For eight glorious weeks, from March 23 to May 18, 2014, the Colorado River flowed all the way to the Gulf of California, something it hasn’t done regularly since the 1930s.

 

Minute 319, a 2012 amendment to the 1944 water treaty between Mexico and the United States, allowed water from the Morelos Dam to run through a 40-mile stretch of parched riverbed to the Colorado River Delta. Scientists designed a “pulse flow” to release 105,392 acre-feet of water to mimic spring floods and “base flows,” which will continue until the measure expires in 2017.