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A new study shows that Earth's global water cycle is changing in unprecedented ways—largely due to human influence.
Scientists have been warning for years about the looming climate crisis, and they've also been repeatedly saying that human activity is literally affecting every system on the planet. In a new study, spanning nearly 20 years of observations, scientists have found that the planet's global water cycle is changing in an unprecedented way, writes PHYS.org.
According to study co-author Sujay Kumar, a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, he and his colleagues found that human interference with the planet's global water cycle is actually more significant than previously thought. Most of the shifts the scientists observed are caused by activities such as agriculture, and scientists believe they can affect ecosystems and water management, especially in certain areas.
These shifts, the scientists describe, have implications for people around the world. Previously, the water cycle was thought to fluctuate only within a certain range, but scientists now believe that these shifts have implications for people around the world. At least, this statement is true for some specific regions, said lead author of the study, Wanshu Ni, a research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
The authors of the study hope that their findings will serve as a roadmap to improve how scientists assess water resource variability, and will also influence how the global community plans for sustainable resource management, especially in areas where changes are particularly noticeable.
One of the most striking examples of human influence on the water cycle is northern China, which is suffering from persistent drought. At the same time, vegetation in some isolated regions continues to thrive, in part because farmers continue to irrigate their lands. Pumping more and more water from the Earth's interior. Such interconnected human interventions often lead to complex effects on other water cycle variables, such as evapotranspiration and runoff.

In the new work, Ni and colleagues focused on three different types of shifts in the cycle:
- reduction of water in the groundwater reservoir;
- seasonal shift;
- change in extreme events, such as 100-year floods occurring more frequently.
The team used remote sensing data collected between 2003 and 2020 from several NASA satellite sources. They also used products from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer satellite to provide information on vegetation health. As a result, the scientists were able to model continental water flows and storage across the planet.
The study results suggest that Earth system models used to simulate the future global water cycle must evolve to integrate the current effects of human activities.
Before the calendar of the final tournament, date, time and place of each match Фокус wrote that a continental water reserve had been found deep within the Earth, but there was a problem: it was guarded by dormant volcanoes.