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Tag: Drought
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Investors looking at water rights as Western drought continues
Investors looking at water rights as Western drought continues – CBS News
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NASA says 2022 fifth warmest year on record, warming trend continues
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Newswise — Earth’s average surface temperature in 2022 tied with 2015 as the fifth warmest on record, according to an analysis by NASA. Continuing the planet’s long-term warming trend, global temperatures in 2022 were 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit (0.89 degrees Celsius) above the average for NASA’s baseline period (1951-1980), scientists from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York reported.
“This warming trend is alarming,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Our warming climate is already making a mark: Forest fires are intensifying; hurricanes are getting stronger; droughts are wreaking havoc and sea levels are rising. NASA is deepening our commitment to do our part in addressing climate change. Our Earth System Observatory will provide state-of-the-art data to support our climate modeling, analysis and predictions to help humanity confront our planet’s changing climate.”
The past nine years have been the warmest years since modern recordkeeping began in 1880. This means Earth in 2022 was about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (or about 1.11 degrees Celsius) warmer than the late 19th century average.
“The reason for the warming trend is that human activities continue to pump enormous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the long-term planetary impacts will also continue,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of GISS, NASA’s leading center for climate modeling.
Human-driven greenhouse gas emissions have rebounded following a short-lived dip in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, NASA scientists, as well as international scientists, determined carbon dioxide emissions were the highest on record in 2022. NASA also identified some super-emitters of methane – another powerful greenhouse gas – using the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation instrument that launched to the International Space Station last year.
The Arctic region continues to experience the strongest warming trends – close to four times the global average – according to GISS research presented at the 2022 annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, as well as a separate study.
Communities around the world are experiencing impacts scientists see as connected to the warming atmosphere and ocean. Climate change has intensified rainfall and tropical storms, deepened the severity of droughts, and increased the impact of storm surges. Last year brought torrential monsoon rains that devastated Pakistan and a persistent megadrought in the U.S. Southwest. In September, Hurricane Ian became one of the strongest and costliest hurricanes to strike the continental U.S.
Tracking Our Changing Planet
NASA’s global temperature analysis is drawn from data collected by weather stations and Antarctic research stations, as well as instruments mounted on ships and ocean buoys. NASA scientists analyze these measurements to account for uncertainties in the data and to maintain consistent methods for calculating global average surface temperature differences for every year. These ground-based measurements of surface temperature are consistent with satellite data collected since 2002 by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder on NASA’s Aqua satellite and with other estimates.
NASA uses the period from 1951-1980 as a baseline to understand how global temperatures change over time. That baseline includes climate patterns such as La Niña and El Niño, as well as unusually hot or cold years due to other factors, ensuring it encompasses natural variations in Earth’s temperature.
Many factors can affect the average temperature in any given year. For example, 2022 was one of the warmest on record despite a third consecutive year of La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean. NASA scientists estimate that La Niña’s cooling influence may have lowered global temperatures slightly (about 0.11 degrees Fahrenheit or 0.06 degrees Celsius) from what the average would have been under more typical ocean conditions.
A separate, independent analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded that the global surface temperature for 2022 was the sixth highest since 1880. NOAA scientists use much of the same raw temperature data in their analysis and have a different baseline period (1901-2000) and methodology. Although rankings for specific years can differ slightly between the records, they are in broad agreement and both reflect ongoing long-term warming.
NASA’s full dataset of global surface temperatures through 2022, as well as full details with code of how NASA scientists conducted the analysis, are publicly available from GISS.
GISS is a NASA laboratory managed by the Earth Sciences Division of the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The laboratory is affiliated with Columbia University’s Earth Institute and School of Engineering and Applied Science in New York.
For more information about NASA’s Earth science programs, visit:
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NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
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Inflation is easing, but the prices of these groceries are expected to soar in 2023 — including one whose price rose nearly 60% in December
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General inflation is easing, but the prices of some food items are not going down anytime soon. And the reasons are largely out of the Federal Reserve’s control.
The consumer price index cooled in December, falling to an annualized 6.5% from the 7.1% annual rate recorded in November, according to government data. Still, the annualized inflation rate in food was 10.4% in December, significantly higher than the overall inflation rate even as it represented a slower rate of increase than November, when food prices were 12% higher than in November 2021.
Inflation running at nearly 40-year highs over the past year has put a squeeze on American wallets. Through a series of jumbo rate hikes, the Federal Reserve has sought to tamp down inflation. Its target interest rate was lifted from a negligible level to a range of 4.25% to 4.50% by the end of 2022.
But a few factors impacting food prices are not going away. War is still ongoing in Ukraine, which affected the prices of fertilizers and animal feeds; the avian flu continues to impact the egg supply; and extreme weather conditions are adding complexities to food production.
The following is a look at how a few popular food items are affected.
Eggs
The price of eggs surged 59.9% on the year in December, up from 49% in November, according to the most government data. That means a carton of Grade A large eggs on average more than doubled in cost with prices reaching $4.25 in December 2022, compared to $1.79 a year earlier. In some parts of the country, consumers could pay up to $8 for a carton of organic eggs.
Avian flu, which has forced millions of chickens to be culled and caused a shortage of eggs, is the main reason behind the price increase. In a change from previous breakouts that faded as summer ended, this time the avian flu lingered into winter.
The holiday season is usually the peak for consumer egg demand, which means that we could see egg prices tick down a little in the new year, experts said.
But it will not be a significant drop given the ongoing flu and high cost of feed. If input costs continue to increase and the bird flu continues to kill large quantities of hens, the costs will most likely be passed on to consumers, said Curt Covington, senior director of partner relations at AgAmerica Lending, a financial services company providing agriculture loans.
Experts, including the biggest egg producer in the country, Cal-Maine, said the avian flu will be hitting egg supplies for the long term. “More than 43 million of the 58 million birds slaughtered over the past year to control the virus have been egg-laying chickens, including some farms with more than a million birds apiece in major egg-producing states like Iowa,” the Associated Press reported this week.
