News | March 10, 2013
A less fertile crescent - GRACE eyes Middle East river basins
One of the great river basins of the Middle East, the Tigris-Euphrates—which flows through the so-called fertile crescent that gave birth to agriculture itself—is getting drier. A study in Water Resources Research, indicates that the region is losing water; 0.3 meters per year from 2006-09, at an an alarming rate. This work is reported in;
Voss, Katalyn A., Famiglietti, James S., Lo, MinHui, de Linage, Caroline, Rodell, Matthew and Swenson, Sean C., Groundwater depletion in the middle east from GRACE with implications for transboundary water management in the Tigris-Euphrates-Western Iran region, accepted manuscript online: 10 JAN 2013 09:55AM EST | DOI: 10.1002/wrcr.20078.
See related stories;
- CNN; Fareed Zakaria GPS story
- The Economist; Less Fertile Crescent
- The New York Times; Dot Earth Blog
- JPL Release; NASA Satellites find Freshwater Losses in the Middle East
- NASA's Earth Observatory; Landsat images of a shrinking reservoir on the Euphrates River