Spatiotemporal Variation in Physico-chemical Properties of Groundwater Within Arsenic-Affected Shallow Alluvial Aquifers of Murshidabad District, West Bengal, Eastern India

Freshwater is essential for life to thrive on this planet. About 12% of all animal species thrive in freshwaterFreshwater ecosystems, and most other species somehow depend on freshwater for their survival. The freshwater system occupies only 1% of the earth’s surfaceSurface and delivers goods and services of paramount value. Irrigated agricultureAgriculture supplies almost 40% of the global food requirement, and hydropower provides about 20% of the global electricity production. Notwithstanding, the freshwater ecosystems are constantly modified and degraded in the Anthropocene (Dubois, The state of the world’s land and water resources for food and agriculture: managing systems at risk. Earthscan, 2011). In developing nations, almost 90% of the untreated wastewaterWastewater is discharged directly into the water bodiesWater bodies thereby polluting the rivers and lakes and rendering them unfit even for industrial uses. Contamination denies access to clean water to as many as 3.3 billion people, globally (Revenga et al., Freshwater systems. World Resources Institute, Washington, DC, 2000). GroundwaterGroundwater comprises the largest distributed store of freshwaterFreshwater available for human sustenanceHuman sustenance thereby enabling human adaptationHuman adaptation to climatic atrocitiesClimatic atrocities. Globally, 1.5 billion people (about 1/3rd of the global population) rely on groundwater as their only source of drinking water (Boretti and Rosa, NPJ Clean Water 2:15, 2019). Most of this groundwater comes from shallower aquifersAquifers. Over-exploitationExploitation of such aquifersAquifers results in a drop in groundwater levels and subsequent mobilization of geogenicGeogenic pollutants ultimately leading to the contamination of aquifersAquifers with geogenic toxicants like arsenicArsenic (As), fluorideFluoride (F) and heavy metals; which may render the very aquifersAquifers unsuitable for further human uses (MacDonald et al., Nature Geoscience 9:762–766, 2016).