By Joby Warrick August 17, 2014
WILLOWS, Calif. — When the winter rains failed to arrive in this Sacramento Valley town for the third straight year, farmers tightened their belts and looked to the reservoirs in the nearby hills to keep them in water through the growing season.
When those faltered,...
Drought, and the resulting shortage of melting snow, is driving the historic water shortages across much of the American West.
By Dennis Dimick, National Geographic
PUBLISHED APRIL 06, 2015
Last week, California Governor Jerry Brown announced his state’s first-ever mandatory water restricti...
The Environmental Protection Agency took responsibility Friday for inadvertently polluting a Colorado river with 1 million gallons of toxic orange wastewater while trying to clean up an abandoned gold mine.
The spill occurred Wednesday morning at a long-closed Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colo., ...
Particulate matter and NO2 air pollution are associated with increased risk of severe heart attacks despite being within European recommended levels, according to research presented at ESC Congress today by Dr Jean-Francois Argacha, a cardiologist at University Hospital Brussels (UZ Brussel-Vri...
Looking for water to flush his toilet, Tino Lozano pointed a garden hose at some buckets in the bare dirt of his yard. It's his daily ritual now in a community built by refugees from Oklahoma's Dust Bowl. But only a trickle came out; then a drip, then nothing more.
"There it goes," said Lozano, a 4...
By Dennis Dimick, National Geographic
PUBLISHED AUGUST 21, 2014
Aquifers provide us freshwater that makes up for surface water lost from drought-depleted lakes, rivers, and reservoirs. We are drawing down these hidden, mostly nonrenewable groundwater supplies at unsustainable rates in the western ...
The bold headline of a recent Los Angeles Times editorial by the hydrologist Jay Famiglietti starkly warned: “California has about one year of water left. Will you ration now?” The write-up quickly made the social media rounds, prompting both panic and the usual blame game: It’s because of the meat ...
Americans tend to take it for granted that when we open a tap, water will come out.
Western states have been dealing with water problems for a while, but they won't be alone for long.
As drought, flooding, and climate change restrict America's water supply, demands from population growth and energ...
Nearly three-quarters of new Oregon residents come from western states, many of which are suffering from severe water shortages.
PORTLAND, Ore. – It’s no surprise that Oregon, especially Portland, is a hot destination for transplants from around the country. Anyone who sits in Portland’s increasing...
In 1922, seven Western states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Wyoming and California — drew up an agreement on how to divide the waters of the Colorado River. But there was one big problem with the plan: They overestimated how much water the river could provide.
As a result, each sta...
29 July 2015 – The world’s population is projected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030, 9.7 billion by 2050 and exceed 11 billion in 2100, with India expected to surpass China as the most populous around seven years from now and Nigeria overtaking the United States to become the world’s third largest count...
BOISE, Idaho (AP) — More than a quarter million sockeye salmon returning from the ocean to spawn are either dead or dying in the Columbia River and its tributaries due to warming water temperatures.
Federal and state fisheries biologists say the warm water is lethal for the cold-water species and i...
Majority of Parks Experience Days Risky for Vulnerable Visitors; Four Parks Regularly Unsafe for Most People
WASHINGTON –A new analysis, released today by National Parks Conservation Association, shows that every one of the 48 national parks with the greatest Clean Air Act protections are plagued b...
Last week, President Obama released a plan to cut carbon emissions from power plants. Climate change has also been cropping up on the presidential campaign trail — both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have released their own proposals.
Nearly three-quarters of Americans now favor government acti...
As the world enters into a sixth great extinction, scientists are racing against the clock to save genetic evidence from plants around the world.
An ambitious project launched Wednesday to collect the genomes of the planet's major plant groups within the next two years and put them into deep freeze...
Due to climate change and the expansion of human civilization, the world is now in the midst of a sixth global extinction, and according to scientists, this time, we are the asteroid. It's What's Up In Climate Change.
The last major extinction event on Earth, the fifth in the planet's long ...
The Environmental Protection Agency took responsibility Friday for a massive wastewater spill that contaminated a Colorado river Wednesday, and warned locals to avoid the polluted waters.
According to a statement by the agency, an EPA cleanup team accidentally caused the spill while excav...
A team of US regulators investigating contamination at a Colorado goldmine accidentally released a million gallons (3.8 million liters) of orange-hued waste water containing sediment and metals into a local river system, the Environmental Protection Agency said on Thursday.
The waste wate...
As water shortages grip California and the seven state Colorado River basin, many users feel no pain, while some face a complete curtailment. That’s because the water management system is not designed to be either efficient or equitable but consistent and predictable. And it is.
As is typ...
