Dwindling groundwater resources in northern India, from satellite gravity observations

Northern India and its surroundings, home to roughly 600 million people, is probably the most heavily irrigated region in the world. Temporal changes in Earth's gravity field in this region as recorded by the GRACE satellite mission, reveal a steady, large‐scale mass loss that we attribute to excessive extraction of groundwater. Combining the GRACE data with hydrological models to remove natural variability, we conclude the region lost...