Ocotillo

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

Lissa and I just back from a lovely weeks’ trip around Arizona. The main purpose was a visit to the University of Arizona and environs in Tucson for a project we’re working on. We spent a delightful day at the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research, made a pilgrimage to Tumamoc Hill to learn about packrat middens, and I got my first real taste from Julie Cole of how corals are used in paleoclimate reconstructions. As always, a huge thanks to all the scientists who are always so generous with their time and energy helping me understand what they do.

We had some play time, too, wandering through Saguaro National Park. I love desert ecosystems deeply, but probably the most fun for me of the entire trip was vicarious – watching Lissa have absolutely batshit crazy fun taking cactus pictures.

Some water stuff, too. I don’t know the Arizona water story very well, but found Phoenix absolutely fascinating. It’s a city that really didn’t take off until the invention of air conditioning in the 1950s, but it has taken off now in a really big way. My favorite water stop was the little Park of the Canals in Mesa (sorry, can’t find a good web page describing it). It preserves old canals dug by the Hohokam, who lived there before the Europeans arrived. Then in the late 1870s, Mormon settlers dug a lateral off of the Salt River and ran water seemingly uphill onto the mesa (hence the town’s name), digging out and reusing old Hohokam canals.

Mesa claims to be the largest suburb in the United States, and I believe it. But up on the north end of town, in a lowland along the dry riverbed of the Salt, we still find old citrus groves irrigated by lateral ditches taking water from the giant concrete lined canals built by the 20th-century descendents of the Hohokam and the Mormons. Like a throwback to my Southern California youth.

What happens when what used to be abnormally dry becomes the new normal?

Drought will become a redundant term as Australia plans for a permanently drier future, according to the nation’s urban water industries chief.

And climate experts yesterday predicted the present drought would continue, signalling a cruel summer for farmers and sparking fears of higher food prices.

“The urban water industry has decided the inflows of the past will never return,” Water Services Association of Australia executive director Ross Young said. “We are trying to avoid the term ‘drought’ and saying this is the new reality.”

This week’s drought tour of America takes us to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where they just completed the driest August on record. It is an old river town, with its downtown opening onto a bend in the Mississippi River. For those interested in Western lore, it’s where John Wesley Powell spent a summer early in his military career, preparing the plans to defend the vital high ground above the river. I married into an old Cape Girardeau family, so I’ve always been interested in the place. Farms spread back up from the river, but they’re not doing so well right now:

For nonirrigated land, “it’s really been a pretty devastating summer,” said Brad Rippey, a meteorologist with the USDA.

Any rainfall at this point would be too late for the summer crops, Rippey said.

Staci Matlock has a nice story in the New Mexican about water problems in the San Luis Valley, on the upper Rio Grande in Colorado:

Until five years ago, most people thought water in the upper one-third of the San Luis Valley was hydrologically disconnected from the river. It was called a closed basin — no surface or groundwater flowed to the Rio Grande. Farmers and ranchers pumped away while fighting off recent attempts by wealthy investors to sell millions of gallons of water from the valley across the mountains to Denver and downstream to Santa Fe and Albuquerque.

Then came the crushing drought of 2002, Whitten said. Water began flowing from the Rio Grande backward, into the underground aquifer, and river flows decreased. In the basin, surface water from streams and creeks dried up as producers kept pumping. “North of the river, it became a losing system, and the aquifer declined,” said Whitten, a board member of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District.