Why Are Millions Of Fish Suddenly Dying In Mass Death Events All Over The Planet?

Millions upon millions of fish are suddenly dying in mass death events all over the world, and nobody seems to know why it is happening. In many of the news reports that are linked to below, locals are quoted as saying that they have never seen anything like this before. So is there a connection between all of the fish deaths that are now occurring all over the planet?

If there is a connection, is there anything that we can do to stop the fish die-off? Sadly, because the big mainstream news networks in the United States have been virtually silent about this phenomenon, most Americans have absolutely no idea that it is happening. Millions of fish are dying in mass death events every single month and most of the public is totally clueless.

Please share the list posted below with as many people as you can. This list was originally started by Frank DiMora, but I have edited it and expanded it. If there were just three or four items on this list, you could dismiss these news stories as coincidences, but taken together this list really is quite startling…

-: 20 acres of fish ponds full of dead fish in Shandong, China

-July 18, 2013: Hundreds of dead Stingrays wash ashore in Veracruz, Mexico

-July 18, 2013: 10,000 lbs of dead fish found in a lake in Nanjing, China

-July 18, 2013: Thousands of fish dead from “lack of rain” in Sugar Lake, Missouri

-July 18, 2013: Large numbers of fish washing up on the shores of Lake Michigan

-July 19, 2013: 2,000 dead fish found in a lake in Vollsmose, Denmark

-July 19, 2013: Hundreds of fish turning up dead in Holter Lake, Montana

-July 19, 2013: THOUSANDS OF TONS of fish have died in Lake Tondano, Indonesia

-July 20, 2013: 3,000 fish found dead in a creek in Madison County, Ohio

-July 21, 2013: Hundreds of fish found dead in a creek in Laille, France

-July 22, 2013: Hundreds of dead fish found in Lake George, Massachusetts

-July 22, 2013: Large fish kill at Grand Lake in St. Marys, Ohio

-July 23, 2013: Hundreds of dead fish in a park pond in Youngstown, Ohio

-July 24, 2013: Massive fish kill washes up in a lagoon in Venice, Italy

-July 24, 2013: Thousands of dead fish in Lake Bulwell causes shock in Nottingham, England

-July 24, 2013: 30,000 fish dying PER DAY in fish farms in Ratchaburi Province, Thailand

-July 24, 2013: Masses of dead fish found in River Lea in England

-July 24, 2013: Hundreds of dead fish found in Provo River, Utah

-July 25, 2013: Hundreds of fish found dead in a park pond in Birmingham, England

-July 26, 2013: Hundreds of thousands of fish dying from “red tide” in South Korea

-July 26, 2013: Thousands of dead fish found floating in River Dender, Ath, Belgium

-July 26, 2013: Mass fish die-off in a river in Moscow, Russia

-July 26, 2013: 25,000 dead fish “is a mystery” in Pittville Lake in Gloucestershire, England

-July 26, 2013: 20,000 fish die along a 5 mile stretch of river in Jiangshan, China

-July 27, 2013: 10,000 dead fish found in Lake Ariel, Pennsylvania

-July 27, 2013: Mass death of fish “is a mystery” in a river in Skane, Sweden

-July 27, 2013: Large fish kill in the Bahlui river, “cause unknown” in Romania

-July 28, 2013: 1100 King Salmon found dead in a river in Petersburg, Alaska

-July 29, 2013: Hundreds of dead fish wash ashore “due to pollution” on beach in Veracruz, Mexico

-July 29, 2013: 7 TONS of dead fish recovered from the Keelung river in Taiwan

-July 29, 2013: Thousands of fish die “due to heat and storms” in Handsworth Park, Birmingham, England

-July 31, 2013: 3 TONS of fish die due to “lack of oxygen” in a river in Pilsen, Czech Republic

-August 2, 2013: Thousands of fish dying all over Alaska

-August 6, 2013: Up to 1000 lbs of dead fish washed ashore in Ylane, Finland

-August 6, 2013: 840 dead Salmon found in a creek in Port Coquitlam, Canada

-August 6, 2013: Hundreds of dead fish lining the shore of a pond in Toronto, Canada

-August 6, 2013: 100,000 fish die in the Arkansas River

-August 7, 2013: Thousands of dead fish found floating in a river in Hangzhou, China

-August 8, 2013: Tons of fish washed up on the shores of Karachi, Pakistan

-August 8, 2013: Tens of thousands of fish dying in lakes and rivers all over the U.K.

