water
I’ve written about global warming a couple times over the last couple years—here and here, for instance. It should come as no surprise that the topic is of interest to me, nor should it be a surprise that I’m still reading and thinking about water issues.
This page documents the shrinking of Lake Mead. The images aren’t as dramatic as the Aral sea images, but it’s still pretty scary. According to the article, “As of June 8, 2004, the U.S. Drought Monitor had placed the southwest in extreme hydrological drought, one designation above the worst in their drought intensity scale.” This article contains a few more images and a lot more detail, including this tidbit. “Water levels in the lake between these images dropped 18 meters (60 feet). Water management officials predict a further drop of between 4.5 to 6 meters (15-20 feet) this year, if weather and water use predictions are correct.” This article at the Goddard Space Flight Center site has a couple more photos.These issues aren’t relegated to the southwest, however. The Great Lakes are having trouble as well, and, as indicated here and here, the issue is only partially due to drought. For instance, the communities along Lake Michigan (in both Wisconsin and Michigan) withdraw more than 1.4 billion gallons of ground water every day. The deep wells in use are “pumping the aquifers beneath them so hard that they now pull water in through the bottom of that Great Lake.”
This is the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The next few years (decades?) are going to be interesting.
Comments
commenting closed for this article
