Preparing for a water crisis in the American West
Hello Richard,
Groundwater is rapidly declining in the Colorado River Basin, satellite data show, read the headline.
The words topped a news story published Tuesday in the Los Angeles Times
by Ian James, who has reported on water in the West for years.
The news is not good.
“Scientists at Arizona State University examined more than two decades of satellite measurements and found that since 2003 the quantity of groundwater depleted in the Colorado River Basin is comparable to the total capacity of Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir,” James reported.
The overpumping of groundwater could have huge consequences for the seven Western states that rely on the Colorado River Basin, including New Mexico.
“As surface water becomes less dependable, the demand for groundwater is projected to rise significantly,” James said of one of the study’s predictions. The study was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “Groundwater is a crucial buffer … but it is rapidly disappearing due to excessive extraction.”
Surface water refers to the streams, rivers, lakes and reservoirs that are vital to irrigation, water going to households and businesses, wetlands and wildlife. It is measured as annual runoff, or the amount of rain and snowmelt drainage left after the demands of nature, evaporation from land, and transpiration from vegetation have been supplied, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Groundwater, on the other hand, refers to water in aquifers below the surface of the Earth, and is “one of the Nation's most important natural resources,” the Geological Survey explains. “Groundwater is the source of about 37 percent of the water that county and city water departments supply to households and businesses (public supply). It provides drinking water for more than 90 percent of the rural population who do not get their water delivered to them from a county/city water department or private water company.”
In short, as rainfall and snowmelt decrease in the coming years, exacerbated by the effects of climate change, we will need to lean more on groundwater to keep our way of life possible.
“If groundwater remains unprotected in large swaths of the southwestern U.S. and continues to disappear, it will dramatically limit food production,” Jay Famiglietti, the study’s senior author and science director for ASU’s Arizona Water Innovation Initiative, told James. “Groundwater is critically important in desert states like Arizona and desert cities like Phoenix and Tucson, and if it disappears, then it becomes an existential crisis.”
New Mexico has experienced its shares of water woes, too, including a legal battle with Texas over how much water each state is entitled to under the 1938 Rio Grande Compact.
Looming over all this is the increasing aridification of the American West and “hotter climate extremes; drier soil conditions; more severe drought; and the impacts of hydrologic stress on rivers, forests, agriculture, and other systems,” according to a 2020 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study the LA Times reported on is not so much a surprise as it is unsettling.
Not a surprise because news organizations, including New Mexico In Depth, have covered water and the effects of climate change for years. Here are a few of the stories we’ve reported over the past decade: New Mexico’s changing forests, the strain on the Gila River in southern New Mexico, the battle over whether to dam it or let it run wild and the stresses on the Rio Grande amid a withering drought. (Research shows that the last quarter century has likely been the driest in western North America in 1,200 years.) We did a year-long project in 2015-2016 called At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate.
In other words, depleting water resources connected to climate change is not new news.
Unsettling because it reminds all of us in the American West and Southwest there are serious challenges to our way of life.
