“More Than Half of World’s Largest Lakes Shrinking Due to Human Activity and Climate Change”

More than half of the world’s largest lakes are shrinking as a result of human activity and higher temperatures due to climate change. This is shown by a study in the scientific journal Science. Over the past 28 years, the combined lakes lost an average of 22 gigatons of water annually, about 17 times Lake Mead – the lake in the state of Nevada enclosed by the Hoover Dam.

Lakes that have to deal with a growing amount of precipitation also lose water, the scientists see. This is partly due to the fact that the warmer air causes more evaporation, but also because people use more water for agriculture and drinking water, for example. The use of fresh water resources for power stations also plays an important role.

“More than half of the decrease is mainly due to human consumption or indirect human action due to global warming,” said lead researcher Fanfang Yao of the University of Colorado. ABC News. “This trend is likely to continue if we don’t act on climate change or if we don’t limit human consumption of water.”

The researchers combined satellite measurements of the nearly 2,000 largest lakes on Earth. 53 percent of these have experienced significant contraction in the past thirty years, which the researchers believe is not random. Incidentally, sedimentation, ie the deposition of material on the bottom of lakes, also plays a role in the reduction of water in the largest freshwater sources.

Among the worst affected lakes, according to the study, are the Salton Sea salt lake in California, the Great Salt Lake in Utah and the Goud-e-Zereh salt lake in Afghanistan. The Aral Sea on the border of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan has also shrunk significantly over the past three decades.

The conclusion that human actions, climate change and sedimentation lead to shrinking lakes is not new, but this study is one of the first to quantify this on this scale. According to the researchers, almost a quarter of the world’s population lives near a large shrinking lake, which means that the development can also have major local consequences for agriculture, drinking water supply and energy generation.