A recent study by NASA reveals that large parts of the dry Middle East region lost freshwater rapidly, almost the size of the Dead Sea, during the past decade. According to the researchers, nearly 60 percent of the loss is due to the growing demand of groundwater and the 2007 drought.
The study, conducted by scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.; University of California at Irvine; and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., has for the first time carried comprehensive hydrological assessments of the entire Tigris-Euphrates-Western Iran region using NASA's twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites.
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