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The Water Desk
Billions in federal assistance after New Mexico’s largest wildfire. But little money to repair streams.
LAS VEGAS, New Mexico – Patrick Gutierrez and Nick Maurer, who work for Hermit’s Peak Watershed Alliance, scramble up Canyon del Rancho, an ephemeral stream in the mountains of northern New Mexico. It’s just before noon in late August, a day after the area’s biggest rain from the summer monsoon.
Colorado River crisis — How did the nation’s two largest reservoirs nearly go dry?
During the drought-choked summer of 2021, Colorado’s largest reservoir, Blue Mesa, was low, its shoreline exposed and dusty like a dirty white collar. The massive inflows from the Gunnison River, a major Colorado River tributary on which it relied, had shrunk to just 32% of average, the lowest on record.
Colorado squeezing water from urban landscapes
This story, a collaboration of Big Pivots and Aspen Journalism, is the first of a five-part series that examines the intersection of water and urban landscapes in Colorado. Like weekly haircuts for men, a regularly mowed lawn of Kentucky bluegrass was long a prerequisite for civic respectability in Colorado’s towns and cities. That expectation has begun shifting.
Scientists use simple cameras to answer complex questions about forests and the snowpack
RED MOUNTAIN PASS, COLORADO – On a sunny day in September, with the leaves starting to turn more than two miles above sea level, scientists and volunteers hauled metal stakes, tall measuring sticks and simple trail cameras into Colorado’s high country to seek answers to pressing questions about forests and the snowpack.
High and Dry
True to its name, the Great Salt Lake contains a great deal of salt. In the lake’s northern arm, salinity is so high that crystals spontaneously form on the surface, then sink into water tinted pink by salt-loving microbes. South of the 20-mile-long railroad causeway that divides the lake, influxes of fresh water lead to more prosaic hues of brown and green. Even there, though, the Great Salt Lake can be more than five times saltier than the ocean.
The Rio Grande isn’t just a border – it’s a river in crisis
The Rio Grande is one of the longest rivers in North America, running some 1,900 miles (3,060 kilometers) from the Colorado Rockies southeast to the Gulf of Mexico. It provides fresh water for seven U.S. and Mexican states, and forms the border between Texas and Mexico, where it is known as the Río Bravo del Norte.
What is a strong El Niño? Meteorologists anticipate a big impact in winter 2023, but the forecasts don’t all agree
Winter is still weeks away, but meteorologists are already talking about a snowy winter ahead in the southern Rockies and the Sierra Nevada. They anticipate more storms in the U.S. South and Northeast, and warmer, drier conditions across the already dry Pacific Northwest and the upper Midwest. One phrase comes...
Drops of Hope Along the Colorado River
“It snowed again!” exclaimed Crystal Tulley-Cordova during a phone call on a frigid January morning. After years of drought, it felt like a relief. “This is the most snow the Navajo Nation has seen in a long time,” she said. Only months before—in summer 2022—the nation had been in severe drought. Now it was facing a different emergency, as a lack of local tribal resources to clear roads of snow had left many people without access to food, medical services, and water.
What Arizona and other drought-ridden states can learn from Israel’s pioneering water strategy
By Gabriel Eckstein, Texas A&M University; Clive Lipchin, Tel Aviv University, and Sharon B. Megdal, University of Arizona. Arizona is one of the fastest-growing states in the U.S., with an economy that offers many opportunities for workers and businesses. But it faces a daunting challenge: a water crisis that could seriously constrain its economic growth and vitality.
New California law bolsters groundwater recharge as strategic defense against climate change
A new but little-known change in California law designating aquifers as “natural infrastructure” promises to unleash a flood of public funding for projects that increase the state’s supply of groundwater. The change is buried in a sweeping state budget-related law, enacted in July, that also makes it...
A Mexican water expert on what Arizona can learn from Hermosillo
As severe water scarcity becomes an increasingly real and increasingly dire prospect for Arizona, looking south to Sonora offers important insight. Understanding the experience of our neighboring Mexican state in recent decades could also help steer Arizona towards a more responsible – and less dry – future. To...
