Photographer John Trotter on the Colorado River: When they opened those gates on (Morelos) dam and let water back into the main channel on the river, it kind of engaged those people. It brought them back into the mainstream of all the other people who are living along it in Moab or Grand Junction or …
We come to a desert but it is not to our liking. One wonders why, then, we came to a desert, but no matter. We can engineer our way out of this: Meadow Lake was never much of a meadow. It was too wild, too wide, its sage-studded plains golden with buffalo grass and endless …
Continue reading ‘fighting off the desert with fake water’ »
It occurs to me that the brief and delightful pulse flow of clicks to this blog reading my recent coverage of what’s going on in the Colorado River delta might be potential book buyers. (Duh. Marketing is not my strength.) It’s called The Tree Rings’ Tale, a science book for kids (middle school aged, 13 …
Continue reading ‘Welcome, pulse flow readers. Buy my (old) book!’ »
Folks on the Colorado River delta “pulse flow” science monitoring team sent around a few pictures yesterday taken by the Sonoran Institute’s Tomás Rivas of the water arriving at the Laguna CILA environmental restoration site. The beauty of this picture for me, beyond the obvious sight of water in a formerly dry delta river channel, is …
Continue reading ‘land and water: Colorado River pulse flow arrives at Laguna’ »
Ultimately, what’s going on down in the Colorado River right now turns on a complicated mix of politics and science. The politics involves how much support advocates can gain for environmental restoration of the troubled system, on both sides of the border. The science supports those decisions After the rush of excitement about the historic …
Continue reading ‘after the rush, getting down to the science’ »
New data from NASA’s GRACE satellite, which scientists use to track changes in groundwater storage, shows some remarkable declines in the Colorado River Basin, according to a recent presentation by Jay Famiglietti of UC Irvine to a California legislative committee (huge thanks to Chris Austin for catching this and bringing it to my attention): “Unfortunately, …
Continue reading ‘declining Colorado River Basin groundwater reserves’ »
Variability is at the core of water management. When it’s on the dry side of the range, some folks are willing to pay a lot for water. But if that involves big capital expenditures, are you willing to sit on the cost when things get wet? Brett Walton explains how this is playing out in …
Continue reading ‘the value of water depends on how dry it is’ »
The Havasu News-Herald, which serves Lake Havasu City along the Colorado River, assured its readers today that the environmental pulse flow, which is passing through on its way from Hoover Dam to the Colorado River delta, shouldn’t have an impact on Lake Havasu recreational boating: Lake Havasu will remain at normal water levels during the …
Continue reading ‘A river means different things to different people’ »
In the 1980s, a film crew came to Iowa to film “Field of Dreams”, carving a baseball diamond out of a corn field: The look of the new ball field itself didn’t inspire confidence: because of a nasty regional drought, the landscape, typically lush, had turned brown and fallow. To make the farmland presentable, the …
Continue reading ‘Here’s a solution to drought – green paint!’ »