The Times asked all 50 states how they police the use of valuable groundwater. Their answers reveal why the country is draining and damaging its aquifers so rapidly.
A Times analysis shows that increasingly complex oil and gas wells now require astonishing volumes of water to fracture the bedrock and release fossil fuels, threatening America’s fragile aquifers.
Nitrate contamination of well water has been a decades-long problem in the San Joaquin and Salinas valleys — and now stormwater has flushed more fertilizer and manure into aquifers.
Using 20 years of satellite observations, researchers identified periods of extreme wetness and dryness, and found they were becoming larger, more frequent and more severe.
Despite the storms that have deluged California this winter, the state remains dogged by drought. And one of the simplest solutions — collecting and storing rainfall — is far more complicated than it seems.
