Western U.S. is Rising Due to Extreme Droughts

Scientists have released a study saying that the entire western U.S. is rising as a result of extreme droughts that have affected the area the past decade.

California's mountains have risen approximately 15mm, whereas the entire west, on average, is now 5 mm higher than it was in 2003.

Their research was published this week in the journal Science.

Scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego found that ground positioning data from GPS stations across the west showed this upward movement, according to the study.

A Scripps assistant research geophysicist kept seeing that over the 11 year period, all of the stations moved upwards, and always coincided with droughts.

Between 2006 and 2011, California experienced a five-year drought, which finally ended back in March 2011, according to the study.

"These results quantify the amount of water mass lost in the past few years. It also represents a powerful new way to track water resources over a very large landscape. We can home in on the Sierra Nevada mountains and critical California snowpack," said Researcher Dan Cayan, according to the International Business Times.  "These results demonstrate that this technique can be used to study changes in fresh water stocks in other regions around the world, if they have a network of GPS sensors."

In 2013, the drought in California returned and intensified, destroying records with minimal rainfall across most of the state. As of earlier this month, the state was going through its worst drought ever recorded, according to the study.

Scientists believe that western U.S. has lost around 62 trillion gallons of water as a result of these droughts, and this is causing the area to rise up as a result. In comparison, the amount of water is equivalent to a six-inch layer of water across the whole of the western U.S.

Geophysicist Duncan Agnew said the rapid uplift of the tectonic plate that western USA lies on is the only way to explain the shifting GPS data.