And remember, the list compiled above represents less than a one month period. The truth is that we have been seeing massive fish die-offs all over the globe month after month. More

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A Sinking Village Trying To Escape Climate Change Is Stuck In A Quagmire

Most people think moving to a new house is a hassle. Relocating an entire village is a whole lot harder.

Newtok, Alaska

That’s what the 350 or so native Alaskans who live in the village of Newtok have been attempting in recent years, as the effects of climate change have caused their land to erode and sink from under them. Now, as The Guardian reports, local political infighting and difficulties locking down the tens of millions of dollars required for the move have essentially ground the relocation effort to a halt.

Every year of delay in constructing the new village site nine miles to the south on higher ground matters for Newtok’s residents. The town’s highest point today--the school--could be underwater as soon as 2017, according to a study (pdf) from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

What’s also concerning about Newtok’s struggle to save itself is what this portends for other places that face imminent threats from climate change, including an estimated 180 or so other Alaskan villages. From The Guardian:

Many villages, like Newtok, are losing land to erosion. The Ninglick river, which encircles Newtok is eating the land out from under the village. Others are sinking in the melting permafrost. A handful have started the process of relocation. But none had gone as far as Newtok in finding a new site, and beginning the slow and laborious process of negotiating through the web of state agencies to find funds for their relocation.

Robin Bronen, a human rights lawyer in Anchorage, has argued extensively that the federal government’s failure to recognise slow-moving climate threats as disasters leaves such communities stranded, with no clear set of guidelines – or designated funds – to secure their communities in place, or plan a move.

If it is this difficult to move even a tiny village further inland, one has also got to question the hurdles in store for much larger-scale climate change “adaptation” plans in cities like New York or London. There’s clearly no talk yet of moving any New Yorkers, but in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is suddenly looking to spend $20 billion to build an entire system of levees, movable flood walls and a full-fledged “Seaport City” to protect flood-prone neighborhoods from future disasters.

Unlike the sinking village of Newtok, New York has more time to plan and build defensive measures against sea-level rise and harsher storms. But any ambitious urban infrastructure project would need all the time it can get to make it past bureaucratic and financial hurdles. Just ask the New Yorkers still waiting for the Second Avenue subway to be finished. It has been under various stages of planning since 1929 and is still under construction today. More

Guardian article here

 

Southern China wilts under heat wave

An extended and deadly heat wave is cooking the southern parts of China, with temperatures hitting record highs in seven provinces and regions on Tuesday.

Since early July, dozens of people nationwide have died from heat-related health problems. With temperatures in most areas of the south forecast to pass 35 C and possibly 40 C, the China Meteorological Administration issued the second-highest national heat alert on Tuesday.

The highest alert has never been issued.

"About 19 provinces and regions are experiencing scorching heat, covering more than 3 million square kilometers, almost a third of the country," said He Lifu, chief weather forecaster at the National Meteorological Center.

How hot has it been? As many micro blog posts and TV reports have shown, it has literally been hot enough to fry an egg on the street. On Wednesday, several people successfully cooked eggs, fish and bacon on street pavements and other surfaces.

In Xiaoshan, Zhejiang province, the mercury hit 42.2 C on Tuesday, a historic high.

"The hot days are mainly caused by a strong Pacific subtropical high, an important atmospheric circulation system influencing the summer climate in China," said Sun Leng, senior engineer for the China Meteorological Administration’s Climate Data Center.

But don’t expect a cooldown. Satellite images on Wednesday from the Climate Data Center indicate that the hot weather will continue until at least mid-August.

For Guo Renping, July was a nightmare. The 55-year-old worker in Chongqing worked eight-hour shifts for 20 of the 31 days this past month that experienced temperatures higher than 35 C.

Every day, Guo, sorted and transferred garbage at a waste landfill. Every day about 2,000 metric tons of waste is delivered to the landfill. Ground temperatures in that area of the city reached 50 C in July.

"I cannot bear to work in such hot weather for eight hours every day," said Guo, who added that he was paid a heat-related subsidy by the garbage company.