Read more: Cal-Maine says avian flu could continue to hit egg supplies after this year
“I suspect it will take much additional effort to ‘stamp-out’ HPAI this time around and we may very well be dealing with the reality that this will be a year-round issue,” said Brian Earnest, lead economist for animal protein at CoBank, a national cooperative bank serving industries across rural America, in an email to MarketWatch.
The weekly supplies of eggs on hand has also reached a historic low, he told MarketWatch. For the week ended Dec. 19, cases on hand reported by the USDA totaled 1.176 million. That’s a 20% drop year-over-year, and the lowest level for the same week since 2014, he said.
Also see: Why egg prices are sizzling — up 38% on last year
Butter
Butter prices rose by 31.4% on the year in December, up from 27% in November, making the average price for a pound of butter $4.81 nationally. It was $3.47 a year earlier.
Extreme heat and smaller cow herds are the main reasons behind that, experts told MarketWatch. Cows eat less and produce less milk in the heat, and the cost of maintaining milk production skyrocketed last year, making farmers unwilling to expand their herds.
Going forward into 2023, the price of butter could soften, but year-over-year price increases could still stay high, said Tanner Ehmke, lead economist of dairy and specialty crops at CoBank.
Cows are approaching their prime milk-producing season, which usually runs from March through May, although customer demand usually peaks during the recently completed holiday season, he said.
But the increase of supply will not be much, Ehmke said, because costs are staying at record highs for farmers to maintain and expand their herds. Drought in the Western part of the country and the war in Ukraine continue to impact the supply and costs of feed.
“It’s [going to be] a very modest increase,” said Ehmke.
About 58% of the U.S. is at least “abnormally dry,” according to the National Integrated Drought Information System. It’s likely this year will see more drought-inducing La Niña weather conditions, according to National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center.
“If so, the third dry year in a row would signal the worst drought since at least 2011- 2013,” said Rob Fox, director of CoBank’s knowledge-exchange division in a 2023 preview released in December. “But this time it is more concentrated in the Western states, and it would be even more devastating to their already precarious water supplies and desiccated pastures,” he added.
At the same time, butter production is competing with the growing production of and appetite for cheese in the U.S., Ehmke told MarketWatch last September. U.S. cheese consumption per capita is growing around 1% to 2% each year, according to the USDA. U.S. cheese exports also increased, particularly to countries like South Korea and Japan.
Read more: Butter prices hit an all-time high — partly because extreme heat is taking a toll on dairy cows
Vegetable oil and margarine
Margarine, which is largely made of vegetable oil, is also seeing a huge price increase. The price of margarine, the substitute for butter in the old days, rose by 43.8 % in December, down slightly from 47.4% in November compared to a year before.
While soybeans, corn and sunflower oil are among the food items that have been hugely impacted by the war in Ukraine, another dynamic is at play here, analysts suggested: A large quantity of vegetable oil is being used for the production of renewable diesel.
In 2021/2022, 38.4% of soybean-oil supplies were used for biofuel production — biofuel is a broader category than renewable diesel — up from 35.6% the year before, according to USDA data updated in October 2022.
Transitioning to a green economy laid out in the Inflation Reduction Act will require more soybean supply. The expected growth in soybean oil-based renewable diesel will require considerably more soybean bushels for domestic production, wrote Kenneth Scott Zuckerberg, CoBank’s lead economist for grain and farm supply, in a report in September.
At the moment, global grain and oilseed supplies are tight, and the combined global stocks of corn, wheat and soybeans are forecast to decline for the fifth straight year in 2023, according to the CoBank report.
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How climate change impacts the Indian Ocean dipole, leading to severe droughts and floods
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Newswise — PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — With a new analysis of long-term climate data, researchers say they now have a much better understanding of how climate change can impact and cause sea water temperatures on one side of the Indian Ocean to be so much warmer or cooler than the temperatures on the other — a phenomenon that can lead to sometimes deadly weather-related events like megadroughts in East Africa and severe flooding in Indonesia.
The analysis, described in a new study in Science Advances by an international team of scientists led by researchers from Brown University, compares 10,000 years of past climate conditions reconstructed from different sets of geological records to simulations from an advanced climate model.
The findings show that about 18,000 to 15,000 years ago, as a result of melted freshwater from the massive glacier that once covered much of North America pouring into the North Atlantic, ocean currents that kept the Atlantic Ocean warm weakened, setting off a chain of events in response. The weakening of the system ultimately led to the strengthening of an atmospheric loop in the Indian Ocean that keeps warmer water on one side and cooler water on the other.
This extreme weather pattern, known as a dipole, prompts one side (either east or west) to have higher-than-average rainfall and the other to have widespread drought. The researchers saw examples of this pattern in both the historical data they studied and the model’s simulation. They say the findings can help scientists not only better understand the mechanisms behind the east-west dipole in the Indian Ocean, but can one day help to produce more effective forecasts of drought and flood in the region.
“We know that in the present-day gradients in the temperature of the Indian Ocean are important to rainfall and drought patterns, especially in East Africa, but it’s been challenging to show that those gradients change on long time-scales and to link them to long-term rainfall and drought patterns on both sides of the Indian Ocean,” said James Russell, a study author and professor of Earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at Brown. “We now have a mechanistic basis to understand why some of the longer-term changes in rainfall patterns in the two regions have changed through time.”
In the paper, the researchers explain the mechanisms behind how the Indian Ocean dipole they studied formed and the weather-related events it led to during the period they looked at, which covered the end of the last Ice Age and the start of the current geological epoch.
The researchers characterize the dipole as an east-west dipole where the water on the western side — which borders modern day East African countries like Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia — is cooler than the water on eastern side toward Indonesia. They saw that the warmer water conditions of the dipole brought greater rainfall to Indonesia, while the cooler water brought much drier weather to East Africa.
