The Global Water System Project at the University of Bonn, in Germany, just released a video on water in the Anthropocene. If you can get past the melodramatic narration, there is a pretty stellar data visualization, based on a lot of federal agency data, that illustrates how the human footprint has changed the global water cycle.
Some of the ways civilization has made its mark on the hydrosphere:
- Rainfall patterns are changing
- Wet areas are becoming wetter
- Dry areas are becoming drier
- Humans move more sediment than natural erosion
- We’ve built 48,000 large dams that change the course of rivers
- Many rivers no longer reach the sea
- Two-thirds of major deltas as sinking
- We’ve drained half of global wetlands
- We use an area the size of South America to grow our crops
- And an area the size of Africa to raise livestock
- We’ve altered snow and ice cover and ocean volume
The Global Water System Project is a research institute dedicated to understanding how all of these things are changing ecosystems in fundamental ways, and how we can adapt our water management strategies to supply everyone with the resources they need. Lofty goals.