Colorado River plummets as lakes Powell and Mead drop to record lows

toomuchtodo

There is enough water for human consumption, but agriculture is over in the basin. There simply isn’t enough water forward looking for the water intensive crops in question. https://coloradoriverscience.org/Agricultural_water_use

testing22321

It seems more and more likely the next Great War will be fought over water. As a Canadian, I get nervous when I see the US running out.

onlypassingthru

Life will be fine. Exporting alfalfa from the Imperial Valley, however, might be done for.

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?

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.

cnity

I recommend folks here read "The Dreamt Land" by Mark Arax. I just started it so it might be a premature recommendation, but it has been doing a great job for me as a new California resident of explaining the interaction between business/agriculture and the desert landscape.

throw-the-towel

I wonder if I'll live to see the evacuation of Phoenix and Las Vegas. (Or Abu Dhabi, for that matter.)

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...

Mistletoe

This year was the first year I finally realized how things are going to be from now on and only getting worse. I’m a gardener and the plants are having such a tough time, many trees in my neighborhood are already bare from dropping their leaves from the heat. I’ve been looking into just landscaping with native plants moving forward that can handle the heat. I have drip irrigation, but that does nothing when air temps stay above 100 for days on end. The world isn’t prepared for this in any way. What happens when the breadbasket of your country gets like this?

codemax98

uh oh this doesn't seem good. but I feel like we've been inundated with articles like this for years so it's hard to tell when it's actually an emergency

Ancalagon

I do believe people in general will be fine in the soutwest for years to come. Agriculture will be cut back, natural landscapes will take over, de-sal in socal and better water treatment plants will come online. The ecological effects of this, though, seem so disastrous. If the Colorado river dries up, what then? The whole of the Southwest just like, dies?

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. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0gN1x6sVTc

cmiles8

The west is facing a dire water crisis and likely will for decades to come. Meanwhile in places like NYC suburbs in the east everyone waters their lawns with drinkable water because high quality fresh water is in abundant supply. People are literally watering their grass with water that’s better than what probably 99% of the global population has available to drink. The disparity is quite stark when you drill into it, but water access is going to rewrite the future of the west.

1attice

As a longtime climate activist, I'm at the point where, reading this, I feel nothing anymore. The coming shock is not going to be fixed with geoengineering, simply because GE takes more time than we have left. This is because it will take another five to ten years for the necessity to become widely apparent, and another five to ten to get the geopolitics and geoeconomics sorted (if ever.) We'll be going into it also having splashed out for datacentres instead of cloud seeders or whatever. And all this ignores how utterly fscked GE is as a strat anyways. The most plausible variant involves white skies and drought in places we can't afford it, and the less plausible variants are almost laughably worse, or involve breakthroughs that might not happen, even with AI, and almost certainly won't arrive on our preferred (ie. desperate) schedule. I am afraid, and rightfully so; the shock is on its way, and behind it, the Great Bottleneck. This year's coming El Niño famine in the global south is just the start.

CircuitSeuss

Alfalfa farms consume 26% of the Colorado River’s water (2024 statistic).[0] Alfalfa and hay production uses up to 68% of Utah’s water, and amounts to 0.2% of the state’s GDP (2022 statistic) [1]. These feed crops are extremely water inefficient, consuming 18-36 acre-inches (≈ 489,600-979,200 gallons) of water per acre of harvested alfalfa [2]. Utah averages 4 tons/acre in harvest [3], which by my math works out to about 510-1020 tons of water used per 1 ton of alfalfa harvest. If that seems high you, you may appreciate looking up numbers on water consumption per pound of beef accounting for feed. The USDA reports about 46 million acres of US land are foreign owned [4](although 2024 reporting suggests not all foreign ownership of farm land is being reported [5]). While there are not accurate public numbers on the percentage of that foreign held land which is used for alfalfa farming, water use by foreign entities has been widely reported on [6], and has prompted legislation in the example state of Utah among others [7]. [0] https://www.sustainablewaters.org/why-do-we-grow-so-much-alf... [1] https://waterdesk.org/2022/12/one-crop-uses-more-than-half-o... [2] https://ecobuilderz.com/how-many-gallons-of-water-are-requir... [3] https://www.progressivepublish.com/downloads/2025/general/20... [4] https://www.fsa.usda.gov/documents/foreign-holdings-us-agric... [5] https://www.dailymail.com/galleries/article-12985003/Foreign... [6] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/in-drought-stricken-ar... [7] https://le.utah.gov/~2023/bills/hbillint/HB0186.pdf