Some workers in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang, have been luckier than Guo. Several companies chose to give their workers days off.

Zhang Ping, a worker at Hangzhou Xihu Electronic Group, told Xinhua News Agency that most of his co-workers were given a 10-day leave from July 26 to Aug 4 because of the hot weather.

In Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, 1,460 air-conditioned shelters, or cooling centers, have been open since late June. Some stores see as many as 50,000 people pass through their doors on a daily basis.

But while people are taking their own measures to cool down, meteorological authorities are making efforts to induce rainfall and a little reprieve from the heat.

On Tuesday, seven cities and counties in Zhejiang seeded clouds and induced precipitation to combat a drought. Millions of hectares of farmland have wilted under a drought in Zhejiang, Hubei, Hunan, Guizhou and Jiangxi provinces.

In Hangzhou’s Yuhang district, seven cloud-seeding rockets were launched on Tuesday afternoon to induce rain, resulting in an average of 5.4 millimeters of precipitation and a 10 C drop in temperatures between 3:30 pm and 5 pm, said Shi Feng at the Yuhang Metrological Bureau.

According to the Zhejiang Metrological Bureau, the province has been experiencing its hottest July in 62 years. From July 1 to 29, the average temperature was 30.3 C, while the average precipitation was only 38 mm.

The bureau also said in a statement that 12 cities and counties are preparing to seed clouds and create precipitation. Authorities said once they see clouds and ideal wind directions, cloud-seeding operations will be conducted as soon as possible. More

 

Pakistan issues fresh flood warnings

Pakistani disaster relief officials have issued fresh flood warnings after the death toll from heavy monsoon rains rose to 45 and waters paralysed parts of the largest city, Karachi.

Pakistan's National Disaster Management Authority warned on Sunday that more thunderstorms and heavy rains were expected on Monday and some rivers may flood.

Flash floods caused by monsoon downpours inundated some main roads in the sprawling port city and swept away homes in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Officials in Karachi said at least 19 people died in the city as 20 others died in the northwest and six in the southwestern province of Baluchistan in the floods over the weekend

Doctor Semi Jamali at the Jinnah Hospital in Karachi told AFP news agency that most of the deaths occurred due to electrocution or collapsing roofs and walls.

Army engineers helped relief efforts in Karachi on Sunday where roads and streets were flooded and the city was practically paralysed, an AFP reporter said.

Pakistan has suffered devastating monsoon floods for the last three years, including the worst in its history in 2010 when catastrophic inundations killed almost 1,800 people and affected 21 million.

Scores killed in Afghanistan

Meanwhile, flash floods triggered by days of torrential rain have killed more than 50 people inneighbouring Afghanistan, destroying dozens of houses, officials said.

An estimated 30 people remained missing on Sunday.

Provincial spokesmen in Nangarhar, Kabul, Khost, Laghman and Nuristan said all the floods struck early Saturday.

Flash floods are common in those provinces and all are fed by rivers that eventually intersect in Nangarhar.

In Kabul's Surobi district, police chief Shaghasi Ahmadi said 34 people were killed in a remote and mountainous area. He said 22 of the bodies from Surobi were later found downstream in Laghman. More

 

Monsoon 2013: Rain calamity strikes Pakistan

Incessant rainfall wreaked havoc across the country on Saturday, triggering flash floods up north, damaging infrastructure, submerging villages and inundating cities and towns. In all, at least 51 people were killed and many more injured, while the damage to properties was seen as colossal.

Life in Karachi, the teeming metropolis of over 16 million, came to a grinding halt as it received the first downpour of the current monsoon. At least 16 people – among them eight children – died in rain-related incidents as provincial authorities called in army troops to help drain out rainwater from different neighbourhoods. Most of the fatalities were caused by electrocution and drowning.

The rain caused dozens of feeders of the Karachi Electric Supply Company (KESC) to trip, which resulted in power outages in almost half of the city. As most drains were clogged, rainwater and sewage flooded the busiest arteries and thoroughfares of the city, causing gridlocks at different places. Several cars and mini-buses also broke down in the middle of the roads adding to the traffic mess.

Angered by the mismanagement of the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation, the Sindh government sacked its administrator Syed Hashim Raza Zaidi and Municipal Services chief Masood Alam.

