The Vanishing River: USA’s Mega Drought | Foreign Correspondent

The once mighty Colorado River is in trouble. Stretching from the snowy peaks of the Rocky Mountains all the way down to the Sea of Cortez in Mexico, its’ waters are a lifeline to tens of millions of people. Subscribe: But the pressures of the decades-long megadrought in America’s Southwest and a warming planet mean the water levels in the river and its dams are dropping. “I’m not going to say it’s too late, but we are in true crisis’, says renowned river scientist, Professor Jack Schmidt. The pressures on the river are largely man-made. The building of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s tamed the waters of this once wild river, harnessing its flows to make hydropower and feed a massive agricultural industry across the Southwest. But the water was over allocated from the start. Now as dam levels drop to their lowest ever, the survival of farms and industries are threatened. ‘I feel every day of my life that my son will not be able to share in this magn