From Newsweek, December 15:
A hydrologist fears that the Colorado River crisis may have been fueled by experts ignoring a study that came out in the 1910s.
Shemin Ge, a hydrogeologist at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, believes that parts of the Colorado River crisis occurring today, could be traced back to a decision made in 1922, she said in a presentation at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting on Thursday.
The flow of the Colorado River has declined by around 20 percent over the last century, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates. This is of huge concern considering the river provides water to around 40 million people. It feeds into major reservoirs like Lake Powell and Lake Mead that provide water and hydropower to basin states. Both of these reservoirs have dropped a considerable level in recent years. Lake Mead is currently just over 30 percent full, and there are estimates that it could inch closer to dead pool levels in the coming years.
In 1922, there were seven men in charge of the Colorado River Commission. They decided to split the water of the Colorado River, which runs 1,450 miles through seven states—the Upper Basin, which is Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming and Utah, and the Lower Basin which is made up of Arizona, California, and Nevada.
However, this decision was based on an assumption that the Colorado River had 16.4 [million] acre-feet of water running through the Lees Ferry area of Arizona each year, according to Ge. An acre-foot represents the amount of water needed to submerge an acre of land to the depth of a foot.
The commission did not in fact, consider another estimate from 1916 that stated the Colorado River actually discharged only 15 million acre feet of water in this area. This calculation was made by hydrologist Eugene Clyde La Rue....
....MUCH MORE
That's a pretty big "Oopsie"
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