What is the difference between ground water and surface water? It’s actually quite simple. The big question is why it matters in 2025.
Groundwater is found under the Earth’s surface, in aquifers and condensed between rocks way down. Way, way down. In fact, research shows there is an ocean below the ground we walk on – more than 400 miles below the surface.
Surface water is mostly pretty obvious: rivers, lakes, streams, and oceans make up surface water. While we can’t see all the water because it gets quite deep, we know it’s there and we can measure how deep it goes, thereby estimating how much of the Earth’s surface is covered by water (about 71%.)
The reason this is important in 2025 is because droughts, agriculture, and people are using huge amounts of our groundwater. In May, 2025, The Guardian published an article reporting that groundwater is being used more than twice as fast as surface water, much of it from the lower Colorado River basin.
One of the reasons for the drastic reduction in groundwater is because there is little to no regulation for its use, so people (or companies) can pump out as much as they want. It’s getting so bad that in the last 10 years, water use from the Colorado River basin has been tree times faster than the 10 years before that.
There is no evidence that regulations would make much of a difference. It seems that more and more water is needed, what with climate change, data centers, and worsening droughts. So what can we do?
IX Water can clean the water coming out of data centers, laced with biocides, corrosion inhibitors, and heavy metals. Our system can help data centers create a closed loop system for their water, so they would need to pull significantly less from groundwater sources. Learn more and become a water savior at startengine.com/Ix-Water
https://ssec.si.edu/stemvisions-blog/there-ocean-below-your-feet
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/27/colorado-river-basin-nasa-study