That fits into what is often seen in recent Indian Ocean dipole events. In October, for example, heavy rain led to floods and landslides in Indonesian islands of Java and Sulawesi, leaving four people dead and impacting over 30,000 people. On the opposite end, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia experienced intense droughts starting in 2020 that threatened to cause famine.
The changes the authors observed 17,000 years ago were even more extreme, including the complete drying of Lake Victoria — one of the largest lakes on Earth.
“Essentially, the dipole intensifies dry conditions and wet conditions that could result in extreme events like multi-year or decades-long dry events in East Africa and flooding events in South Indonesia,” said Xiaojing Du, a Voss postdoctoral researcher in the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society and Brown’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, and the study’s lead author. “These are events that impact people’s lives and also agriculture in those regions. Understanding the dipole can help us better predict and better prepare for future climate change.”
The dipole the researchers studied formed from the interactions between the heat transport system of the Atlantic Ocean and an atmospheric loop, called a Walker Circulation, in the tropical Indian Ocean. The lower part of the atmospheric loop flows east to west across much of the region at low altitudes near the ocean surface, and the upper part flows west to east at higher altitudes. The higher air and lower air connect in one big loop.
Interruption and weakening of the Atlantic Ocean heat transport, which works like a conveyor belt made of ocean and wind currents, was brought on by massive melting of the Laurentide ice sheet that once covered most of Canada and the northern U.S. The melting cooled the Atlantic and consequent wind anomalies triggered the atmospheric loop over the tropical Indian Ocean to become more active and extreme. That then led to increased precipitation in the east side of the Indian Ocean (where Indonesia sits) and reduced precipitation in the west side, where East Africa sits.
The researchers also show that during the period they studied, this effect was amplified by a lower sea level and the exposure of nearby continental shelves.
The scientists say more research is needed to figure out exactly what effect the exposed continental shelf and lower sea level has on the Indian Ocean’s east-west dipole, but they’re already planning to expand the work to investigate the question. While this line of the work on lower sea levels won’t play into modeling future conditions, the work they’ve done investigating how the melting of ancient glaciers impacts the Indian Ocean dipole and the heat transport system of the Atlantic Ocean may provide key insights into future changes as climate change brings about more melting.
“Greenland is currently melting so fast that it’s discharging a lot of freshwater into the North Atlantic Ocean in ways that are impacting the ocean circulation,” Russell said. “The work done here has provided a new understanding of how changes in the Atlantic Ocean circulation can impact Indian Ocean climate and through that rainfall in Africa and Indonesia.”
The study was supported with funding from the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society and the National Science Foundation.
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Lake Mead’s receding waterlines have revealed unexpected discoveries
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See what extreme drought has exposed at Lake Mead
December 16, 2022
LAKE MEAD, NEVADA — Along a lonely stretch of Lake Mead’s southwestern shore, a rattlesnake huddles amidst a cluster of rocks, just feet away from the wreck of an abandoned houseboat that has been baked under the desert sun.
The wreck is cluttered with remnants of a past life: Cracked white dishes ringed with delicate floral motifs, coffee cups flung far from their matching saucers, a blender filled with dirt. Its wooden frame is splayed over the uneven rock bed, a scrum of split beams and rusted engine parts webbed with rope and electrical cords. A small white toilet sits perched atop the ruin. Its seat—still attached to the lid—can be found down by the water’s edge.
Early this year, the vessel was submerged under the lake’s emerald waters.
But formerly sunken boats sitting high and dry on the horizon are now a hallmark of the lake’s new reality as it becomes a focal point in one of America’s most dire climate crises—extreme drought in the West.
As the result of a decades-long “megadrought” across the region, Lake Mead’s water level has dropped around 170 feet feet since 2000, causing its shoreline to recede dramatically and exposing huge swaths of dry lakebed. Some locals and longtime visitors feel the drawback has made life at the lake a fraction of what it used to be. But the crisis is also attracting a new kind of tourist—those who come to see what the newly exposed shoreline has revealed.
Designated the first national recreation area in 1964, Lake Mead’s mirror-like surface and breathtaking mountain views have attracted hordes of visitors who zig-zag across water on boats and jet skis and trek to shore with towels in hand. As the reservoir has declined to historic lows, however, the scene is much quieter than the boaters’ paradise Joyce DiManno remembers.
A longtime resident of the park’s neighboring Boulder City, DiManno can see the vista of Lake Mead and its crown of mountains from a wide window stretching across her living room.
“We’ve been in this particular house for five years and it’s amazing to just see the water continue to disappear from our front yard,” she says.
Joyce DiManno at her home in Boulder City, Nevada. 
DiManno flips through browning photo albums that hold memories of years spent at Lake Mead. Seated at her kitchen table, DiManno spreads piles of photo albums out before her, each holding snapshots of the 80s and 90s when she and her husband Frank visited the lake religiously.
As she combs through them, she points out snippets of weekends spent skiing and boating with friends, the countless hours passed lounging in coves and on beaches. At the time, drought was far from their minds.
The DiMannos eventually sold their boat in 1999. In the years that followed, the couple had a front-row view as many of their beloved spots became unrecognizable.
At the lake’s southwestern Boulder Beach, shorelines have retracted so far that roads built to meet the water’s edge end abruptly several hundred yards from the water line. Cars loaded with folding chairs, umbrellas, kayaks and piles of food must navigate the bumpy off-road ride to the shore, their wheels grinding over delicate white shells that stud the dry lakebed.
The newly exposed stretch of shore near Boulder Beach was the site of a shocking discovery early this year when the body of a decades-old homicide victim was found inside an eroding barrel, likely tossed far offshore in the 70s or 80s. In the months that followed, several more remains have been found in the receding waters, including the body of a 2002 drowning victim.
