Past aquifer responses to climate recorded by fossil groundwater.

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 g

SUBMITTER: Seltzer AM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12154190 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature