"Very often what happens is materials collapse on each other," said Sarah Porter of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University.

One especially troubling sign of aridification is out of sight but, at least in Arizona, not out of mind. That would be groundwater, which Arizona State University researchers and their colleagues are finding is being rapidly depleted here and around the world.

I spoke with hydrologist and sustainability professor Jay Famiglietti about some global research with significant implications for Arizona. Perhaps not surprisingly, he and colleagues find that dry regions like ours are drying even more with climate change and water overuse.

"They can swell like 10 times their volume just by sucking humidity out of the air” and work even in very dry environments, said Paul Westerhoff, a professor at the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University. It’s “where a lot of the excitement in the field is."

“Current water management efforts need to be revisited on a war footing,” stated Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar, an Earth system scientist at ASU.

"We found a big relationship between areas with groundwater stress and lack of groundwater management," said Karem Abdelmohsen with the Arizona Water Innovation Initiative at ASU.

“These findings send perhaps the most alarming message yet about the impact of climate change on our water resources,” said Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist and professor at Arizona State University who co-authored the study. “The rapid water cycle change that the planet has experienced over the last decade has unleashed a wave of rapid drying.”

"There's a provision you can’t cause more than 10 feet of drawdown over a 5-year period. They can mitigate the harm (and still drill) by paying people or doing other things," said Kathleen Ferris, a water researcher for Arizona State University's Kyl Center for Water Policy and a former Arizona Department of Water Resources director who helped draft the 1980 groundwater law.

“The health of Tucson’s aquifers is nearly entirely dependent on flows from the Colorado River. As these flows diminish in a hotter and drier future, Tucson’s aquifers will likely suffer,” Kathryn Sorensen of Arizona State University said in 2022. A hotter and drier future is here, and CAP cuts to agriculture have begun. Tucson could be next.

“It’s potentially a whole can of worms that we need to approach very carefully,” said Sarah Porter, the Kyl Center for Water Policy director at Arizona State University. “Who gets to be the entity that decides what’s an appropriate amount of use for any particular water user or community?"

In her book, “The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage,” Arizona State University professor Christy Spackman chronicles the attempt in recent decades to make water drinkers take on some of that labor.

The idea is to encourage consumers to consider the notion that it's not necessarily a bad thing to think of water as something that has a taste — because it comes from somewhere. In the wine world, this is called "terroir" — the taste of place.