Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Billions of people rely upon groundwater for drinking water and agriculture, yet predicting how climate change may affect aquifer storage remains challenging. To gain insight beyond the short historical record, we reconstruct changes in groundwater levels in western North America during the last glacial termination (LGT, ~20 to 11 thousand years ago) using noble gas isotopes. Our reconstructions indicate remarkable stability of water table depth in a Pacific Northwest aquifer throughout the LGT despite increasing precipitation, closely matching independent Earth system model (ESM) simulations. In the American Southwest, ESM simulations and noble gas isotopes both suggest a pronounced LGT decline in water table depth in in response to decreasing precipitation, indicating distinct regional groundwater responses to climate. Despite the hydrologic simplicity of ESMs, their agreement with proxy reconstructions of past water table depth suggests that these models hold value in understanding groundwater dynamics and projecting large-scale aquifer responses to climate forcing.
Source: Science Advances
Institutions: Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, University of Manchester, University of Idaho, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado Boulder, Yale University, University of Utah, Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques, Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques
Language: English
Subfield: Geochemistry and Petrology
Field: Earth and Planetary Sciences
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $4,500
OpenAlex ID: W4411193867