As water levels drop at this major lake, bodies begin to appear
News of the discoveries, as well as the exposure of artifacts such as a World War II-era landing craft, have catapulted the reservoir’s water shortage to national attention and attracted a motley collection of amateur treasure hunters, YouTube explorers and intrigued visitors hoping to spot the relics that now litter the drying lakebed.
Near the busy marinas of Hemenway Harbor, the sunken wreck of a WWII-era Higgins boat has become a more well-known antiquity emerging from the retracting waters. Its ribbed frame rises from the surface like the washed-up skeleton of a prehistoric fish. The long craft has been partially gutted, its engine removed.
Emerald waters partially submerge the frame of a WW-II era boat near the Lake Mead Marina. Murky waters and layers of silt conceal the remainder of the boat’s U-shaped design, which the park says is still wrapped in its armored plating. Thick bands of rust streak its body, studded with underwater growth and tiny shells.
The amphibious landing craft was designed to deliver US troops from ships to open beaches, but the boats have long been used around the park. The park service is unsure how or when the boat was deposited there, but the shallow spot has become a sort of pilgrimage for curious explorers.
Another sleek vessel attracting visitors rockets out of the ground at a seemingly gravity-defying angle. In May, the craft was partially submerged, but its engine has become so firmly lodged in the packed silt that it has remained erect even as the lake has disappeared around it.
Dozens of other previously waterlogged vessels now nestle between tufts of brittle brush or rest on sandy shelves formed by the dropping shores. Most are crusted with layers of dirt and underwater growth that cling to their control panels. A handful appear untouched as their glossy paints glint in the sun, seemingly unscathed by years of soaking underwater.
A buoy hangs dry from the rocks above the water. 
The true scale of water loss is visible from almost every vantage point at the reservoir. Towering rock formations that jut out of the water’s surface and wall the lake’s edges are lined with a thick white stripe of sediment left behind by past water levels.
The stark “bathtub ring” ribboning across the mountains can be seen even from distant outlooks.
The exposed wall of the Hoover Dam can be seen on September 12, 2022. 
The ivory ring sits flush with the top of the hulking Hoover Dam, which holds back water from the reservoir. Today, the dam’s towering turbines—capable of producing enough hydropower for roughly 1.3 million people annually—rise far out of the water. Without sufficient supply, they can only operate at just over half their capacity. If the water level drops about 100 feet more, they will no longer be able to produce power, according to the Bureau of Reclamation.
Though the water level has substantially lowered, the reservoir still offers an extraordinary playground for the millions who visit each year. Getting a boat onto the water, however, is becoming more of a challenge.
Since 2000, the National Park Service has spent nearly $50 million relocating and extending boat launching ramps and other infrastructure in an attempt to chase the falling water line. But even with these huge and costly adjustments, the park has been forced to close all but one ramp.
At the sole remaining launch ramp in Hemenway Harbor, the water is still too shallow for bigger boats to enter. On busy days, wait times can last hours as cars clog the road to the water with boats and trailers in tow. The long, paved runway to the ramp is punctuated with signs warning of the risk of boating in low waters.
When Alan O’Neill was superintendent of the park from 1987 to 2000, the park maintained as many as nine ramps for people to pull boats in and out of the lake, he says, remarking that having only one ramp available at the park is “tragic.”
“It breaks my heart to go out there,” he says. “We thought it would be damn near impossible for the lake to get to the level it is now.”
Alan O’Neill oversaw the Lake Mead National Recreation Area while the reservoir reached some of its fullest levels. 
Signage at the Hemenway Harbor boat launch warns of low water levels. Though O’Neill is quick to point out that the 1.5-million-acre park still offers abundant land-based recreation across its vast mountains, valleys and canyons, he believes the visitor experience at the lake has been significantly disrupted by the closure of facilities like launch ramps and marinas.
“I feel really bad looking out and seeing that, knowing how many people from our community were out enjoying not only the lake but the adjacent shoreline,” O’Neill says, recalling the park buzzing with activity.
News of extreme drought’s impacts on the lake may also be deterring visitors who have the impression that the scene has become bleak, says Bruce Nelson, director of operations at the Lake Mead Marina in Hemenway Harbor.
“Everybody is convinced that Lake Mead is this big mud puddle, and that’s not the case,” he says, emphasizing that even at low capacity, the reservoir remains one of the nation’s largest. “It’s still a really great lake for boating and enjoying yourself recreation wise.”
Aware of how water and ramp conditions are impacting the visitor experience, the National Park Service is holding several public meetings this month and is working on a plan to accommodate boating as the reservoir drops.
Recent federal projections show the reservoir’s levels are expected to continue plunging over the next two years, inching closer to “dead pool” levels where the dam is unable to release water downstream. The dire forecasts have already prompted federal mandatory water cuts for Nevada, Arizona and Mexico. California will likely soon follow.
Still, even further cuts will be necessary to preserve Lake Mead and the Colorado River Basin. Fraught negotiations between states, tribes, cities and farmers have been tedious, however, as they decide who will take on the biggest restrictions.
But if states can’t commit to big enough water cuts, the federal government’s patience may soon run out. The US Department of Interior is making preparations to take its own actions, which may include limiting downstream water releases from the reservoir to prevent it from nearing dead pool levels.
Though Joyce DiManno no longer boats at the reservoir, she still visits occasionally to walk the widening shore. She’s hopeful the lake will avoid reaching crisis levels, but she doubts it will ever live up to the lively scene she remembers.
“Will it ever be what it was? No,” she says. “I truly feel we had the golden years of boating out there. It was just fabulous.”
A boat sits on a sandy shelf revealed by dropping waters. “We never thought we would see anything like (what) is going on at this time now,” DiManno says.
As the falling waters persist, unexpected relics of the reservoir’s past continue to be unveiled. But in depths that can stretch hundreds of feet deep, decades-worth of artifacts remain submerged.
