Tehran, the capital of Iran has begun to sink dramatically – the land subsidence can be seen on satellite images and just taking a stroll around the city of 13 million people.
The fissures along roads and massive gaping holes in the countryside are hard to ignore, reports the Associated Press. Iranian authorities now openly acknowledge that the country has a serious groundwater crisis.
“Land subsidence is a destructive phenomenon,” said Siavash Arabi, a measurement expert at Iran’s cartography department. “Its impact may not be immediately felt like an earthquake, but as you can see, it can gradually cause destructive changes over time.”
Excessive water pumping causes unusual land subsidence pic.twitter.com/qFQ8JP4v1W
— CGTN (@CGTNOfficial) January 22, 2019
The Vancouver Sun reports that Arabi says he can identify “destruction of farmland, the cracks of the earth’s surface, damage to civilian areas in cities, wastewater lines, cracks in roads and damages to water and natural gas pipes.”
Specifically, Tehran sits 1,200 meters (3,900 feet) above sea level against the Alborz Mountains on a plateau. Precipitation is less than 100 millimeters annually for over 50 percent of the country and in the region where Tehran is located, on a semi-arid plateau, only 171 millimeters (6.7 inches) of precipitation was recorded last year.
“Surface soil contains water and air. When you pump water from under the ground surface, you cause some empty space to be formed in the soil,” Arabi told The Associated Press. “Gradually, the pressure from above causes the soil particles to stick together and this leads to the sinking of the ground and formation of cracks.”
RT @NRT_English: In Iran, parched lands hollowed by water pumping now sinking#NRTnews #Iran #Water #WaterCrisis pic.twitter.com/0RzCclyqmb
— Kōkua Water Bottles (@my_kokua) January 24, 2019
Iran’s groundwater crisis
According to Iran’s water comprehensive plan, the country’s total renewable water resources reach 130 billion cubic meters. Of that total amount, 92 percent is used for agriculture; 6.6 percent is for domestic use and the remainder is used for industry and services.
Looking at Iran’s groundwater aquifers, there are 203 normal prohibited aquifers, 67 critically prohibited aquifers, and 339 free aquifers. In attempting to address the prolonged drought and obvious water shortages, Iran, over the past several decades has restricted water removal from some of its aquifers due to over-extraction of groundwater.
This situation didn’t happen overnight in Iran. We have to go back to when the Shah of Iran was the ruler and began the excessive construction of dams in the country. This was made worse by the Ahmadinejad administration and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ engineering arm, which redirected rivers and in turn intensified the drought in some regions.
Even so, many of Iran’s environmental problems predate the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when mismanagement of water and the burning of fossil fuels was the normal state of affairs. While the current regime in Iran has been working to solve the country’s water problems, they are up against a population that is leery of science and have the belief that the water underground belongs to them to use as they wish.
This has resulted in inefficient irrigation practices and worse yet, led to sporadic unrest over the past year that in some cases, turned into violent confrontations. Adding to the tensions over a water shortage, there is the fear of an economic crisis sparked by President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw America from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers.
