Water is heavy and costly to transport, and those who can afford it will always have water. But the real problems are availability and transport moving the freshwater from where it is plentiful (such as Canada, South America, and Russia) to where it is scarce (such as the Middle East, India, and Africa). As with any other resource, there are of course regional shortages, and they are getting worse. There's plenty of freshwater on our blue globe it is not raining any less these days than it did millennia ago. Large-scale desalination can be done, but it is expensive.īut nor is the world running out of freshwater, either. The problem is that the vast majority of Earth's water is contained in the oceans as saltwater, and must be desalinated before it can be used for drinking or farming. In fact, there is probably more liquid water on Earth than there was just a few decades ago, due in part to global warming and melting polar ice caps.

Earth's hydrologic cycle is a closed system, and the process is as old as time: evaporation, condensation, precipitation, infiltration, and so on. There's about 360 quintillion gallons of water on the planet, and it's not going anywhere except in a circle. Our planet is not running out of water, nor is it losing water. It's true that there is cause for alarm, but to understand the problem people need to read behind the headlines to understand one little fact: There is no water shortage. Nevada's Lake Mead is half its original capacity a recent study concluded that there is a 50/50 chance that the lake will be gone in less than fifteen years. Earth's lakes are vanishing at an alarming rate the Aral Sea, for example, is less than a quarter its original size.Many of the world's great rivers are a fraction of the size they once were, and some have dried up completely.The global demand for water has tripled over the last 50 years, while water tables are falling in many of the world's most populated countries, including the United States, China, and India.

Another word for running out of water