Is the USA and Mexico become the World largest Desert? The Colorado River Runs Dry.
From it's source high in the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado River channels water south nearly 1,500 miles, over falls, through deserts and canyons, to the lush wetlands of a vast delta in Mexico and into the Gulf of California. So it did for the last six million years until 1920 Western states began splitting up the Colorado’s water, building dams and diverting the flow hundreds of miles, to San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix and other fast-growing cities. The river now serves 30 million people in seven U.S. states and Mexico, with 70 percent or more of its water siphoned off to irrigate 3.6 million acres of cropland.
The damming and diverting of the Colorado, the nation’s seventh-longest river, may be seen by some as a triumph of engineering and by others as a crime against nature, but there are ominous new twists. The river has been running especially low for the past decade, as drought has gripped the Southwest. It still tumbles through the Grand Canyon, much to the delight of rafters and other visitors. And boaters still roar across Nevada and Arizona’s Lake Mead, 110 miles long and formed by the Hoover Dam. But at the lake’s edge they can see lines in the rock walls, distinct as bathtub rings, showing the water level far lower than it once was—some 130 feet lower, as it happens, since 2000. Water resource officials say some of the reservoirs fed by the river will never be full again. Climate change will likely decrease the river’s flow by 5 to 20 percent in the next 40 years, according to the director of the University of Colorado Western Water Assessment. Others believe that the given time frame are wrong and the once mighty river will be disappear. Forest's, grassland, cropland and lakes fed by the Colorado River which are also responsible to form clouds are already vanishing and bring the weather system out of balance. Less precipitation in the Rocky Mountains will yield less water to begin with. Droughts will last longer. Higher overall air temperatures will mean more water lost to evaporation. That's also effecting the snow fall in the Rockies which feed the River for the last six million years. Is the USA and Mexico become the World largest Desert?