Although the posh and residential neighbourhoods were no exception, the worst-hit were the slums and villages on the edge of the city.

Around 250 houses of Babu Basti and Bhund Goth were partially damaged after the Thado River broke its banks in Malir area. Most residents fled their homes to seek shelter in a state-run school in nearby Soomar Kandi village.

Similarly, over a dozen houses were damaged in Badai Jokhio village while the situation in another six villages near the Sukkan River is also critical. Latt Basti and Ali Muhammad Jatt Goth were also inundated when the nearby drain overflowed.

“Army troops have started draining out the rainwater,” a military spokesperson told The Express Tribune. “The troops have been draining water from Natha Khan Goth, Sharea Faisal, Airport and its surrounding areas,” he added.

Other major cities of Sindh, including Hyderabad, Mirpurkhas, Sukkur and Sanghar also received heavy rainfall. In some areas, irrigation canals overflowed and inundated villages. In all, three fatalities were reported from rural Sindh.

In Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and its adjoining tribal regions, at least 19 people died as flash floods damaged properties and farmlands. Fatalities were reported in Chitral, Peshawar, Bannu, Lakki Marwat, FR Tank and tribal agencies of North Waziristan and Kurram.

As of now, Chitral is the worst-affected district where over 100 houses, three small power houses and eight small bridges have been swept away. Officials, however, say they haven’t been able to assess the damage in the remote areas of the district due to the difficult mountainous terrain.

In Tank district, the union councils of Warsponn, Pai and Gulam Imam were flooded where dozens of houses were damaged and farmlands affected. Local administrator Muhammad Ali Shah claimed that the floodwater was receding. In Peshawar, scores of houses were inundated when Budhni stream broke its banks, forcing people in the neighbourhood to move to safer places.

According to the Flood Control Cell, most of the rivers in the province are in normal or medium- level flood except the Kurram and Gambela rivers in Bannu district which are in high flood. Landslides triggered by heavy downpour blocked the strategic Karakoram Highway at three places, suspending traffic between Rawalpindi and Gilgit-Baltistan. “The traffic between G-B and Rawalpindi is suspended due to the blockage of the KKH,” said a spokesman for the Northern Areas Transport Corporation,” a government-sponsored transport company.

Balochistan also bore the brunt of the devastating monsoon spell. At least eight people were reportedly killed and dozens of villages submerged, displacing hundreds of people in the province. Jhal Magsi is the worst-affected district where 25 villages have been virtually washed away, according to Khalid Baloch, the director general of the PDMA. Jhal Magsi is literally cut off from the rest of the province as the main highway has been flooded.

Naseerabad district received incessant rain for 15 hours. The ensuing flood devastated over half a million acres of farmlands. In the neighbouring Jaffarabad district, the whole town, including government offices, is under knee-deep water. Several villages have also been flooded.

Similarly, Sibi, Loralai and Lasbela districts have also been affected where scores of mud-houses have been swept away by flash floods.

Hill torrents unleashed by heavy rains swept through the impoverished south Punjab where at least five people were reportedly dead and 200,000 acres of farmlands ravaged by floodwater.

To deal with the calamity, the authorities have declared a state of emergency in the districts of Dera Ghazi Khan, Rajanpur and Jampur. All officials on leave have been called back for duty. The office of the chief minister is monitoring the situation round-the-clock.

In DG Khan, the Ronghan, Raakhi Gaaj and Vahowa areas are the worst hit where more than 100 villages have been submerged, uprooting hundreds of villagers from their homes.

In Rajanpur, the house Punjab Assembly Deputy Speaker Sher Ali Gorhacni and the farmhouse of former premier Yousuf Raza Gilani have also been inundated.

According to an official tally, 100,000 people have been affected by the ongoing flash floods. Some tourists are also reported to have been trapped in the tribal belt of Rajanpur. More

 

 

 

Northeast Pakistan hit by 'surprise' floods, as monsoon rains intensify

SIALKOT, Pakistan (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - “We kept quivering with fear the whole night and could not sleep even a wink,” recalled Salma Zehra, a mother of five teenage children. The family trembled to think that the roof of their mud house could cave in at any time, as the rain lashed down in a huge thunderstorm.

