Groundwater Depletion Causing 25% Of Sea Level Rise

From "Is Groundwater Depletion Causing Sea-level Rise?" by Lakis Polycarpou on state of the planet blog:

depletion of groundwater may be contributing to as much as 25 percent of observed sea-level rise in recent years.

What does this mean? Try to imagine it this way: human beings have stuck giant straws into the ground all over the world and are sucking out ancient water that has been there for, in some cases, millennia. That water is initially used to irrigate crops, water lawns, etc, but then it has to go somewhere, eventually into the sea. Or to put it another way, as Duke University’s Bill Chameides puts it, “Mankind is moving buckets and buckets of water from land to the ocean.”

Read the complete post here.