Report: 13 Great Lakes’ worth of water underlies the contiguous United States
… A measly 1% of Earth’s freshwater is on the surface, where it can be seen and measured with relative ease. But beneath that, measurements vary massively depending on water table depth and ground porosity we can’t directly see. … But a new groundwater map by [Princeton University hydrologist Reed] Maxwell and colleagues offers the highest-resolution estimate so far of the amount of groundwater in the contiguous United States: about 306,500 cubic kilometers. That’s 13 times the volume of all the Great Lakes combined, almost 7 times the amount of water discharged by all rivers on Earth in a year.
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