Lake Mead is the highest it’s been since May 4, 2021, climbing Wednesday to 1,075 feet — the threshold for a water shortage, according to the federal government. It’s symbolic, not an end to the water shortage. And it has been cause for celebration at the lake, even if it’s short-lived.
A plan to extract lithium — the lustrous, white metal used in electric vehicle batteries — in southeast Utah is adding to an anxiety familiar in the arid American West: how the project could affect water from the Colorado River.
Drinking water in the United States is at risk, scientists have said, as nitrogen pollution seems to be increasing.
The latest forecast has arrived for the West’s largest reservoir — and, stop me if you’ve heard this one, it’s not great. Federal scientists are projecting that Lake Mead — created by Hoover Dam, which interrupts the Colorado River not far from Las Vegas — will fall close to its lowest level ever by the end of 2025, as the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Alan Halaly reports.
California, Arizona and others, fearing a political shake-up of negotiating teams after the November election, are aiming to wrap up work this year. The states that rely on the Colorado River, which is shrinking because of climate change and overuse, are rushing to agree on a long-term deal to share the dwindling resource by the end of the year. They worry that a change in administrations after the election could set back talks.
Water, the stuff of life, behaves differently than most other matter in our universe: as it cools to take its solid form, it expands. This thermodynamic fact (called anomalous density) affords water the power to split solid granite. Water has also proven capable of dividing sovereign nations states, and tribes. The water in the Colorado River is performing this function right now.
With precipitation and snowpack falling behind normal levels for this time of year, the 40 million people served by the Colorado River have last year’s wet winter to thank for the Basin’s relative stability. Right now, the entire American West is struggling with snow drought. Snowpack for the Upper Colorado River Basin — which includes Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — stands at a dismal 57.7% of average as of Jan. 3.
Millions of people rely on water from the Colorado River, but there’s just not enough to quench everyone’s thirst. In other words, there’s a big gap between the amount of water in the river, and the amount that people are using.
California was deluged with storms and floods at the beginning of 2023, bringing home the severity of impacts from climate change, particularly in the low-income communities of Planada in Merced County and Pajaro in Monterey County.
After more than two decades of drought, water utilities serving the largest urban regions in the arid Southwest are embracing a drought-proof source of drinking water long considered a supply of last resort: purified sewage.
Water supplies have tightened to the point that Phoenix and the water supplier for 19 million Southern California residents are racing to adopt an expensive technology called “direct potable reuse” or “advanced purification” to reduce their reliance on imported water from the dwindling Colorado River.
“[Utilities] see that the river is overallocated, and they see that the climate is changing,” said Kathryn Sorensen, former director of Phoenix Water Services Department. “They’re looking at this and understanding that the river supply is highly variable and extremely uncertain in the future.”
The Colorado River that sustains nearly 40 million people and more than 4 million acres of cropland across seven states is shrinking because of climate change and overuse. The river’s flows have declined approximately 20 percent over the past century, and a more than two-decade drought that began at the turn of this century has pushed the system to its limits.
With so much at stake, cities dependent on the river are strengthening water conservation measures and pursuing new sources of water with urgency.
