powell Water Database
lakepowell.water-data.com

But aquifers are not lakes.

Aquifers are ground water.

When a farm uses a pump to pull water up from the ground, that is using the aquifer.

And in the mid-west, aquifers are drying up.

The Ogallala Aquifer: Saving a Vital U.S. Water Source (2009)
www.scientificamerican.com

... On America's high plains, crops in early summer stretch to the horizon: field after verdant field of corn, sorghum, soybeans, wheat and cotton.

Framed by immense skies now blue, now scarlet-streaked, this 800-mile expanse of agriculture looks like it could go on forever.

It can't.

The Ogallala Aquifer, the vast underground reservoir that gives life to these fields, is disappearing. In some places, the groundwater is already gone. This is the breadbasket of America"the region that supplies at least one fifth of the total annual U.S. agricultural harvest. If the aquifer goes dry, more than $20 billion worth of food and fiber will vanish from the world's markets. And scientists say it will take natural processes 6,000 years to refill the reservoir. ...