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by Abrahm Lustgarten, Graphics by Lucas Waldron, Illustrations by Olivier Kugler for ProPublica As the planet gets hotter and its reservoirs shrink and its glaciers melt, people have increasingly drilled into a largely ungoverned, invisible cache of fresh water: the vast, hidden pools found deep underground. Now, a new study that examines the world’s total supply of fresh water — accounting for its rivers and rain, ice and aquifers together — warns that Earth’s most essential resource is quickly disappearing, signaling what the paper’s authors describe as “a critical, emerging threat to humanity.” The landmasses of the planet are drying. In most places there is less precipitation even as moisture evaporates from the soil faster. More than anything, Earth is being slowly dehydrated by the unmitigated mining of groundwater, which underlies vast proportions of every continent. Nearly 6 billion people, or three quarters of humanity, live in the 101 countries that the study identified as confronting a net decline in water supply — portending enormous challenges for food production and a heightening risk of conflict and instability. The paper “provides a glimpse of what the future is going to be,” said Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar, an earth systems scientist working with Arizona State University and the lead author of the study. “We are already dipping from a trust fund. We don’t actually know how much the account has.” The research, published on Friday in the journal Science Advances, confirms not just that droughts and precipitation are growing more extreme but reports that drying regions are fast expanding. It also found that while parts of the planet are getting wetter, those areas are shrinking. The study, which excludes the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, concludes not only that Earth is suffering a pandemic of “continental drying” in lower latitudes, but that it is the uninhibited pumping of groundwater by farmers, cities and corporations around the world that now accounts for 68% of the total loss of fresh water in those areas, which generally don’t have glaciers. Groundwater is ubiquitous across the globe, but its quality and depth vary, as does its potential to be replenished by rainfall. Major groundwater basins — the deep and often high-quality aquifers — underlie roughly one-third of the planet, including roughly half of Africa, Europe and South America. But many of those aquifers took millions of years to form and might take thousands of years to refill. Instead, a significant portion of the water taken from underground flows off the land through rivers and on to the oceans. The researchers were surprised to find that the loss of water on the continents has grown so dramatically that it has become one of the largest causes of global sea level rise. Moisture lost to evaporation and drought, plus runoff from pumped groundwater, now outpaces the melting of glaciers and the ice sheets of either Antarctica or Greenland as the largest contributor of water to the oceans. Water From Land Has Become a Leading Driver of Sea Level Rise Most of the water lost from drying regions is from groundwater pumping, which ultimately shifts fresh water from aquifers into the oceans. Note: Glaciers refer to the parts of the continents covered in glaciers but excludes the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Drying land and aquifers refer to the water lost by the continents in areas not covered by glaciers, including river flow and evaporation. Groundwater loss accounts for 68% of the drying in those places. The study examines 22 years of observational data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, satellites, which measure changes in the mass of the earth and have been applied to estimate its water content. The technique was groundbreaking two decades ago when the study’s co-author, Jay Famiglietti, who was then a professor at the University of California, at Irvine, used it to pinpoint where aquifers were in decline. Since then, he and others have published dozens of papers using GRACE data, but the question has always lingered: What does the groundwater loss mean in the context of all of the water available on the continents? So Famiglietti, now a professor at Arizona State University, set out to inventory all the land-based water contained in glaciers, rivers and aquifers and see what was changing. The answer: everything, and quickly. Since 2002, the GRACE sensors have detected a rapid shift in water loss patterns around the planet. Around 2014, though, the pace of drying appears to have accelerated, the authors found, and is now growing by an area twice the size of California each year. “It’s like this sort of creeping disaster that has taken over the continents in ways that no one was really anticipating,” Famiglietti said. (Six other researchers also contributed to the study.) The parts of the world drying most acutely are becoming interconnected, forming what the study’s authors describe as “mega” regions spreading across the earth’s mid-latitudes. One of those regions covers almost the whole of Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Asia. The Drying of the Earth Accelerated in Recent Years The dramatic depletion of groundwater and surface water plus the melting of glaciers between 2014-24 has connected once-separate arid places, forming “mega-drying” regions that stretch across whole continents. Watch video ➜ Note: Data is for February 2003 to December 2013 and January 2014 to April 2024. The first time period contains seven more months of data than the second. In the American Southwest and California, groundwater loss is a familiar story, but over the past two decades that hot spot has also spread dramatically. It now extends through Texas and up through the southern High Plains, where the Ogallala aquifer is depended on for agriculture, and it spreads south, stretching throughout Mexico and into Central America. These regions are connected not because they rely on the same water sources — in most cases they don’t — but because their populations will face the same perils of water stress: the most likely, a food

