Past aquifer responses to climate recorded by fossil groundwater
Billions of people rely upon groundwater for drinking water and agriculture, yet predicting how climate change may affect aquifer storage remains challenging. To gain insight beyond the short historical record, we reconstruct changes in groundwater levels in western North America during the last glacial termination (LGT, ~20 to 11 thousand years ago) using noble gas isotopes. Our reconstructions indicate remarkable stability of water table depth in a Pacific Northwest aquifer throughout the LGT despite increasing precipitation, closely matching independent Earth system model (ESM) simulations. In the American Southwest, ESM simulations and noble gas isotopes both suggest a pronounced LGT decline in water table depth in in response to decreasing precipitation, indicating distinct regional groundwater responses to climate. Despite the hydrologic simplicity of ESMs, their agreement with proxy reconstructions of past water table depth suggests that these models hold value in understanding groundwater dynamics and projecting large-scale aquifer responses to climate forcing.
Authors
- Rebecca Tyne (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1316-3119)
- Kristopher B. Karnauskas (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8121-7321)
- William J. Jenkins (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9146-2064)
- Jeff B. Langman (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8880-0090)
- Michael W. Broadley (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5031-4687)
- Dillon J. Amaya (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6720-3265)
- Peter H. Barry (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6960-1555)
- Gabriel J. Bowen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6928-3104)
- Juan M. Lora
- David V. Bekaert (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1062-6221)
- Maya Costantini (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8491-8075)
- Alan Seltzer (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2870-1215)
- Israela Musan
Institutions
- Planetary Science Institute (US)
- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (US)
- University of Idaho (US)
- Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (US)
- University of Colorado Boulder (US)
- University of Utah (US)
- University of Manchester (GB)
- Yale University (US)
- Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques (FR)
- Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques (FR)
- NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory (US)
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Science Advances
- Published
- 2025-06-11
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adu7812
- Citations
- 1
- Primary Topic
- Groundwater and Isotope Geochemistry
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 1.34