It’s been called the largest tributary in New Mexico’s middle Rio Grande – the outfall from Albuquerque’s sewage treatment plant. A friend loaned me his mountain bike for the weekend (I’m in the market for a new bike that I can ride off the pavement), so I took it for a test ride down in …
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My on-again, off-again infatuation with 1083.57, the elevation Lake Mead reached in March 1956, is back on. As Shaun McKinnon reports in this morning’s Arizona Republic, Mead’s at the lowest it’s been since then. The latest “24-month study” from the Bureau of Reclamation (pdf), out this week, is back to forecasting that we’ll drop below …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: “We know that it’s being drained.”’ »
Professional Car Washing and Detailing magazine recently excitedly reported the results of an investigation by News 8 in Austin, Texas, into water consumption associated with various ways of washing your car: A self-serve carwash uses about 17 gallons of water (depending on the nozzle; an IBA wash, found at a gas station can use between …
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Between the USGS, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Library of Congress, Calisphere and others, there are so many great old Colorado River photos around that it’s easy to think the early history of the river’s development happened in black and white. I get lost in them. Today’s treasure is a photo from the 1923 Birdseye …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: LaRue and the Question of How Much Water There Really Was’ »
When Zach Sharp sent me a copy of his paper in yesterday’s Science Express, I only had to get to the words “moon rocks” to decide to do a story. I mean, they’re moon rocks. Zach, a stable isotope geochemist, is a bit of a mad scientist. So even without moon rocks, his work is …
A letter to the editor in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal has removed the scales from my eyes: The City Council recently turned down a proposal to restrict the rights of homeowners’ associations to require grass in residential landscapes. Grass has been made to seem like a culprit because of the amount of water it uses …
When I was in Copenhagen a month ago, out walking in the evening, I came across a pair of buskers, folks singers, doing The Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” I’ve always loved it, thought of it as a great American song. It was fun to stand in a square with a bunch …
When I was in Vegas in April, I heard several talks on the way folks on Lake Mead engage in a practice they call “chasing water”. As the water storage reservoir recedes, the Park Service extends boat ramps farther and farther. The owners of the Las Vegas Marina, which used to sit up in Las …
I had a dream last night that the Native Americans we drove out of South Florida left a sort of time bomb that, in time, would render Miami unlivable: In White’s view, it’s already too late to turn back the clock on climate change to save low-lying coastal cities like Miami.
You would think that on the over-appropriated Lower Colorado River, downstream from dwindling Lake Mead, getting by on less water would be a good thing. But this little news blurb from KXO radio in El Centro, in California’s Imperial Valley, suggests otherwise. The problem, apparently, is that the Imperial Irrigation District, the largest water rights …
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