This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. After California’s wetter-than-normal winter — and the official end to its drought — you’re probably not thinking much about water scarcity and the food supply. But our food and water woes go well beyond the Golden State’s latest precipitation patterns, as this new Nature study from a global team of researchers — including two from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies — shows. The paper notes that the globe’s stores of underground water, known as groundwater — the stuff that accumulates over millennia in aquifers — is vanishing at an “alarming” rate, driven mainly by demand for irrigation to grow crops. You can think of such reserves as “fossil” water, since it takes thousands of years to replenish once it’s pumped out. Once it’s gone, some of the globe’s key growing regions — the breadbaskets for much of Asia and the Middle East — will no longer be viable. Here in the United States, we rely heavily on California’s Central Valley for fruit, vegetables, and nuts — which in turn relies on some of the globe’s most stressed aquifers for irrigation. Tapped-out aquifers point to a future marked by high food prices and geopolitical strife. The Nature researchers found that the most severe depletion is concentrated “in a few regions that rely significantly on overexploited aquifers to grow crops, mainly the USA, Mexico, the Middle East and North Africa, India, Pakistan, and China, including almost all the major breadbaskets and population centers of the planet.” The group mapped global food trade flows from these areas with the most-stressed aquifers — places like the California Central Valley, the Midwest’s High Plains (where farmers have for years been draining the Ogallala Aquifer to grow corn and cotton), India’s breadbasket, the Punjab, and China’s main growing region, the North Plain. That these crucial resources are being rapidly…