Although clearly visible in before and after photographs, the water loss due to the drought in California can now be measured tangibly: the amount of water loss has been so great that the Earth’s crust is rising rapidly across the region.

According to the calculations of scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of San Diego, the water deficit during the drought is currently 240 gigatons, or 63 trillion gallons. The lost water weight alleviated enough pressure from the crust to uplift land in California anywhere from 4 millimeters (.15 inch) to 15 millimeters (.6 inch) in the past few years.

“These results quantify the amount of water mass lost in the past few years,” said Dan Cayan, a research meteorologist with the US Geological Survey, in a statement. “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.”

The astonishing rates of uplift, a growth rate which rivals mountain ranges like the Himalayas, were noticed by Scripps researcher Adrian Borsa as he reviewed data from GPS locations from around California. Between 2003-2014, all of the stations showed an uplift; as the drought intensified the land acted like a spring uncoiling.

“Groundwater is a load on the Earth’s crust,” said Klaus Jacob, a seismologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y. unaffiliated with the study, to Bloomberg News. “A load compresses the crust elastically, hence it subsides. When you take that load away (by the drought) the crust decompresses and the surface rises. From the amount of rising, one can estimate the amount of the water deficit.”

Though significant changes to the crust may alarm residents in an area with high plate tectonic activity already, the scientists stress that the uplifting has virtually no impact on the San Andreas fault and should not correlate with any increased seismic activity.