The Middle East is headed towards a water shortage crisis, as NASA
satellites show that reserves the size of the Dead Sea have been
depleted in just seven years, largely due to well-drilling. Newly-obtained results show that 144 cubic kilometres of freshwater –
a volume nearly equivalent to that of the Dead Sea or Lake Tahoe – had
been removed from the ground in the area that encompasses Turkey, Iran,
Iraq and Syria between 2003 and 2009. "That's enough
water to meet the needs of tens of millions to more than a hundred
million people in the region each year, depending on regional water use
standards and availability," said Jay Famiglietti, the UC Irvine
professor who led the team who made the findings, which are due to be
published on Friday in Water Resources Reasearch magazine.