Can Colorado’s source streams make a comeback? These scientists, and beavers, think so
Intrepid though they were, the first European explorers and settlers along the West’s various river systems did a lot of complaining. Pioneers groused about downed trees blocking their path and waterlogged ground that made footing treacherous. Mosquitoes, debris jams, underwater snags, and a confusing network of secondary streams thwarted humans’ attempts at efficient travel.
Luke Runyon joins The Water Desk as our new co-director
We’re thrilled to share the news that Luke Runyon has joined The Water Desk as our new co-director!. As many of you know, Luke is not only one of the nation’s finest water journalists but also a leader in the broader field of environmental journalism and board president of the Society of Environmental Journalists.
Seasonal river cleanups could be a new community conservation tradition in Tucson
Jessica White glances up briefly at the sky. It’s barely 9 a.m. and the morning desert sun in May is gaining momentum. This story was supported by the Water Desk’s grants program. Read more grantee stories ». Jessica makes sure her boys are drinking plenty of water and...
Climate change is increasing stress on thousands of aging dams across the US
Heavy rainfall in the Northeast on June 9-11, 2023, generated widespread flooding, particularly in New York’s Hudson Valley and in Vermont. One major concern was the Wrightsville Dam, built in 1935 on the Winooski River north of Vermont’s capital city, Montpelier. The reservoir behind the dam rose to within 1 foot of the dam’s maximum storage capacity, prompting warnings that water could overtop the dam and worsen already-dangerous conditions downstream, or damage the dam.
Pitkin County aims to bring back beavers
During the summer of 2020, Woody Creek landowner Jennifer Craig noticed that beavers had taken up residence on her property, building a dam across the channel and creating a pool. The network of dams, pools and lodges has continued to grow over the past few seasons, creating a lush, muddy...
The fun is back at Blue Mesa and other reservoirs, as heavy winter snows melt, restoring their glory
Southwestern Colorado’s Blue Mesa Reservoir, drained by years of drought and a major release of water designed to aid a plummeting Lake Powell, is experiencing a rebirth this summer and could fully fill by the end of the recreation season. “The water has been shooting up,” says Eric Loken,...
Scientists Warned of a Salton Sea Disaster. No One Listened.
This story was supported by the Water Desk’s grants program. On the afternoon of Oct. 6, 2022, a massive dust storm rose in the drought-parched Sonoran Desert just southeast of California’s Salton Sea. Wind, gusting at more than 60 miles per hour, whipped the desert floor into a vaulting curtain of sediment that swept north across the Imperial Valley, engulfing low-slung agricultural towns like El Centro and Brawley in a mantle of suffocating dust. The storm knocked out power, downed trees, and shrouded the region in an eerie amber haze. The Environmental Protection Agency’s Air Quality Index, which considers scores above 150 unhealthy, and those above 300 hazardous, spiked to 659 at a monitoring station on the western shore of the Salton Sea. And as the avalanche of dust bore down, Trianna Morales, a 31-year-old baker at the local Vons supermarket in Brawley, looked on with dread. “Oh my God,” Morales thought. “We’re gonna get sick.”
3M offers $10.3B settlement over PFAS contamination in water systems – now, how do you destroy a ‘forever chemical’?
PFAS chemicals seemed like a good idea at first. As Teflon, they made pots easier to clean starting in the 1940s. They made jackets waterproof and carpets stain-resistant. Food wrappers, firefighting foam, even makeup seemed better with perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances. Then tests started detecting PFAS in people’s blood.
How well-managed dams and smart forecasting can limit flooding as extreme storms become more common in a warming world
The arduous task of cleaning up from catastrophic flooding is underway across the Northeast after storms stretched the region’s flood control systems nearly to the breaking point. As rising global temperatures make extreme storms more common, the nation’s dams and reservoirs – crucial to keeping communities dry – are...
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