Drought Is Causing the Western U.S. to Rise Like an Uncoiling Spring

Drought In The West - Public Domain

File under apocalyptic imagery: The western United States’ worst drought in possibly 500 years is causing the ground to rise up like an uncoiling spring.

A new report in Science from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at U.C. San Diego found that the massive loss of groundwater associated with the drought has caused a tectonic “uplift” of more than half an inch in California’s mountains, with an average 0.15 of an inch across the west.

Sifting through ground-positioning data from GPS stations throughout the region, the researchers had discovered those stations had been moving upwards in recent years, coinciding with the current drought. Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist specializing in earthquakes and an author of the study, told Scripps that the data can only be explained by a rapid uplift of the tectonic plate underlying the western U.S. (which, he stressed, has virtually no effect on the San Andreas fault and does not increase risk of earthquakes).

(Read the rest of the story here…)