While the forests are on fire, the water is ... being depleted (how fast, exactly it is hard to estimate).
The Ogallala is the largest freshwater aquifer in the world. The maps above show the saturated thickness (vertical distance between the water table and the aquifer floor) of the Ogallala in 1996-97 and the water level changes between 1980 and 1997. The aquifer is depleted in parts of northern Texas and west central Kansas. A large share of Ogallala water lies beneath the Nebraska Sandhills, where the resource remains largely untapped because crop irrigation is uneconomic. (McGuire et al., 1999)
