Researchers found the severe drought that has swept the United States over the past several years is actively changing the landscape.
A research team found the broad-scale loss of water is causing the U.S. to rise like a spring coil, the University of California - San Diego reported.
The team found the drought is causing an "uplift" effect of more than half an inch in California's mountains and an average of 0.15 of an inch across the west. GPS data estimated a water deficit of a whopping 62 trillion gallons spread out across the entire western U.S.
To make their findings the researchers looked at an array of data from the National Science Foundation's Plate Boundary Observatory and other networks. Scripps researcher Adrian Borsa noticed the same patterns taking place between the years of 2003 and 2014. All of the stations had moved up over the years, coinciding with the recent droughts.
Duncan Agnew, a Scripps Oceanography geophysics professor who specializes in studying earthquakes and their impact on shaping the earth's crust, said the data's findings can only be explained by a rapid uplift in the tectonic plate on which the western U.S. rests.
"These results quantify the amount of water mass lost in the past few years," said Cayan. "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," said Dan Cayan, a research meteorologist with Scripps and USGS, the results paint a new picture of the dire hydrological state of the west.
The findings were published in the August 21 online edition of the journal Science.
