It’s not quite as bad as 2002, she said, but it could easily get there. She compares the current drought conditions to 2018, another record-breaking hot and dry year just a couple years ago. “People are having to do things that you don’t necessarily see, but we have water being hauled for livestock, water being hauled in for wildlife,” Selover said. It survives,” she said.īut even some creosote is dying, unable to take the one-two punch of both the hottest and driest conditions on record last year in parts of Arizona. “Creosote is one I personally like to call it the cockroach of the vegetation world because pretty much nothing kills creosote. Even hardy desert plants, the ones well-adapted to water scarcity, have struggled. Record-breaking high temperatures dragged well into fall. “This is when we’re supposed to be gaining and accumulating water in the form of snowpack, and that’s not happening,” Selover said.Ĭonditions have been deteriorating across the river basin since the summer of 2020. If it’s dry there, that means many more problems as the water flows downstream. Nancy Selover, Arizona’s state climatologist, says the Upper Basin figure is concerning because that accounts for the river’s headwaters. Two Mexican states also receive Colorado River water. The basin is made up of portions of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. 84% of the Upper Colorado River watershed is currently experiencing extreme to exceptional drought conditions, the highest percentage since 2002. The Lower Basin fares worse, with 93% of the land area in those categories. This is the highest percentage of land in the river’s Upper Basin since 2002, which stands as the region’s driest year on record. 84% Of Upper Basin In Extreme To Exceptional Drought Invest in quality science journalism by making a donation to Science Friday.ĭonate 1. We called several of them and asked for discrete numbers that capture the current state of the Colorado River basin. Understanding and explaining the depth of the dryness is up to climate scientists throughout the basin. This story was reported by Luke Runyon on KUNC.ĭry conditions are the worst they’ve been in almost 20 years across the Colorado River watershed, which acts as the drinking and irrigation water supply for 40 million people in the American Southwest.Īs the latest round of federal forecasts for the river’s flow shows, it’s plausible, maybe even likely, that the situation could get much worse this year. This segment is part of The State of Science, a series featuring science stories from public radio stations across the United States. In plain fact, Mark has never sung better in his life, from the harmonic folk edifice of Radio Death Song to the propulsive rap reincarnation of The Slab.Lake Mead is currently projected to be at its lowest level since filling within the next year, possibly triggering the first federal shortage declaration on the river that supplies water to 40 million across seven U.S. I found myself in a different landscape and singing quite differently." "With Head Above Water and When the River Runs Dry, the whole emotion changed as a result of the arrangements. "With all respect to Hunters & Collectors, quite a few of these songs work better here than they did originally," he says. More by accident than design, DAYTIME AND THE DARK is top-heavy with songs Mark thought he'd left behind, songs reborn by the immediacy of acoustic performance and the unpredictable prism of hindsight. And funnily enough, that's exactly what they are to the majority of Australians for whom Throw Your Arms Around Me and Holy Grail endure, like tea towels on a Hill's Hoist, as flags on the cultural landscape. Memories twisted around somebody's fingerĪfter three solo albums of evolving sophistication, Hunters & Collectors are history for Mark Seymour. In a blinding flash I see the years go by "I spy your humble home, see the tea towels fly
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