Mehtabpur, District Sialkot, Pakistan

By early morning on July 22, the house in Mehtabpur village in northeast Pakistan’s Sialkot district was waist-deep in water. The torrential downpour had left Zehra’s two buffaloes dead, the 45-year-old said in a shaky voice.

Another bout of heavy rain followed later that night. The Dek tributary of the Chenab River in Sialkot, 192 km (122 miles) from Islamabad, burst its banks, submerging more than 72 villages in the district.

Besides Sialkot, other districts in Punjab province have also suffered massive damage to crops across 1,000 hectares of land, as well as to properties. According to the district disaster management authorities of Sialkot, Gujranwala and Narowal, an estimated 400 villages have been flooded.

Officials have declined to give final figures for the losses, but say dozens have died and thousands of people remain stranded in the affected parts of the three districts. Some are starting to return home, but many houses have collapsed and must be rebuilt, they report.

Sialkot District Coordination Officer Iftikhar Ali Sahu told Thomson Reuters Foundation thousands of people had been trapped on the roofs of their houses during the worst of the flooding. “Mortality among cattle is high - the number of dead animals continued to rise as the floodwaters began to recede on July 26,” he added.

The situation in adjoining districts is just as bad. In Narowal alone, around 2,000 people were marooned on their rooftops in some seven villages a week ago.

Less than 30 percent of the floodwater has yet to recede, according to Mujahid Sherdil, director-general of the Punjab Provincial Disaster Management Authority.

Machines have been brought in to help drain water out of the flood-affected areas, and he hopes the task will be accomplished in the next two to three days, he told Thomson Reuters Foundation from Lahore.

Sherdil said the torrential rainfall had caused breaches of irrigation canals, streams and natural dams, and the floods had washed away crops, livestock, roads, bridges, buildings and even entire villages.

Farmers say surviving cattle in flood-hit areas are now at risk.

“Besides paddy, maize and vegetable crops, fodder fields are also underwater. This has created an acute shortage of fodder, and it is barely possible to save our cattle from the looming threat of hunger and disease,” said Zehra’s husband, Ghulam Abbas.

METEOROLOGISTS ‘STARTLED’

The above-normal monsoon rains in Punjab’s northeastern districts have taken weather experts by surprise.

“Last month, we predicted that this year monsoon rains across the country would remain normal with no possibility of flooding. But unexpected heavy rains in the northeastern districts are startling for us,” said Ghulam Rasul, a senior weather scientist at the Pakistan Meteorological Department (PMD) in Islamabad. “This shows how monsoon rains have become erratic and unpredictable in timing, volume and intensity.”

Sherdil, head of the Punjab disaster management agency, said the heavy rains and flooding had caught them unprepared.

“We were closely following the weekly and monthly forecasts of PMD that never predicted heavy rains of unprecedented significance for July in northeastern parts, which have been nearly 40 percent above normal for the month,” he said.

It has been difficult to get aid into the affected areas due to damaged and flooded roads and bridges, he said. “Nevertheless, we left no stone unturned to get the emergency relief items including food, medicines, to the flood victims on boats – although (they arrived) a bit late,” he added.

MONSOON SHIFTS

In June 2012, scientists argued in the Nature Climate Change journal that global warming would make understanding changes in the South Asian monsoon more difficult.

They said the impacts of short- and long-term monsoon shifts would affect the lives of over a billion people in the region, who rely on rainfall for agriculture, hydropower generation, economic growth and basic human needs.

Understanding how the South Asian monsoon will alter due to climate change is necessary to cope with the effects, reduce the risk of disasters and safeguard people’s livelihoods, they underlined.

“Addressing the uncertainties in projected changes of the monsoon variability in coming years will remain a daunting challenge for climate scientists,” said Arshad Abbasi, a water and energy expert at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad.

Arshad Khan, the executive director of the Global Change Impact Study Centre (GCISC), the research arm of Pakistan’s Federal Climate Change Division, said the country is in the grip of unpredictable weather patterns.

Intense monsoon rains will be a common phenomenon, particularly on the country’s southern plains which lack water reservoirs and are highly vulnerable to floods, he warned.

And a spurt in the speed of glacial melt, due to rising global temperatures and above-normal monsoon rains, is likely to cause rivers to overflow and burst their banks across the country, he added.

