From Sophie's front desk — Sunday, August 9
NYT — read the full story
Lake Mead has dropped to its lowest level in recorded history — the bathtub ring of mineral deposits marking where the water used to be. The New York Times reports that this reservoir... which supplies Nevada, Arizona, California, and Mexico, reflects decades of over-allocation meeting accelerating drought across the Colorado River Basin. We're watching the infrastructure of the Southwest face the collision of engineering assumption and climate reality. Thoreau has the first word on what we've promised the land, then Franklin on what we've promised ourselves.
I have watched Walden drop five feet in a dry season and rise again when the clouds remembered their duty. The pond keeps its own ledger.
No engineer's calculation accounts for the springs that feed it from below, nor the evaporation that steals upward while men sleep. You have built a lake in the desert and called it Mead.
You have drawn lines on a map — Arizona, Nevada, California, Mexico — and told the river it must serve them all. The Colorado agreed for a century.
Now the mineral ring climbs the sandstone like a tide mark on a cellar wall, and the Let me think about what Thoreau would say.
it will appear four times as shallow. So much for the _increased_ horrors of the chasm of Loch Fyne when emptied. No doubt many a smiling valley with its stretching cornfields occupies exactly such a “horrid chasm,” from which the waters have receded, though it requires the insig…
amid temperate dews;—flowing long and full of meaning, but untranslatable as its name Pemigewasset, by many a pastured Pelion and Ossa, where unnamed muses haunt, tended by Oreads, Dryads, Naiads, and receiving the tribute of many an untasted Hippocrene. There are earth, air, fir…
pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or not, and within what period, nobody knows, though, as usual, many pretend to know. It is commonly higher in the winter and lower in the summer, though not corresponding to the general wet and dryness. I can remember when it was a foo…
angle, and flowing between Bedford and Carlisle, and through Billerica, empties into the Merrimack at Lowell. In Concord it is, in summer, from four to fifteen feet deep, and from one hundred to three hundred feet wide, but in the spring freshets, when it overflows its banks, it …
may be added the five feet which it has risen since, making one hundred and seven. This is a remarkable depth for so small an area; yet not an inch of it can be spared by the imagination. What if all ponds were shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? I am thankful that t…
The white ring at the water's edge — carbonate of lime, mostly, left behind when the sun takes the water and leaves the mineral — ... that ring is a ledger. You have seen it on your teakettle, on the inside of a still. The Colorado River once carried silt and salt to the Gulf; now the river stops here, and the lake distills itself in the open air. I wrote once that all fresh water is the produce of distillation, the sun raising vapours from the sea. Your engineers have built a vast open-air still and called it a reservoir.
We have seen this arithmetic before. The Junto debated the Schuylkill water works in '99 , how many gallons a household draws, how many households the stream can serve before the stream fails. The Colorado Compact of 1922 allocated seventeen million acre-feet among seven states and Mexico. The river's long-term average is nearer fourteen. The deficit was written into the compact at the signing. You do not need a thermometer to know the ledger is overdrawn; you need only count.
The drought you call climate-driven is the sun doing what the sun does , raising vapours, indifferent to compacts. The over-allocation is yours. A farmer in the Imperial Valley grows alfalfa for export with water that once reached the sea. A suburb in Nevada waters grass that would not grow there without the pipe. Each acre-foot has three claimants and one source. The bathtub ring widens.
The water falls. The arithmetic does not lie.
viz. the upper Lake, Lake mischigan, Lake Huron, and lake Eriée: you knows, Sir, that all this Lakes are more small Seas than lakes. You can most every where see the Sun or rise or set in the water; besides this Lacs there are great many great rivers that empties their water in t…
Dear Sir, [Before March 16, 1775.] Presuming the mode of raising water by its momentum may be new and useful to many individuals, induces me to send you the inclosed plan and description of a work, executed in the year 1772, at Oulton, in Cheshire, the seat of Philip Egerton, Esq…
Sir, London, May 7, 1760. ******It had, indeed, as you observe, been the opinion of some very great naturalists, that the sea is salt only from the dissolution of mineral or rock salt, which its waters happened to meet with. But this opinion takes it for granted that all water wa…
the frozen land, may be another cause of our general N.W. winds, which blow off to sea at right angles from our North-American coast. The warm light sea air rising, the heavy cold land air pressing into its place. Heavy fluids descending, frequently form eddies, or whirlpools, as…
the drops fall, must soon be stript of its previously dissolved water, so as to be no longer capable of augmenting them. Indeed very heavy showers, of either, are never of long continuance; but moderate rains often continue so long as to puzzle this hypothesis: So that upon the w…
The Junto reached no single vote — we were a disputing society, not a legislative one — but the arithmetic that carried the room was Thomas Godfrey's: the Schuylkill's low-water flow, measured at the Falls, yielded roughly three million gallons a day, and a city of thirty thousand souls drawing thirty gallons each would exhaust it before the tide turned. Hugh Meredith objected that rain would replenish; Godfrey replied that droughts do not negotiate. We settled on a practical maxim: no charter should grant more than the stream's worst week can spare. The Philadelphia Water Works, when finally built at Centre Square, ignored that counsel and pumped until the pumps choked on silt. A river is not a purse; you cannot spend what the drought withholds.
The story ran in the New York Times. The reservoir's collapse isn't just drought — it's the arithmetic of promising the same water to too many people finally catching up. That's Old News for today.