A Warming Climate Takes a Toll on the Vanishing Rio Grande

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THIS STORY ORIGINALLY appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Hiking through the emerald green canopy of the bosque, or riverside cottonwood forest, near downtown Albuquerque, Tricia Snyder, an advocate for WildEarth Guardians, believes zero hour has arrived for the Rio Grande. Though the river this day is high and a rich chocolatey-red color, water levels are historically low and dropping precipitously. Experts predict the Rio Grande will dry up completely all the way to Albuquerque this summer for the first time since the 1980s.

The story of the Rio Grande is similar to that of other desert mountain rivers in the US Southwest, from the Colorado to the Gila. The water was apportioned to farmers and other users at a time when water levels were near historic highs. Now, as a mega-drought has descended on the West, the most severe in 1,200 years, the flows are at crisis levels.

And to make things even more uncertain, the drought is accompanied by an aridification of the West—a prolonged drying that scientists say may become a permanent fixture in the region. The number and scope of wildfires are also increasing sharply; New Mexico’s ongoing Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire has now burned 315,000 acres.

The concern of Snyder and others is that much of the Rio Grande—already greatly compromised by channelization, dams, and irrigation—is on a trajectory to disappear and take out the bosque forests, fish, and other creatures that live in it and along it. “We’re past the point of easy answers,” she says.

https://www.wired.com/story/a-warming-climate-takes-a-toll-on-the-vanishing-rio-grande/