Sierras Lost Water Weight, Grew Taller During Drought

Loss of water from the rocks of California's Sierra Nevada caused the mountain range to rise nearly an inch (24 millimeters) in height during the drought years from October 2011 to October 2015.

The Sierra Nevada range rose almost an inch during California's recent drought due to loss of water from within fractured rocks. Image credit: NASA

In the two following years of more abundant snow and rainfall, the mountains have regained about half as much water in the rock as they had lost in the preceding drought and have fallen about half an inch (12 millimeters) in height.

This suggests that the solid Earth has a greater capacity to store water than previously thought. Significantly more water was lost from cracks and soil within fractured mountain rock during drought and gained during heavy precipitation than hydrology models show.

The research team used advanced data-processing techniques on data from 1,300 GPS stations in the mountains of California, Oregon and Washington, collected from 2006 through October 2017.

The team found that the amount of water lost from within fractured mountain rock in 2011-2015 amounted to 10.8 cubic miles of water. This water is too inaccessible to be used for human purposes, but for comparison, the amount is 45 times as much water as Los Angeles currently uses in a year.

Earth's surface falls locally when it is weighed down with water and rebounds when the weight disappears. Many other factors also change the ground level, such as the movement of tectonic plates, volcanic activity, high- and low-pressure weather systems, and Earth's slow rebound from the last ice age.

The team corrected for these and other factors to estimate how much of the height increase was solely due to water loss from rock.

Before this study, scientists' leading theories for the growth of the Sierra were tectonic uplift or Earth rebounding from extensive groundwater pumping in the adjoining California Central Valley. These two processes together only produced a quarter of an inch (7 millimeters) of growth -- less than a third of the total. (NASA)

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