The 2300 km long Colorado River whose catchment covers most of Arizona and parts of the states of Colorado, California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming is one of the world’s most harvested surface water resources. So much so that barely a trickle now ends up in Baja California where the huge river once flowed into the sea. The lower reaches of the river system cross arid lands and it is the water source for several major cities and areas of intensive agriculture, serving as many as 40 million people and 16 thousand km2 of irrigated fields. It has been nicknamed the US Nile because of its economic importance, but Egypt’s Nile has far less pressure put on it, although its exit flow to the Mediterranean is also hugely reduced from its former peak volume. The water crisis affecting the Colorado River and the areas that it serves has peaked during the 14-year drought over its lower reaches. To ease conditions in the former wet lands of Mexico near the river’s outlet 2014 saw deliberate major releases from giant reservoirs higher in the Colorado’s course.
Surface abstraction is not the only drain on water resources of the Colorado River basin: groundwater pumping from the sediments beneath has grown enormously for both irrigation and urban use. That it is possible to play golf at many courses in the desert and to see monstrous musical fountains in Las Vegas is down largely to groundwater exploitation. There have been concerns about depletion of underground reserves once abstraction outpaced natural recharge by infiltration of rainfall and snow melt, but highlighting the magnitude of the problem required a rather dramatic discovery: so much water has been lost from aquifers that the missing mass has reduced the Earth’s gravitational field over the south-west US (Castle, S.L. et al. 2014. Groundwater depletion during drought threatens future water security of the Colorado River Basin. Geophysical Research Letters, doi: 10.1002/2014GL061055).
The evidence comes from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), jointly funded by NASA and Germany’s DLR and launched in March 2002. GRACE uses two satellites that follow the same orbit with a spacing of 220 km between them. Range finders on each measure their separation distance, and so their ups and downs as gravity varies, with far greater accuracy than any other method. Measuring the Earth’s entire gravitational field at their orbital height takes about a month. Groundwater depletion beneath the Gangetic Plains of northern India, to the tune of 109 km3, was detected in 2009 and the same approach has been applied to the Colorado Basin for nine years between 2004 and 2013. It shows that during this part of one of the longest droughts in the history of the south-west US 50 km3 have been lost from beneath, as a rate of about 5.5 km3 per year. Though the total is half the loss from beneath northern India, it should be remembered that more than ten times as many people depend on the Ganges Basin. Moreover, there is no monsoon recharge in the south-western states.
Earth-logs 