In the reservoir’s northern Overton Arm, the heavy frame of a bomber plane has rested on the lake’s floor for 74 years after a critical miscalculation of the plane’s altitude sent the B-29 Superfortress crashing into the surface and sinking to the lakebed.
Once more than 200 feet below the surface, the spot has been an extraordinary excursion for divers. But after water levels at the site fell around 100 feet, the park restricted diving there altogether this year while it determines how to preserve the historic relic in increasingly shallow waters.
Decades of soaking in the lake’s depths have left the plane’s aluminum body quilted with colonies of invasive mussels. Inside the dented cockpit, a parachute caught while the crew members safely evacuated lies stretched between the seats.
The future of the B-29 and the crucial waters that surround it remain unknown. But for now—and with each passing year—Lake Mead’s underwater curiosities creep closer to the surface.
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Lake Mead’s receding waterlines have revealed unexpected discoveries
[ad_1]
See what extreme drought has exposed at Lake Mead
December 16, 2022
LAKE MEAD, NEVADA — Along a lonely stretch of Lake Mead’s southwestern shore, a rattlesnake huddles amidst a cluster of rocks, just feet away from the wreck of an abandoned houseboat that has been baked under the desert sun.
The wreck is cluttered with remnants of a past life: Cracked white dishes ringed with delicate floral motifs, coffee cups flung far from their matching saucers, a blender filled with dirt. Its wooden frame is splayed over the uneven rock bed, a scrum of split beams and rusted engine parts webbed with rope and electrical cords. A small white toilet sits perched atop the ruin. Its seat—still attached to the lid—can be found down by the water’s edge.
Early this year, the vessel was submerged under the lake’s emerald waters.
But formerly sunken boats sitting high and dry on the horizon are now a hallmark of the lake’s new reality as it becomes a focal point in one of America’s most dire climate crises—extreme drought in the West.
As the result of a decades-long “megadrought” across the region, Lake Mead’s water level has dropped around 170 feet feet since 2000, causing its shoreline to recede dramatically and exposing huge swaths of dry lakebed. Some locals and longtime visitors feel the drawback has made life at the lake a fraction of what it used to be. But the crisis is also attracting a new kind of tourist—those who come to see what the newly exposed shoreline has revealed.
Designated the first national recreation area in 1964, Lake Mead’s mirror-like surface and breathtaking mountain views have attracted hordes of visitors who zig-zag across water on boats and jet skis and trek to shore with towels in hand. As the reservoir has declined to historic lows, however, the scene is much quieter than the boaters’ paradise Joyce DiManno remembers.
A longtime resident of the park’s neighboring Boulder City, DiManno can see the vista of Lake Mead and its crown of mountains from a wide window stretching across her living room.
“We’ve been in this particular house for five years and it’s amazing to just see the water continue to disappear from our front yard,” she says.
Joyce DiManno at her home in Boulder City, Nevada. DiManno flips through browning photo albums that hold memories of years spent at Lake Mead. Seated at her kitchen table, DiManno spreads piles of photo albums out before her, each holding snapshots of the 80s and 90s when she and her husband Frank visited the lake religiously.
As she combs through them, she points out snippets of weekends spent skiing and boating with friends, the countless hours passed lounging in coves and on beaches. At the time, drought was far from their minds.
The DiMannos eventually sold their boat in 1999. In the years that followed, the couple had a front-row view as many of their beloved spots became unrecognizable.
At the lake’s southwestern Boulder Beach, shorelines have retracted so far that roads built to meet the water’s edge end abruptly several hundred yards from the water line. Cars loaded with folding chairs, umbrellas, kayaks and piles of food must navigate the bumpy off-road ride to the shore, their wheels grinding over delicate white shells that stud the dry lakebed.
The newly exposed stretch of shore near Boulder Beach was the site of a shocking discovery early this year when the body of a decades-old homicide victim was found inside an eroding barrel, likely tossed far offshore in the 70s or 80s. In the months that followed, several more remains have been found in the receding waters, including the body of a 2002 drowning victim.
As water levels drop at this major lake, bodies begin to appear
News of the discoveries, as well as the exposure of artifacts such as a World War II-era landing craft, have catapulted the reservoir’s water shortage to national attention and attracted a motley collection of amateur treasure hunters, YouTube explorers and intrigued visitors hoping to spot the relics that now litter the drying lakebed.
Near the busy marinas of Hemenway Harbor, the sunken wreck of a WWII-era Higgins boat has become a more well-known antiquity emerging from the retracting waters. Its ribbed frame rises from the surface like the washed-up skeleton of a prehistoric fish. The long craft has been partially gutted, its engine removed.
Emerald waters partially submerge the frame of a WW-II era boat near the Lake Mead Marina. Murky waters and layers of silt conceal the remainder of the boat’s U-shaped design, which the park says is still wrapped in its armored plating. Thick bands of rust streak its body, studded with underwater growth and tiny shells.
The amphibious landing craft was designed to deliver US troops from ships to open beaches, but the boats have long been used around the park. The park service is unsure how or when the boat was deposited there, but the shallow spot has become a sort of pilgrimage for curious explorers.
Another sleek vessel attracting visitors rockets out of the ground at a seemingly gravity-defying angle. In May, the craft was partially submerged, but its engine has become so firmly lodged in the packed silt that it has remained erect even as the lake has disappeared around it.
Dozens of other previously waterlogged vessels now nestle between tufts of brittle brush or rest on sandy shelves formed by the dropping shores. Most are crusted with layers of dirt and underwater growth that cling to their control panels. A handful appear untouched as their glossy paints glint in the sun, seemingly unscathed by years of soaking underwater.
A buoy hangs dry from the rocks above the water. The true scale of water loss is visible from almost every vantage point at the reservoir. Towering rock formations that jut out of the water’s surface and wall the lake’s edges are lined with a thick white stripe of sediment left behind by past water levels.
