Severe Drought is Causing the Western United States to Rise Like an 'Uncoiled Spring'

The drought currently gripping the western United States may be causing more than just failing crops. Scientists have taken a closer look and have found that growing, broad-scale loss of water is causing the entire western U.S. to rise up like an uncoiled spring.

The researchers first noticed this effect while they were investigating ground positioning data from GPS stations throughout the west. Pouring through the data, they kept noticing the same pattern over the 2003 to 2014 period-all of the GPS stations moved upwards in the most recent years, coinciding with the timing of the current drought.

In fact, the researchers found that the water shortage is actually causing an "uplift" effect of up to 15 millimeters, which is more than half an inch, in California's mountains. It's also causing an average four millimeters, or .15 of an inch, of uplift across the west.

"These results quantify the amount of water mass lost in the past few years," said Dan Cayan, a research meteorologist with Scripps and USGS, in a news release. "It also represents a powerful new way to track water resources over a very large landscape. We can home in on the Sierra Nevada mountains and critical California snowpack. These results demonstrate that this technique can be used to study changes in fresh water stocks in other regions around the world, if they have a network of GPS sensors."

In the end, the scientists estimate that the water deficit is at nearly 62 trillion gallons of water. That's enough to spread out a six-inch layer of water across the entire western U.S.

As the drought continues, it's important to measure its impacts, especially in the western U.S. The fact that the ground is actually rising due to a lack of water reveals a new way to potentially monitor the drought in the future.

The findings are published in the journal Science.