Aug 22, 2014 03:51 PM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

Mountains in Calif. have risen slightly more than half an inch in the past 18 months as a result of a massive draught.

According to Climate Central, the water disappearing from the land is acting like a weight being lifted off a spring. Researchers estimate 63 trillion gallons of groundwater and surface water has evaporated in the Western region's drought.

"These results quantify the amount of water mass lost in the past few years," study co-author Dan Cayan, a researcher at Scripps University, said in a press release. "It also represents a powerful new way to track water resources over a very large landscape. We can home in on the Sierra Nevada mountains and critical California snowpack. These results demonstrate that this technique can be used to study changes in fresh water stocks in other regions around the world, if they have a network of GPS sensors."

Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego published their work in the journal Science, which was supported by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

"The implications of this have yet to play out," study co-author Duncan Carr Agnew told Climate Central. "What we've shown is that there is a measurement technique we can use to get a total water loss - water loss in places where we have no direct measurements."

In the first study to observe such an event, the researchers noticed a strange occurrence when observing the National Science Foundation's Plate Boundary Observatory. Agnew said the team noticed some GPS sensors placed in western mountains had risen in altitude since 2003 and the beginning of the drought, though it became more exaggerated as the drought progressed.

"That's why this study is interesting," Agnew said. "We can use this set of tools, which were installed for a different purpose in order to monitor water changes.

"The total amount of stress that's been added in the last 18 months from drought is the same amount of stress that's added every week because of plate tectonics."

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