California drought gave Sierra Nevada mountain range 1 inch height in four years

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California drought gave Sierra Nevada mountain range 1 inch height in four years
California drought gave Sierra Nevada mountain range 1 inch height in four years

California : Drought in California may be a nightmare for many farmers and land linked humans, but it apparently resulted in the growth of Sierra Nevada Mountain range by an inch, according to new data from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The growth in the mountain range has been registered in a time frame of nearly four years with the help of 1,300 GPS stations.

The reason behind gain in height is loss of water. The Sierra Nevada mountain range lost about 10.8 cubic miles of water in those four years (for reference, this was enough amount of water to fulfill needs of Los Angeles for next 45 years). 

Scientist Donald Argus, a JPL researcher involved in the study, explained how precipitation trends could cause mountains to shrink or grow.

When rain, snow, and other forms of precipitation build up on the surface, mountains tend to give way and lose some height. But when there is a lack of water on the surface, similar to what happened in this decade’s California drought, the opposite happens, as mountains grow a bit taller due to the loss of water weight.

“It’s like a bathroom scale,” Argus told the Sacramento Bee on Thursday.

Well, there is also another theory which states another big reason behind the growth of Sierra Nevada mountain range.

A second theory suggested that intense groundwater pumping had caused the height increase in the Sierra Nevada. As explained by the Sacramento Bee, farmers in California’s Central Valley had engaged in groundwater pumping during the drought, which resulted in parts of the valley floor sinking.

NASA’s study confirmed that this also contributed to the height increase, but not as much as the lack of water and snow from 2011 to 2015.