Giant_and_Dwarf-FIN

Giant and DwarfThis is because the food nourishing the hundreds of millions of people is producedthrough pumping groundwater. However, the levels of ground water are fast dropping inmany areas of India and China. 86 When the million wells (millions in the case is a very realnumber, not literary exaggeration) hit the bottom, the water will be suddenly gone andwith it also the food for tens if not hundreds of millions of people. Due to the excessivepumping of underground water, draining water from rivers into irrigation channels andrecurrent droughts, thousands of lakes have already dried up in China, including the largestChinese lake, the Poyang Lake. By 2012 the area of the lake had shrunk from original3,500 km 2 to 200 km 2 . Of course, this looks insignificant if compared to the tragedy of theAral Sea, which was by 2007 had decreased from its original size of ​68,000 km 2 to fourlakes with combined area of ​about 7,000 km 2 . Unfortunately, these are just two examplesamong thousands of others across the world. 87 Due to the same reasons that lakes aredisappearing in China, the waters of the mighty Yellow River—the mother of Chinese civilization—havenot reached the sea several times over the past decade. The water on its wayto the sea was used by people, so the riverbed has just dried up. This fate has befallen manyworld rivers, including the Colorado and Indus.Only 50 years ago Lake Chad, situated on the borders of Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon,was ​one of the largest African lakes. However, a combination of overusing water for irrigationfrom its two main tributaries and a changing climate has resulted in the lake losing 95 % of itsarea during my own lifetime. A lake that used to cover an area almost as large as Belgium hasshrunk to little over 1,000 km 2 or the size of a district. The lake is the source of water for about20 million people, livestock and fields in the four mentioned countries.86 Unfortunately, not only there. Much of the agriculture in one of the breadbaskets of the USA—states ofOklahoma, northern Texas, Kansas and around them, much of productivity depends on water pumpedfrom giant fossil aquifer Ogalala. Despite the vast area and volume of Ogalala aquifer, decades of pumpingare leading to rapid decrease in groundwater level and in some areas wells have already dried up.This is the territory which during the years 1930–1940 suffered by severe drought, wind erosion and a giganticdust storms. The phenomenon has gone down in history under the name “Dust Bowl”. Dust Bowlcaused great social crisis, hundreds of thousands of people were economically ruined and multitudes ofrefugees were forced to leave Oklahoma and other affected areas. The events of the time are brilliantlycaptured in the novel The Grapes of Wrath by American Nobel laureate in literature John Steinbeck.87 During the drought in 2011, only in the province of Hubei 1300 lakes dried up and were declared dead.Yangtze delta hit by worst drought in decades, 2011-05-27, http://www.smh.com.au/world/yangtzedelta-hit-by-worst-drought-in-decades-20110526-1f6fq.html100