What happens if lake mead dries up

The Water Education Foundation is a nonprofit, tax-exempt, c 3 organization, federal tax ID Header link June 22, Read more. Header link September 15, Header link November 3, Header link May 15, Water Education Foundation. Aquafornia news May 8, Referring Pages. Share this page. Most became hamburgers, he said. Recharged by those rains, the grass is growing back, but it's poor quality compared with normal, Babcock said.

That means he's delaying buying cows to rebuild his herd. Sooner or later, said Paolo Bacigalupi, an author and futurist who has written about Western droughts, the United States must acknowledge that some of its cities, from Las Vegas to Phoenix, are overbuilt in areas that are essentially uninhabitable without massive irrigation systems drawing from the Colorado River.

As droughts deepen and water shortages grow, we face a reckoning, he said. Bacigalupi's novel, "The Water Knife," is premised on increasingly dire water shortages causing armed skirmishes and government-sanctioned dam sabotages between neighboring states. And climate change is making us more wrong every year. Bureau of Reclamation officials Heather Patno and Michael Bernado are responsible for helping predict those water flows and for keeping water running down the Colorado River through the two reservoirs to irrigate farms and provide water for residents, along with hydroelectricity.

Patno, a hydraulic engineer who helps manage Lake Powell, worries that the loss of clean hydropower will raise electricity rates for potentially tens of thousands of people, but there's little either can do but watch as snow and rainfall diminish and the soil gets drier, soaking up what little water does fall across the West. In New Mexico, Dine farmer Graham Beyale, 31, said the worsening water shortages caused by drought and increased demand for the West's fast-growing population could increase conflicts between Indigenous people and white-dominated governments and corporations, either via large agricultural operations or the bottling of drinking water by companies such as Nestle.

According to the census, three of the top 10 fastest-growing states are in the West: Colorado, Utah and Arizona. Although California lost , residents last year and its growth rate over the past decade has been slightly less than the national average, it added 2. Beyale, who lives in an off-grid tent on the Navajo Nation near Shiprock, New Mexico, raises and distributes heritage corn to other tribal members, using water drawn from the San Juan River.

He said the Gold King Mine disaster upstream in a Colorado tributary to the San Juan sharpened his fears about competition over increasingly scarce water. The mine spill contaminated hundreds of miles of river for weeks, imperiling crops and drinking water for the Navajo Nation and other residents. Though the Navajo Nation in theory has legal rights to water members have used for thousands of years, political pressure from growing communities threatens that, Beyale said. Farmers and experts who see the evidence of droughts and climate change firsthand acknowledge the challenge they face: The rest of the country seems unwilling or uninterested in addressing their concerns.

Udall said he's warned of the growing risks for years and rarely found anyone east of the Mississippi River willing to listen. That's changing as bigger drought-exacerbated wildfires in California and Oregon have inundated the East Coast with smoke, he said. And for something like climate change, it makes reacting to it all the more difficult," Udall said. Facebook Twitter Email. As climate change deepens, Lake Mead and Lake Powell continue drying up.

Show Caption. The water in Lake Mead on Wednesday reached a new low — More precisely, every day for the past eight days has been a record as rapid evaporation and human use siphon water from the reservoir.

The lake has fallen around feet below its level, when it was last considered full. About a century ago, representatives from seven U. Hydrologists warned that officials were promising more water than the river could give, according to Fleck. But in an era driven by power and politics, their warnings were largely ignored and plans moved forward.

Snaking its way through the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of California, the flows of the Colorado River are dwindling due to climate change-driven heat and drought. Among the hardest hit in the first round of water cuts will be agricultural communities, particularly those in central Arizona. With less water, farmers say they will be forced to fallow land.

Twenty one years ago Lake Mead peaked at an elevation of 1, feet.