GOVERNMENT EFFORTS

Officials at the Climate Change Division, which operates under the oversight of the prime minister, said efforts are underway to tackle the vagaries of climate change across different sectors of the economy, particularly agriculture and water.

“Consultations are being made with national and provincial disaster management authorities, and officials of federal and provincial environment, agriculture, irrigation departments to implement national climate change policy to mitigate the impacts of changing weather patterns and erratic monsoon rains,” said a senior official, who coordinates policy at federal and provincial levels.

The Climate Change Division is developing climate adaptation plans for the agriculture, water and irrigation sectors, which will be implemented in Pakistan’s four provinces in collaboration with international NGOs and provincial government offices.

It is also working on programmes to ensure that climate change is considered in other sectors such as health and education, to make them more climate-resilient.

Abbasi of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute said the best ways to avert the growing threat of floods in Pakistan include efficient watershed management, reforestation in northern mountain areas and the revival of riverine forests.

Saleem Shaikh and Sughra Tunio are Islamabad-based journalists specialising in climate change and development issues. More

Goodbye to All That (Water)

Martha and the Vandellas would have loved it. Metaphorically speaking, the New York Times practically swooned over it. (“An unforgiving heat wave held much of the West in a sweltering embrace over the weekend, tying or breaking temperature records in several cities, grounding flights, sparking forest fires, and contributing to deaths.”)

Colorado River

It was a “deadly” heat wave, a “record” one that, in headlines everywhere, left the West and later the rest of the country “sweltering,” and that was, again in multiple headlines, “scary.” The fire season that accompanied the “blasting,” “blazing” heat had its own set of “record” headlines -- and all of this was increasingly seen, in another set of headlines, as the “new normal” in the West. Given that 2012 had already set a heat record for the continental U.S., that the 10 hottest years on record in this country have all occurred since 1997, and that the East had its own sweltering version of heat that wouldn’t leave town, this should have been beyond arresting.

In response, the nightly primetime news came up with its own convenient set of new terms to describe all this: “extreme” or “severe” heat. Like “extreme" or "severe" weather, these captured the eyeball-gluing sensationalism of our weather moment without having to mention climate change or global warming. Weather, after all, shouldn’t be “politicized.” But if you’re out in the middle of the parching West like TomDispatch regular William deBuys, who recently headed down the Colorado River, certain grim realities about the planet we’re planning to hand over to our children and grandchildren can’t help but come to mind -- along with a feeling, increasingly shared by those in the sweltering cities, that our particular way of life is in the long run unsustainable. Tom

Never Again Enough

Field Notes from a Drying West

By William deBuys

Several miles from Phantom Ranch, Grand Canyon, Arizona, April 2013 -- Down here, at the bottom of the continent’s most spectacular canyon, the Colorado River growls past our sandy beach in a wet monotone. Our group of 24 is one week into a 225-mile, 18-day voyage on inflatable rafts from Lees Ferry to Diamond Creek. We settle in for the night. Above us, the canyon walls part like a pair of maloccluded jaws, and moonlight streams between them, bright enough to read by.

One remarkable feature of the modern Colorado, the great whitewater rollercoaster that carved the Grand Canyon, is that it is a tidal river. Before heading for our sleeping bags, we need to retie our six boats to allow for the ebb.

These days, the tides of the Colorado are not lunar but Phoenician. Yes, I’m talking about Phoenix, Arizona. On this April night, when the air conditioners in America’s least sustainable city merely hum, Glen Canyon Dam, immediately upstream from the canyon, will run about 6,500 cubic feet of water through its turbines every second.

Tomorrow, as the sun begins its daily broiling of Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa, Tempe, and the rest of central Arizona, the engineers at Glen Canyon will crank the dam’s maw wider until it sucks down 11,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). That boost in flow will enable its hydroelectric generators to deliver “peaking power” to several million air conditioners and cooling plants in Phoenix’s Valley of the Sun. And the flow of the river will therefore nearly double.

It takes time for these dam-controlled tidal pulses to travel downstream. Where we are now, just above Zoroaster Rapid, the river is roughly in phase with the dam: low at night, high in the daytime. Head a few days down the river and it will be the reverse.

