As people pump groundwater for irrigation, drinking water, and industrial uses, the water doesn't just seep¹（渗） back into the ground -- it also evaporates（蒸发） into the atmosphere, or runs off into rivers and canals, eventually emptying into（流注） the world's oceans. This water adds up, and a new study calculates that by 2050, groundwater pumping will cause a global sea level rise of about 0.8 millimeters per year. "Other than ice on land, the excessive groundwater extractions are fast becoming the most important terrestrial water contribution to sea level rise," said Yoshihide Wada, with Utrecht University in the Netherlands and lead author of the study. In the coming decades, he noted², groundwater contributions to sea level rise are expected to become as significant as those of melting glaciers³ and ice caps outside of Greenland and the Antarctic.

Between around 1970 and 1990, sea level rise caused by groundwater pumping was cancelled out as people built dams, trapping water in reservoirs so the water wouldn't empty into the sea, Wada said. His research shows that starting in the 1990s, that changed as populations started pumping more groundwater and building fewer dams.

The researchers looked not only at the contribution of groundwater pumping, which they had investigated before, but also at other factors that influence the amount of terrestrial（地球的） water entering the oceans, including marsh⁴ drainage, forest clearing, and new reservoirs. Wada and his colleagues calculate that by mid-century, the net effect of these additional factors is an additional 0.05 mm per year of annual sea level rise, on top of the contribution from groundwater pumping alone.

The research team's article is being published May 9 in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

The last report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 addressed the effect on sea level rise of melting ice on land, including glaciers and ice caps, Wada said. But it didn't quantify the future contribution from other terrestrial water sources, such as groundwater, reservoirs, wetlands and more, he said, because the report's authors thought the estimates for those sources were too uncertain.

"They assumed that the positive and negative contribution from the groundwater and the reservoirs would cancel out," Wada said. "We found that wasn't the case. The contribution from the groundwater is going to increase further, and outweigh⁵ the negative contribution from reservoirs."

In the current study, the researchers estimated the impact of groundwater depletion⁶ since 1900 using data from individual countries on groundwater pumping, model simulations of groundwater recharge, and reconstructions⁷ of how water demand has changed over the years. They also compared and corrected those estimates with observations from sources such as the GRACE satellite, which uses gravity measurements to determine variations in groundwater storage.