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Article: Going down: climate change, water use threaten Lake Mead.(This Week)
- Article from:
- Science News
- Article date:
- February 23, 2008
- Author:
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If climate changes as expected and future water use goes unchecked, there's a 50 percent chance that Lake Mead--one of the southwestern United States' key reservoirs--will become functionally dry in the next couple of decades, a new study suggests.
Besides providing water for millions, flow from Lake Mead--the reservoir formed as the Colorado River collects behind Hoover Dam--generates prodigious amounts of hydroelectric power. Over the past century, on average, about 18.5 cubic kilometers of water flowed into Lake Mead each year, says Tim P. Barnett, a climatologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif. Of that amount, about 2.1 ...