Lake Powell's annual spring rebound basically didn't happen—and that has Colorado River experts sounding alarms. The country's second-largest reservoir is sitting at about 23% of capacity and is expected to sink to record lows this fall, after a dismal snowpack and early-season heat wave left runoff all but absent, the Guardian reports. The lake, straddling Utah and Arizona, is now just 37 feet above the point where Glen Canyon Dam's turbines begin to fail, jeopardizing power for nearly 6 million customers.
- "What's unique this year is that there was no recovery at all," says Jack Schmidt, the director of Utah State University's Center for Colorado River Studies. "Water management in the Colorado River system is starting to get terribly complicated."
The stakes stretch far beyond electricity. Forty million people across seven US states, dozens of tribes, and parts of Mexico rely on the Colorado River system, where Lake Powell and downstream Lake Mead have been shrinking for more than two decades. "In the 21st century, the ultimate cause of the problem is declining runoff," Schmidt says. "There's less water in the system. It's caused by a warming climate, period." The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center, part of the National Weather Service, says much of the watershed had the warmest, least snowy winter on record, the Arizona Republic reports.
Negotiators for the basin states have yet to agree on how to cut use; the US Bureau of Reclamation could step in with its own plan as soon as next month. Cities including Phoenix and San Diego are already chasing backup supplies, from wastewater recycling to desalination-linked water swaps. As Brad Udall, a water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University, puts it, a warming climate has left "too many straws in the glass"—and the only real lever left is taking less water out. (AI data centers are adding to the water strain.)
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