by Renee Dudley, with research by Doris Burke ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Last week, Microsoft announced that it would no longer use China-based engineering teams to support the Defense Department’s cloud computing systems, following ProPublica’s investigation of the practice, which cybersecurity experts said could expose the government to hacking and espionage. But it turns out the Pentagon was not the only part of the government facing such a threat. For years, Microsoft has also used its global workforce, including China-based personnel, to maintain the cloud systems of other federal departments, including parts of Justice, Treasury and Commerce, ProPublica has found. This work has taken place in what’s known as the Government Community Cloud, which is intended for information that is not classified but is nonetheless sensitive. The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, the U.S. government’s cloud accreditation organization, has approved GCC to handle “moderate” impact information “where the loss of confidentiality, integrity, and availability would result in serious adverse effect on an agency’s operations, assets, or individuals.” The Justice Department’s Antitrust Division has used GCC to support its criminal and civil investigation and litigation functions, according to a 2022 report. Parts of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education have also used GCC. Microsoft says its foreign engineers working in GCC have been overseen by U.S.-based personnel known as “digital escorts,” similar to the system it had in place at the Defense Department. Nevertheless, cybersecurity experts told ProPublica that foreign support for GCC presents an opportunity for spying and sabotage. “There’s a misconception that, if government data isn’t classified, no harm can come of its distribution,” said Rex Booth, a former federal cybersecurity official who now is chief information security officer of the tech company SailPoint. “With so much data stored in cloud services — and the power of AI to analyze it quickly — even unclassified data can reveal insights that could harm U.S. interests,” he said. Harry Coker, who was a senior executive at the CIA and the National Security Agency, said foreign intelligence agencies could leverage information gleaned from GCC systems to “swim upstream” to more sensitive or even classified ones. “It is an opportunity that I can’t imagine an intelligence service not pursuing,” he said. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has deemed China the “most active and persistent cyber threat to U.S. Government, private-sector, and critical infrastructure networks.” Laws there grant the country’s officials broad authority to collect data, and experts say it is difficult for any Chinese citizen or company to meaningfully resist a direct request from security forces or law enforcement. Microsoft declined interview requests for this story. In response to questions, the tech giant issued a statement that suggested it would be discontinuing its use of China-based support for GCC, as it recently did for the Defense Department’s cloud systems. “Microsoft took steps last week to enhance the security of our DoD Government cloud offerings. Going forward, we are taking similar steps for all our government customers who use Government Community Cloud to further ensure the security of their data,” the statement said. A spokesperson declined to elaborate on what those steps are. The company also said that over the next month it “will conduct a review to assess whether additional measures are needed.” The federal departments and agencies that ProPublica found to be using GCC did not respond to requests for comment. The latest revelations about Microsoft’s use of its Chinese workforce to service the U.S. government — and the company’s swift response — are likely to fuel a rapidly developing firestorm in Washington, where federal lawmakers and the Trump administration are questioning the tech giant’s cybersecurity practices and trying to contain any potential national security fallout. “Foreign engineers — from any country, including of course China — should NEVER be allowed to maintain or access DoD systems,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote in a post on X last Friday. Last week, ProPublica revealed that Microsoft has for a decade relied on foreign workers — including those based in China — to maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems, with oversight coming from U.S.-based digital escorts. But those escorts, we found, often don’t have the advanced technical expertise to police foreign counterparts with far more advanced skills, leaving highly sensitive information vulnerable. In response to the reporting, Hegseth launched a review of the practice. ProPublica found that Microsoft developed the escort arrangement to satisfy Defense Department officials who were concerned about the company’s foreign employees, given the department’s citizenship requirements for people handling sensitive data. Microsoft went on to win federal cloud computing business and has said in earnings reports that it receives “substantial revenue from government contracts.” While Microsoft has said it will stop using China-based tech support for the Defense Department, it declined to answer questions about what would replace it, including whether cloud support would come from engineers based outside the U.S. The company also declined to say whether it would continue to use digital escorts. Microsoft confirmed to ProPublica this week that a similar escorting arrangement had been used in GCC — a dynamic that surprised some former government officials and cybersecurity experts. “In an increasingly complex digital world, consumers of cloud products deserve to know how their data is handled and by whom,” Booth said. “The cybersecurity industry depends on clarity.” Microsoft said it disclosed details of the GCC escort arrangement in documentation submitted to the federal government as part of the FedRAMP cloud accreditation process. The company declined to provide the documents to ProPublica, citing the potential security risk of publicly disclosing them, and also declined to say whether the China-based location of its support personnel was specifically mentioned in them. ProPublica contacted other major cloud services providers to the federal government to ask whether they use China-based support. A spokesperson for Amazon Web Services said in a statement that “AWS does