Filing some pictures this evening, I came across this, taken in the bed of the Rio Grande beneath the Hatch bridge in southern New Mexico on April 29, 2013: This is the sort of thing Jack Schmidt of the Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center was talking about at a conference in Boulder last August when he …
Talking about water, and talking about water as a commodity, is not the same as talking about a river. Jack Schmidt, Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, speaking at the Clyde Martz Summer Water Conference, August 2013, University of Colorado
“To say Albuquerque is located in a valley,” Paul Bauer and his colleagues wrote in Albuquerque: A Guide to Its Geology and Culture, “is geologically imprecise.” From Colorado to Texas, the river we today call the “Rio Grande” follows the path of what the geologists call “the Rio Grande rift”. As earth’s crust pulled apart, …
From this morning’s newspaper: The community’s total water use for the year, 32 billion gallons, was the lowest for the metro area since 1983, despite the fact that the population in the utility’s service area has grown 70 percent in the two decades since, according to Katherine Yuhas.
If it’s too intense and too early in the spring, it can blow all the snow and moisture away in the mountains as if winter had never happened. Then there’s no snow to become water to drain into the rivers, to come into the fields. That’s from Stacia Spragg-Braude’s new book If There’s Squash Bugs …
I suppose it’s a sign of the times on the Colorado River that a January forecast of 95 percent of average flow into Lake Powell counts as good news. Since green on the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center map runs from 90 to 110 percent, we get green. It’s only a little bit below average! …
Continue reading ‘For now, some breathing room on the Colorado River’ »
Some months ago, I found myself at a speaking engagement at a posh resort in the hills outside San Diego, the sort with beautiful eucalyptus trees, and golf carts. I’d brought some business attire for my panel discussion (in our family we refer to them as “grownup clothes”), but realized I’d forgotten to pack socks. …
Continue reading ‘The rich are different from you and me. They have nicer socks.’ »
For Christmas, my friend Alison gave me the 1928 Popular Science Monthly “Pocket Guide to Science.” It’s a treasure, including things like this: What produced the Grand Canyon of Arizona? It was cut down, during millions of years, by the Colorado River which still flows in the bottom of it. The sand and clay cut …