Lake Powell Hits Lowest Level on Record as Southwest Water Crisis Deepens
Colorado River plummets as lakes Powell and Mead drop to record lows
Lake Powell, the nation's second-largest reservoir, fell to a record low on Saturday, and Lake Mead, the largest, hit its lowest point a week earlier. The combined system hasn't held this little water since 1957, before climate change brought a 1,200-year drought. Officials are shifting water from smaller reservoirs and urging conservation, but the crisis threatens cities like Phoenix, agriculture, and hydroelectric power for millions.
The combined reservoir system, an essential water source for cities and farms across Arizona, Nevada and Southern California, has not held so little water since 1957, before Lake Powell was filled.
- flybrand
When the West was settled it was widely believed that the act of building a town attracted rain. The 'atmosphere' of human buildings in an area would naturally attract and collect rain from the heavens. Many of the original methods used to estimate water, rainfall, and other essentials for human survival were wrong.
Most of them are catalogued in the outstanding Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner - an excellent book with an outstanding audiobook too.
https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing...
- darth_avocado
Who would’ve thought that growing water intensive crops in the middle of the desert and growing cities like Phoenix with suburbs with lush green lawns at a much higher rate than rest of the country was going to be without consequences.
- jmward01
Vox did a great video on this a few years ago. [1] Bottom line, growing cow feed in the desert is wasteful and stupid. Blaming cities and industry is just a diversion.
- jp57
The shrinking reservoirs are the immediate result of record-low snowpack this winter, which was erased by record heat in the spring. Melted snowpack creates most of the Colorado’s flow during the dry summer months. But as the Southwestern climate has grown hotter and drier, the river’s flow has become smaller and less reliable.
Legitimate question: I can understand that record-low snowpack would cause less water to flow into the lake, but the "erasure" of the snow pack by heat is just melting that would be captured in the lake, right? So if the record-low snowpack had been followed by record cold, would we have even less water in the lake?
- throw-the-towel
I wonder if I'll live to see the evacuation of Phoenix and Las Vegas. (Or Abu Dhabi, for that matter.)