Startling water loss in Middle East

As of Tuesday, the freshwater in the Middle East has reduced by an amount that is comparable to the size of the Dead Sea, NASA study sad. The water loss is due to poor management, increased demands for groundwater and the effects of a 2007 drought, Fox News said. The study examined data using a pair of gravity-measuring satellites over the period of seven years from 2003, San Francisco Chronicle said. This NASA study is the most recent evidence of the worsening water crisis in the Middle East, San Francisco Chronicle reported. "This rate of water loss is among the largest liquid freshwater losses on the continents," an author of the NASA study said. The study will be published Friday in Water Resources Research, Fox News reported. Researchers found that freshwater reserves in parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran had lost 117 million acre feet of it's total stored freshwater, Fox News said. As demands from growing populations, war and the worsening effects of climate change are raising the prospect that some countries could face sever water shortages in the decades to come, San Francisco Chronicle said, "they and everyone else in the world's arid regions need to manage their available water resources as best they can."