By mid-summer, temperatures in Phoenix will routinely soar above 110°F, and power demands will rise to monstrous heights, day and night. The dam will respond: 10,000 cfs will gush through the generators by the light of the moon, 18,000 while an implacable sun rules the sky.

Such are the cycles -- driven by heat, comfort, and human necessity -- of the river at the bottom of the continent’s grandest canyon.

The crucial question for Phoenix, for the Colorado, and for the greater part of the American West is this: How long will the water hold out?

Major Powell’s Main Point

Every trip down the river -- and there are more than 1,000 like ours yearly -- partly reenacts the legendary descent of the Colorado by the one-armed explorer and Civil War veteran John Wesley Powell. The Major, as he preferred to be known, plunged into the Great Unknown with 10 companions in 1869. They started out in four boats from Green River, Wyoming, but one of the men walked out early after nearly drowning in the stretch of whitewater that Powell named Disaster Falls, and three died in the desert after the expedition fractured in its final miles. That left Powell and six others to reach the Mormon settlements on the Virgin River in the vicinity of present-day Las Vegas, Nevada.

Powell’s exploits on the Colorado brought him fame and celebrity, which he parlayed into a career that turned out to be controversial and illustrious in equal measure. As geologist, geographer, and ethnologist, Powell became one of the nation’s most influential scientists. He also excelled as an institution-builder, bureaucrat, political in-fighter, and national scold.

Most famously, and in bold opposition to the boomers and boosters then cheerleading America’s westward migration, he warned that the defining characteristic of western lands was their aridity. Settlement of the West, he wrote, would have to respect the limits aridity imposed.

He was half right.

The subsequent story of the West can indeed be read as an unending duel between society’s thirst and the dryness of the land, but in downtown Phoenix, Las Vegas, or Los Angeles you’d hardly know it.

By the middle years of the twentieth century, western Americans had created a kind of miracle in the desert, successfully conjuring abundance from Powell’s aridity. Thanks to reservoirs large and small, and scores of dams including colossi like Hoover and Glen Canyon, as well as more than 1,000 miles of aqueducts and countless pumps, siphons, tunnels, and diversions, the West has by now been thoroughly re-rivered and re-engineered. It has been given the plumbing system of a giant water-delivery machine, and in the process, its liquid resources have been stretched far beyond anything the Major might have imagined.

Today the Colorado River, the most fully harnessed of the West’s great waterways, provides water to some 40 million people and irrigates nearly 5.5 million acres of farmland. It also touches 22 Indian reservations, seven National Wildlife Reservations, and at least 15 units of the National Park System, including the Grand Canyon.

These achievements come at a cost. The Colorado River no longer flows to the sea, and down here in the bowels of the canyon, its diminishment is everywhere in evidence. In many places, the riverbanks wear a tutu of tamarisk trees along their edge. They have been able to dress up, now that the river, constrained from major flooding, no longer rips their clothes off.

The daily hydroelectric tides gradually wash away the sandbars and beaches that natural floods used to build with the river’s silt and bed load (the sands and gravels that roll along its bottom). Nowadays, nearly all that cargo is trapped in Lake Powell, the enormous reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam. The water the dam releases is clear and cold (drawn from the depths of the lake), which is just the thing for nonnative trout, but bad news for homegrown chubs and suckers, which evolved, quite literally, in the murk of ages past. Some of the canyon’s native fish species have been extirpated from the canyon; others cling to life by a thread, helped by the protection of the Endangered Species Act. In the last few days, we’ve seen more fisheries biologists along the river and its side-streams than we have tourists.

The Shrinking Cornucopia

In the arid lands of the American West, abundance has a troublesome way of leading back again to scarcity. If you have a lot of something, you find a way to use it up -- at least, that’s the history of the “development” of the Colorado Basin.

Until now, the ever-more-complex water delivery systems of that basin have managed to meet the escalating needs of their users. This is true in part because the states of the Upper Basin (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico) were slower to develop than their downstream cousins. Under the Colorado River Compact of 1922, the Upper and Lower Basins divided the river with the Upper Basin assuring the Lower of an average of 7.5 million acre-feet (maf) of water per year delivered to Lees Ferry Arizona, the dividing point between the two. The Upper Basin would use the rest. Until recently, however, it left a large share of its water in the river, which California, and secondarily Arizona and Nevada, happily put to use. More