The Hoover Dam is seeing record-low water levels, a significant and scary development with major implications for water and climate in the entire American Southwest.
Amid drought conditions, Lake Mead’s level last week reached an all-time low of 1,071.56 feet above sea level, leaving it just 37 percent full.
The body of water’s level has been declining since 2000, and has fallen about 140 feet over the past two decades. It comes amid a drought in the Southwest that is the worst in two decades, according to a New York Times analysis.
Long-standing water issues in the West are heightening the challenges posed by more recent effects of climate change.
The Colorado River, which feeds the reservoir, is severely over-allocated, with the demand for its water exceeding the actual flow of the river, according to Kathryn Sorensen, a member of the board of advisors at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Morrison Institute. Scientists have projected the river’s flow may diminish by up to 25 percent in the future, she noted.
Seven states are located in the river’s basin and affected by the Colorado River […]
Lake Mead looks more like a mud hole, not a real lake. What a misuse of water can do is incomprehensible.
P.S.: I think too much water goes to the big agriculture-farms owned by Capitalists who do not even live there and do not care what they do to the environment.