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Critical drinking water supplies are on the verge of running out in the western USA.
The city's governor believes this is one of the very real effects of climate change.
Officials are calling for people to reduce 15 to 20% of their water use.
December was remarkably wet, but the drought is not done yet.
A new study says we should get ready for a blast from the past — in all the wrong ways. According to its findings, America’s Great Plains risk turning back into the dustbowl of the 1930s. The Great Plains area has become increasingly dry in the past 20 decades, the authors explain, with dust storms […]
Climate change is going to make dry periods longer and more frequent.
Better photosynthesis and water efficiency means more food for everybody.
Climate change will bring too much of both to the Sunny State.
New research from ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, Australia, says we’ll see longer and more frequent droughts due to climate change. Southwestern Australia, parts of southern Australia, as well as regions in the Amazon, Mediterranean and southern Africa can expect to see more frequent and intense droughts in the future as climate patterns […]
Droughts are becoming more frequent and more severe -- and they're threatening water resources.
It seems that in this case, the popular belief was wrong.news
Our forefathers left behind an ominous warning for us -- and we'd best heed it. Otherwise, we can start carving our own years into the rocks.
The Mayans expanded haphazardly, and they ended up paying the price for it -- but Mother Nature also had a say in it.
Drought has a massive effect on rainforests. Bad news in the current changing climate.
The Mediterranean, one of Europe's most beautiful areas, will bear the brunt of the damage.
It was that bad.
With drought on the rise, this finding couldn't come at a better time.
Talk about waste.
You can't squeeze blood from a stone, but you can squeeze water from thin air -- even in the driest areas of the world.
One step forward, two steps back.
The paper's authors think it unlikely that we'll be able to prevent it.
Who says desalinization isn't sexy?
Stanford researchers found California's drought-struck Central Valley harbors three times more groundwater than previously thought.
A new collaboration study between NASA and Harvard University found that climate change is breaking an important link between droughts and the grape harvests in France and Switzerland.
Agriculture is a very risky line of work since its inevitable once in a while extreme weather will take a huge toll on the crop yields. This is common knowledge, but the quantitative impact of droughts and heat waves has only recently been investigated in great detail. A paper published in Nature by researchers at University of British Columbia found droughts cut a country’s total crop yield by 10 percent, and heat waves by 9 percent. Floods and cold spells oddly did not affect crop production in a significant way. These effects vary from country to country and another surprising finding is that crops in developed countries suffer up to twice as many losses than those in developing countries.
Vidal Mendoza, a U.S. Geological Survey hydrologic technician, has been spending his past Tuesday scanning the upper Guadalupe River, looking for the right spot to measure the flow of the water. Perhaps more accurately, Mendoza has been spending his past Tuesday on a hot, mostly dry riverbed searching where the river should have been.
The team looked at 15-years worth of data on California's grasslands, and documented declining plant diversity from 2000 to 2014 at both the local community (5 m2) and landscape (27 km2) scales, across multiple functional groups and soil environments. They found a link between wildflower diversity decline to significant decreases in midwinter precipitation.
California's record drought has completely dried off large swaths of rivers, including the San Joaquin River, which means that juvenile salmon can't actually reach the sea. In a desperate effort to save an entire generation of hatchlings, authorities are transporting them by truck, on the highway.
Exploiting plants' natural response to stress caused by drought, researchers have engineered crops that build tolerance and can withstand longer without water, while also extending the point of no return when no amount of water can save the withered plant. This "buy more" time method might hopefully help vulnerable crops fare better during long periods of drought - like the one currently in full swing in California, which is experiencing its worst drought in recorded history - and increase yields.
In recent years, a number of independent studies have concluded that the American Southwest and central Great Plains will experience extensive droughts in the second half of this century – and global warming will make things even worse, exacerbating the already worrying conditions. Now, a new study says that things are even worse than previously imagined, […]
In March 2014, the US and Mexican governments decided to release a flow of water down the Colorado River, in an experimental attempt called “Minute 319”. The river has experienced record droughts in 2014, but surprisingly, this initiative reversed a 13-year decline in the greenness along the delta. The Colorado River stretches along 1,450-miles (2,330 km), encompassing seven […]
According to a new study published by researchers working with the American Geophysical Union, the drought that California is experiencing now is the worst one in over 1,200 years. They show that the current California drought is driven by reduced though not unprecedented precipitation and also record high temperatures. With the effects of global warming being […]
A new study shows that last an incredible 63 trillion gallons of groundwater were lost in the Western US alone – so much that it’s actually causing the ground level to rise. The Earth has lifted up about 0.16 inches over the last 18 months in the area, and up to 0.6 inches in the Californian […]
California is facing one of its direst drought streaks, and only last year it came out of its warmest winter on record. Clearly, things aren’t looking that good and the most vulnerable resource to these conditions is at the same time the most valuable: water. Desperate times, call for desperate measures, and this means in […]
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said in a statement that California just came off its warmest winter on record. On average there were 48 Fahrenheit (9 Celsius) for December, January and February, making it 4 degrees hotter than the 20th-century average in California. The state is currently facing its most dire drought streak […]
“Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die” – seems to be the motto at big oil companies. At Wednesday’s meeting for ExxonMobil shareholders in Dallas, CEO Rex Tillerson told participants that the economy is currently relying on oil, and that will not change anytime soon. He concluded that cutting down on carbon emissions […]
Deep in Africa, under some of our planet’s most drought threatened areas lie massive water reserves – freshwater aquifers containing 60 times as much water as all the American Great Lakes combined. These aquifers are some 410,000 cubic miles thick and contain 100 times the freshwater that exists on the continent’s surface, and as Africa’s […]
It was a warm, drought plagued year – in July 2012, farmers in the U.S. Midwest and Plains regions watched crops wither and falter, after a series of unusually high temperatures and low precipitations. However, as the lack of rain continued to make its mark scientists observed another indication of drought in data from NASA […]
Around the globe, local climates are changing. Maybe you haven’t noticed it yet, because in most regions this is a slow and subtle change, but the people that are used to observing the nature around their cities, or the people in agriculture that are deeply connected to the patterns of rain and drought will tell you […]
According to a new report released by the Chinese authorities, global warming “threatens China’s march to prosperity by cutting crops, shrinking rivers and unleashing more droughts and floods“. China, the world’s second largest economy and biggest polluter understands that “greenhouse gases from industry, transport and shifting land-use poses a long-term threat to China’s prosperity, health […]
The problem of a water shortage has been on the table for quite a while now, and as time passes, it is becoming more and more of a probability. Especially the United States and other heavily populated and industrailized countries are threatened by this issue. A detailed analysis conducted by National Center for Atmospheric Research […]
I’ve always found it strange that beavers are considered by some pests; besides being amazing animals with some amazing habits, they also have been proven to have a positive effect during the droughts which occure quite often these days. They can help mitigate the effects of drought, and because of that, their removal from wetlands […]
