The Colorado River is running low. The picture looks even worse underground: “The Colorado River Basin has lost twice as much groundwater since 2003 as water taken out of its reservoirs, according to a study based on satellite data.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2025/05/27/american-west-drought-water-colorado-river/
13 Comments
Water is essential to everything and I am not sure exactly how we will address this shortage without exploring desalination while also becoming more efficient with current usage. I get a feeling that water will be more and more valuable as time goes on because what good is all of our technology is we are thirsty, hungry, and dirty? I can’t stop thinking about water to be honest, how entire wars might happen over it around the world this century.
As long as the right people are making a lot of money growing alfalfa and almonds, nothing will change. I live in Michigan, and I’m more and more uneasy with how the west is looking at the Great Lakes.
And that underground water ain’t coming back. It’s the same thing in California, they’re pumping all the groundwater out and when that’s gone it’s gone.
I don’t even have hope these days cause most people still don’t realize this. But atleast the saudis can grow their alfaalfa there now, gentlemen they sold our country like a street prostitute
Look up T Boone Pickens. There’s plenty of greedy people actively making things worse. At least he’s dead
Irrigation is typically a giant waste. It’s to make something look pretty instead of incorporating local nature.
The amount of homes that get whatever form of sod they want and water it incessantly, forcing it to grow in regions it’s not meant for is a bigger problem than people realize.
The math is clear. We only need to do two things.
1. Stop letting foreign markets take the crops (mostly alfalfa) grown from that water.
2. Convince everyone to reduce their beef and dairy consumption by at least 50%. The more, the better. Not just for the water supply, but also for your health.
The majority of that water goes to growing feed for cattle. Stop growing cattle feed and the problem disappears.
Don’t worry our government will wait until the last drop is gone before thinking about a solution.
Another alarming stat is the Rocky Mountain snowpack that feeds the river is increasingly not making it to the river during spring melt. Higher temperatures are causing the snow to sublimate directly into the atmosphere instead of turning into runoff. This winter actually brought pretty close to normal snowfall across most of the basin (~90%), but now in June it appears we’re headed for one of the worst runoff years in recent memory (~60%). At this time of year streamflows out of the upper Colorado River Basin should be peaking, but it’s barely even ticked up from the low levels in early April.
Which means just to get to an *average* water year in the future is likely going to require significantly greater than normal snowfall – which can hardly be counted on.
People could really learn from AZ specifically phoenix. We bank a lot of water. We do it from the wet years to get us through the dry years. Desalination is being looked at along with ways to get it from underground rivers. We are constantly looking at ways to reserve water for the future instead of hoping it magically appears.
Desalination is the future. Somehow everyone can have video’s of cats beamed through the air to their hands, yet taking salt out of sea water is too much? It’s just a matter of will.
The laws around well water pumping around the Southwest are pretty wild. I lived in a house with a well in Arizona for a few years and it came as a complete surprise that there was no meter on it. If you have the electricity, theoretically you could pump water out of the ground 24/7. So, with a couple of solar panels you have free water. Not only that, but in that neighborhood they were building brand new houses, also on wells. It seems like a system doomed to failure.
I live 20 feet from the Colorado River in AZ. Have seen the river go from 20+ days per month being able to boat on her 10 years ago to maybe a full six days now. I was recently surprised that we had water all 3 days over memorial weekend. The crisis is quite real.