The stark “bathtub ring” ribboning across the mountains can be seen even from distant outlooks.The exposed wall of the Hoover Dam can be seen on September 12, 2022. The ivory ring sits flush with the top of the hulking Hoover Dam, which holds back water from the reservoir. Today, the dam’s towering turbines—capable of producing enough hydropower for roughly 1.3 million people annually—rise far out of the water. Without sufficient supply, they can only operate at just over half their capacity. If the water level drops about 100 feet more, they will no longer be able to produce power, according to the Bureau of Reclamation.
Though the water level has substantially lowered, the reservoir still offers an extraordinary playground for the millions who visit each year. Getting a boat onto the water, however, is becoming more of a challenge.
Since 2000, the National Park Service has spent nearly $50 million relocating and extending boat launching ramps and other infrastructure in an attempt to chase the falling water line. But even with these huge and costly adjustments, the park has been forced to close all but one ramp.
At the sole remaining launch ramp in Hemenway Harbor, the water is still too shallow for bigger boats to enter. On busy days, wait times can last hours as cars clog the road to the water with boats and trailers in tow. The long, paved runway to the ramp is punctuated with signs warning of the risk of boating in low waters.
When Alan O’Neill was superintendent of the park from 1987 to 2000, the park maintained as many as nine ramps for people to pull boats in and out of the lake, he says, remarking that having only one ramp available at the park is “tragic.”
“It breaks my heart to go out there,” he says. “We thought it would be damn near impossible for the lake to get to the level it is now.”
Alan O’Neill oversaw the Lake Mead National Recreation Area while the reservoir reached some of its fullest levels. Signage at the Hemenway Harbor boat launch warns of low water levels. Though O’Neill is quick to point out that the 1.5-million-acre park still offers abundant land-based recreation across its vast mountains, valleys and canyons, he believes the visitor experience at the lake has been significantly disrupted by the closure of facilities like launch ramps and marinas.
“I feel really bad looking out and seeing that, knowing how many people from our community were out enjoying not only the lake but the adjacent shoreline,” O’Neill says, recalling the park buzzing with activity.
News of extreme drought’s impacts on the lake may also be deterring visitors who have the impression that the scene has become bleak, says Bruce Nelson, director of operations at the Lake Mead Marina in Hemenway Harbor.
“Everybody is convinced that Lake Mead is this big mud puddle, and that’s not the case,” he says, emphasizing that even at low capacity, the reservoir remains one of the nation’s largest. “It’s still a really great lake for boating and enjoying yourself recreation wise.”
Aware of how water and ramp conditions are impacting the visitor experience, the National Park Service is holding several public meetings this month and is working on a plan to accommodate boating as the reservoir drops.
Recent federal projections show the reservoir’s levels are expected to continue plunging over the next two years, inching closer to “dead pool” levels where the dam is unable to release water downstream. The dire forecasts have already prompted federal mandatory water cuts for Nevada, Arizona and Mexico. California will likely soon follow.
Still, even further cuts will be necessary to preserve Lake Mead and the Colorado River Basin. Fraught negotiations between states, tribes, cities and farmers have been tedious, however, as they decide who will take on the biggest restrictions.
But if states can’t commit to big enough water cuts, the federal government’s patience may soon run out. The US Department of Interior is making preparations to take its own actions, which may include limiting downstream water releases from the reservoir to prevent it from nearing dead pool levels.
Though Joyce DiManno no longer boats at the reservoir, she still visits occasionally to walk the widening shore. She’s hopeful the lake will avoid reaching crisis levels, but she doubts it will ever live up to the lively scene she remembers.
“Will it ever be what it was? No,” she says. “I truly feel we had the golden years of boating out there. It was just fabulous.”
A boat sits on a sandy shelf revealed by dropping waters. “We never thought we would see anything like (what) is going on at this time now,” DiManno says.
As the falling waters persist, unexpected relics of the reservoir’s past continue to be unveiled. But in depths that can stretch hundreds of feet deep, decades-worth of artifacts remain submerged.
In the reservoir’s northern Overton Arm, the heavy frame of a bomber plane has rested on the lake’s floor for 74 years after a critical miscalculation of the plane’s altitude sent the B-29 Superfortress crashing into the surface and sinking to the lakebed.
Once more than 200 feet below the surface, the spot has been an extraordinary excursion for divers. But after water levels at the site fell around 100 feet, the park restricted diving there altogether this year while it determines how to preserve the historic relic in increasingly shallow waters.
Decades of soaking in the lake’s depths have left the plane’s aluminum body quilted with colonies of invasive mussels. Inside the dented cockpit, a parachute caught while the crew members safely evacuated lies stretched between the seats.
The future of the B-29 and the crucial waters that surround it remain unknown. But for now—and with each passing year—Lake Mead’s underwater curiosities creep closer to the surface.
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Three Techniques, Three Species, Different Ways to Fight Drought
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The Science
Rising temperatures and increasing droughts have scientists looking for ways to better predict how plants will react to stress. Every study offers a little more information. Now, scientists have discovered a way to yield a wealth of insights in a single study. Combining three advanced research techniques that are rarely used together, they found they could pinpoint how different types of plants protect themselves from harsh conditions. Even more surprising? Plants try various strategies to assure their survival.
The Impact
When used together, the three techniques reveal a surprising amount of information about the chemical processes inside plants. Scientists can also look for patterns across plant communities. The results can help identify when plants require more water or more nutrients to keep growing during times of stress, even in diverse environments. How plants respond to drought can also have profound impacts on the movement of carbon through the environment, which ultimately influences climate.
Summary
Working under the Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science (FICUS) program, scientists examined the effects of drought on chemical processes inside the roots of three tropical rainforest species. The team included researchers from the University of Arizona, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the University of Freiburg. To understand the plant’s chemical functioning, including how it utilized carbon, the team combined cutting-edge metabolomic and imaging technologies at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), a Department of Energy (DOE) user facility. They used powerful nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to identify the type and structure of molecules in the plant roots. They then created detailed images of tissues using mass spectrometry (matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry) and took nanoscale measurements of elements and iisotopes (nanoscale secondary ion mass spectrometry).
