Water shortage troubles are common in the arid West and South Africa. But they’re not the only places enduring dry spells. In a new study today, scientists say the atmosphere itself is suffering from a major drought. The lack of moisture in the air is sucking water from dirt and plants, leading to reduced crop yields and impaired plant growth worldwide, and likely adding to global warming.
“It’s like there is a pump in the air, and the pump extracts the water from the soil and plants,” Wenping Yuan, an ecologist at Sun Yat-Sen University in Zhuhai, China, who led the new research, said in an email.
Two years ago, Yuan and colleagues realized that since the late 1990s, the growth of vegetation across the globe has slowed down. They ruled out factors like temperature and precipitation as the root of the problem, but were left scratching their heads until ...
