Lake Mead (Photo by Brian L. Frank)
Catching up the other day, I ran across Where the River Runs Dry by David Owen for the New Yorker on May 25. It’s a great piece of reporting and writing about the Colorado River, from its headwaters on the Western slope of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado to its delta in Mexico, south of Yuma, AZ.
You really need to read this article. Here’s some of what I learned:
- The river and the basin, underground, are drying up. Lake Mead’s water volume has fallen by 60% since 1998. GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment), a very cool two-satellite NASA mission, has determined that the river basin lost 50 cubic kilometers—900 hundred square