This combination of techniques yielded insights into different defense mechanisms plants use to survive drought. One species added woody lignin to thicken its roots. The second secreted antioxidants and fatty acids as a biochemical defense. The third appeared less affected by drought conditions, but the soil around it had a higher level of carbon. This indicates that the plant and the microbes in the soil were working together to protect the plant. Overall, this study demonstrates how multiple techniques can be combined to identify different drought-tolerance strategies and ways to keep plants thriving.
Funding
A portion of this research was performed under the FICUS exploratory effort and used resources at the DOE Joint Genome Institute and EMSL, both of which are DOE Office of Science user facilities. This research was supported in part by the European Research Council and the DOE Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research program. The Philecology Foundation and the European Research Council also provided financial support.
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Department of Energy, Office of Science
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Climate change worsens Somalia hunger crisis
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Climate change worsens Somalia hunger crisis – CBS News
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El NiñO Increases Seedling Mortality Even in Drought-Tolerant Forests
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Newswise — Global climate change may lead to more extreme weather events such as droughts. To predict the impact of climate change on tropical forests, it is necessary to understand more accurately the effects of drought. El Niño often reduces rainfall and causes drier forests in the tropical regions of Southeast Asia. Since tropical rainforests there usually experience rainfall year-round with no dry season, El Niño-induced drought increases tree mortality. Seasonally dry tropical forests (SDTFs), on the other hand, are considered more adaptive to drought given that they experience both wet and dry seasons. However, there remains limited understanding about the effects of El Niño on SDTFs.
Addressing this knowledge gap, a research team led by graduate student Prapawadee Nutiprapun, from the Graduate School of Science at Osaka City University, Professor Akira Itoh, from the Graduate School of Science at Osaka Metropolitan University, and Professor Dokrak Marod, from the Faculty of Forestry at Kasetsart University, monitored seedling recruitment and mortality at an SDTF in a national park in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, at monthly intervals for 7 years.
During the study period, an extremely strong El Niño event occurred between 2014 and 2016, resulting in reduced rainfall. In 2016, the dry season was approximately 3 months longer than normal. The collected data show that severe and prolonged drought increased seedling mortality even in the SDTF. In addition, drought-caused mortality was greater in evergreen forests at higher elevations, where drought is usually less severe, than in deciduous forests at lower elevations, where severe drought is more frequently observed.
Only in deciduous forests did the number of seedlings increase significantly during the El Niño period. This was mainly due to a large number of acorns produced by the deciduous oak Quercus brandisiana (Fagaceae). El Niño has been known to stimulate mass flowering and fruiting, leading to an increase in seedlings in tropical rainforests in Southeast Asia.
“This study takes us one step closer to understanding the impact of El Niño on seasonally dry tropical forests in Southeast Asia,” said Ms. Nutiprapun.
“A decline in the number of seedlings that carry the next generation will affect the entire forest in the long run,” concluded Professor Itoh. “We believe that we have obtained useful basic knowledge to develop measures to conserve tropical forest ecosystems in consideration of future climate change.”
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About OMU
Osaka Metropolitan University is a new public university established by a merger between Osaka City University and Osaka Prefecture University in April 2022. For more science news, see https://www.upc-osaka.ac.jp/new-univ/en-research/, and follow @OsakaMetUniv_en, or search #OMUScience.
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Osaka Metropolitan University
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Drought disrupts Mississippi River shipping
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Drought disrupts Mississippi River shipping – CBS News
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Drought disrupts
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St. Louis, Missouri — The Mighty Mississippi might need a new nickname. North of Memphis, the river looks more like a desert than a river, as barge traffic up and down the crucial corridor is slowed or stranded amid a historic drought.
Paul Rohde, who represents the river’s shipping and towing industry, says the Mississippi is plunging to record low levels just as farmers send their harvests down river for export.
“It’s stark. We are seeing operational challenges that are almost unprecedented,” said Rohde, Waterways Council vice president of the Midwest area. “One-twelfth of the world’s population eats something that emanates from the Mississippi River Basin. Forty percent of the global food supply starts at the Mississippi River Basin. So this is a serious issue about who’s going to feed the world if America can’t get its agriculture products out.”
Massive barges also carry everything from coal and petroleum, to fertilizer and road salt.
Economic costs are estimated to be in the billions.
“It’s absolutely a water super highway,” Rohde said. “This is irreplaceable. We have got to keep commerce moving.”
The Army Corps of Engineers has been dredging the river nonstop for three months to help keep barges moving. It is desperately trying to maintain a nine-foot-deep shipping channel near St. Louis, sucking up enough sand and silt to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every hour.
“We’ve had three dredges working in our reach of the river to keep things open, based on the forecast,” said Lou Dell’Orco, chief of operations for the St. Louis District Corps of Engineers. “We can dredge it to a certain point, and then Mother Nature wins.”
Climate change is making Mother Nature unpredictable. St. Louis was hit with record-shattering rainfall in July, right before the drought began. The drought is expected to last through January, threatening the critical supply chain that rides on a receding ribbon of water.
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Photos: Brazil’s Amazon faces severe drought
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Just months after enduring floods that destroyed crops and submerged communities, thousands of families in the Brazilian Amazon are now dealing with drought that in some areas is the worst in decades.
The low level of the Amazon River, which is the heart of the world’s largest drainage system, has put dozens of municipalities on alert.
The quickly decreasing water levels are due to lower-than-expected rainfall during August and September, according to Luna Gripp, a geosciences researcher who monitors the western Amazon’s river levels for the Brazilian Geological Survey.
