In this article, we will explore some of the many ways that climate change has affected our water resources. Spoiler: Didn’t help in any ways.
Climate change is affecting precipitation patterns. First off, it causes droughts due to the hot air causing more water to evaporate, and second, it causes flooding due to heavy precipitation, tropical cyclones, and sea level rise. These either cause there to be too little or too much water.
Another thing it is doing is making it more difficult for people to obtain freshwater. Global warming causes glaciers and ice sheet to melt, causing the water people get from them to go to the ocean. People also sometimes rely on melted snow to get water (after the snow melts to water) due to there being a lot of snow, but the warming makes it snow less. As stated in the last paragraph, climate change also causes droughts, which make it harder to obtain water.
Another thing it is doing that a lot of people don’t think of is making it more difficult to obtain groundwater. In case you don’t know, groundwater is the water that is underground inside of things like the cracks and spaces of rocks, soil, and sand. Groundwater is becoming more scarce because of agriculture due to people using it for irrigation, population due to more people needing the water, and climate change due to the higher evaporation making it more difficult for water to get underground. Groundwater depletion can lead to it being more difficult to obtain groundwater, the Earth’s surface to go lower down (commonly known as land subsidence), decreased water quality, and negative impacts on the ecosystem (a lot of ecosystems depend on groundwater to maintain good water levels).
As you have learned, climate change is really ruining the world in terms of water. It messes up the precipitation patterns, makes it harder to obtain freshwater, and makes it harder to obtain groundwater, leading to less water being available to all species, including humans.
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