Why America's Biggest Water Supply Is Collapsing

In 1964 a well in Haskell County, Kansas pumped sixteen hundred gallons a minute. By 2012 the farmer's grandson was getting three hundred out of a replacement, with sand in it. Underneath is the Ogallala, the High Plains aquifer: 111.8 million acres under eight states, the largest in the United States. The USDA credits the ground above it with nearly one-fifth of America's wheat, corn, cotton and cattle; the USGS puts its share of all US groundwater pumped for irrigation at thirty percent. The Geological Survey's 2024 report measured 2,741 wells. The average level is down 16.5 feet since 1950, about a tenth of the storage, and 56 percent of the area barely changed. Texas is down 44 feet. Nebraska has barely moved. South Dakota is up. Rain falls almost evenly across a thousand miles. Recharge does not: ninety-two millimetres a year reaches the water under the Nebraska Sand Hills, nine under western Kansas. This is the story of fossil water, rain that fell before the last ice age ended, pumped up by center pivots nobody thought to question, and running out one county at a time. Sources: McGuire, V.L., and Strauch, K.R., 2024. Water-level and recoverable water in storage changes, High Plains aquifer, predevelopment to 2019 and 2017 to 2019. U.S. Geological Survey Scientific Investigations Report 2023-5143. https://pubs.usgs.gov/publication/sir20235143 Scanlon, B.R., and others, 2012. Groundwater depletion and sustainability of irrigation in the US High Plains and Central Valley. PNAS 109(24). https://www.beg.utexas.edu/files/content/b... Whittemore, D.O., Butler, J.J. Jr., and Wilson, B.B. Status of the High Plains Aquifer in Kansas. Kansas Geological Survey Technical Series 22. https://www.kgs.ku.edu/Publications/Bullet... High Plains Underground Water Conservation District No. 1, 2024 Water Level Summary (saturated thickness, 16 counties around Lubbock). https://hpuwcd1.specialdistrict.org/files/... Wines, Michael, "Wells Dry, Fertile Plains Turn to Dust." The New York Times, 19 May 2013.