In the Sao Estevao community, fishermen have postponed catching pirarucu, the Amazon’s largest fish, because the boat to transport their catch to the city cannot dock.
The legal fishing season runs until the end of November. If the water level doesn’t rise soon, the seven-family community will lose a significant source of income, fisherman Pedro Canizio da Silva told The Associated Press.
About six months ago, the community suffered losses due to a heavier-than-expected flood season.
“I lost my crops of banana and yuca,” Canizio said. “Moreover, caymans and anacondas got closer to us due to the flood and ate some of my ducks and chickens. The water underneath my stilted house almost reached the floor.”
In the Porto Praia Indigenous community, the nearby branch of the Amazon River has become a vast swathe of sand that during the day becomes too hot to walk across. A motorboat trip to Tefe, normally 90 minutes long, now takes four hours, Anilton Braz, a local leader, told AP, because the water is so shallow in some stretches that it is necessary to paddle instead of using the motor.
The local source of water has become muddy and there is no other water to drink. “We fear our children will get sick with diarrhoea and other diseases,” Braz said.
The situation has led Tefe’s City Hall to declare a state of emergency to speed aid to families, but so far, there’s been little help. “The mayor sent a little bit of food,” Braz said.
The local civil defence authority said 53 out of 62 municipalities in Amazonas state have been affected by floods and drought this year. The drier season, known locally as the “Amazonian summer”, usually lasts from June to December in this part of the rainforest.
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World War II
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Low water levels in California’s drought-stricken Shasta Lake have revealed the long-lost wreckage of a ship that served in World War II. The U.S. Forest Service says the amphibious Higgins landing craft — referred to as the “ghost boat” — appeared last fall in the drought-stricken reservoir.
Markings on the boat’s side confirmed it was used on the USS Monrovia, the battleship that served as Gen. George Patton’s headquarters during the invasion of Sicily. Dwight D, Eisenhower, who planned and oversaw the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, was also on board the ship at one point.
The ship went on to serve in several missions, which reportedly included the invasion of Tarawa, where more than 1,200 Marines died in just 76 hours.
The USS Monrovia eventually sank in shallow waters off an island in the Pacific Ocean.
The “ghost boat” was salvaged and somehow ended up at the bottom of California’s largest reservoir.
“There is more to discover of its history and obviously its time on Shasta Lake, and still the circumstance of its sinking remains a mystery,” the Forest Service wrote.
The boat will be restored and will eventually be displayed at a museum in Nebraska.
Higgins Industries in New Orleans built several thousand landing craft between 1942 and 1945. Around 1,500 “Higgins boats” were deployed at Normandy.
California is enduring a drought that scientists are calling the worst in 1,200 years. In July, another sunken boat dating back to World War II emerged from a shrinking reservoir that straddles Nevada and Arizona.
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California farmers turn to growing agave amid drought
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Amid historic drought, one startup
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Amid historic drought, one startup “grows” water – CBS News
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Without Action, Water Shortages Will Lead to Less Food Production, Food Shortages, and Price Hikes
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Water shortages that continue to plague California are increasingly affecting the number of acres devoted to growing our food.
Press Release
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May 16, 2022
SACRAMENTO, Calif., May 16, 2022 (Newswire.com)
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Water shortages that continue to plague California are increasingly affecting the number of acres devoted to growing much of the nation’s fresh food, according to the California Farm Water Coalition. Farmers are making tough choices on which crops to grow and how much to plant in the face of crushing water supply cuts.“New estimates are emerging on the number of acres without enough water to grow food and it doesn’t look good,” said Mike Wade, executive director of the California Farm Water Coalition. “We believe the state could see as much as 691,000 acres taken out of production this year, a 75 percent increase over last year and 151,000 acres more than the previous high in 2015.”
Critical for consumers are the crops that won’t make it to the grocery store because of insufficient water supplies. Fresh fruits and vegetables, along with strawberries, citrus, peaches, broccoli, rice, and tomatoes for things like pizza sauce and salsa, are among the crops impacted when farm water supplies are cut off. It’s estimated that up to 40 percent of California’s irrigated cropland will receive little or no surface water this year.
“When people talk about taking millions of acres of California farmland out of production, those are just numbers. To put that into perspective, every acre that is left unplanted because of a lack of irrigation water, it is the equivalent of 50,000 salads that will not be available to consumers,” said Bill Diedrich, president of the California Farm Water Coalition.
In addition to less food in our grocery stores, it’s expected that the number of job losses on the state’s farms will approach 25,000 with an economic hit to the State of about $3.4 billion.
Data from the United States Department of Food and Agriculture show that 80% of U.S.-produced fruits, nuts and vegetables are grown West of the Rockies.
“It is not an accident that so much of our food supply comes from the West and in particular, California,” said Diedrich. “California’s climate is unique and not replicated in any other state. Most other states have more significant weather extremes, higher altitudes, oppressive humidity, and in some cases, too much water.
“California’s Mediterranean climate lends itself to abundant food production. If we abandon that, we’re accepting food shortages, higher prices, and more imports from foreign countries, many with significantly lower safety standards.
“California has failed to adapt to changing weather patterns. Because more of our precipitation now comes in the form of rain, instead of snow, we need to build both small and large storage projects to capture the water when Mother Nature delivers it.
“Both the federal and state government have allocated money for water infrastructure, but it moves too slowly. A clear example is Sites Reservoir which was specifically designed to capture rainfall from extreme events. If it was in place now, 2022 would not look so bleak.
“In addition to lack of storage, our water policy has also failed to adapt and remains mired in outdated science and cumbersome bureaucracy.
“We are not asking people to choose between a domestic food supply and a clean environment. We need both and that is achievable if we make the necessary adjustments.
“Immediate action is necessary because by the time the grocery shelves are empty it will be too late.”
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For further information, contact:
Mike Wade, California Farm Water Coalition
(916) 718-7408
mwade@farmwater.orgSource: California Farm Water Coalition
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