We ask too much of the Colorado River

Even without feeding both the Los Angeles and Phoenix metropolitan areas, the Colorado River is one of North America's smaller major rivers

Photo by Gert Boers on Unsplash

I’m pulling together the last bits and pieces of my next video (Water Pipeline 2: Electric Boogaloo!) and one of the most interesting parts of my research was just how small the Colorado River is. Compared to most other major rivers it’s a relative minnow and that’s even before water starts getting redirected to the Los Angeles and Phoenix metropolitan areas.

If we compare it to North America’s largest river, the Mississippi River, the Colorado River is really only about 4% the size in terms of average discharge, which is measured in cubic feet per second of water. To illustrate this, I whipped up the following graphic:

I suppose this shouldn’t be too surprising. It is primarily a desert river after all. But the fact that we rely so heavily on the Colorado River to feed two very large metropolitan areas as well as agricultural needs within the southwest is astonishing. At some point, it simply won’t be enough and I think that time is coming sooner rather than later.

There’s a larger story brewing here, which is that fresh water is becoming increasingly more scarce. Hunter and I have already done one deep dive into the southwest’s water issues which you can listen to here. I’ve also created a couple videos for my YouTube channel on the region’s water issues with a third premiering tomorrow. Not to give too much away, but I’ve been toying around with an idea to launch a more comprehensive series on water issues. It’s a rich subject that we probably don’t talk about enough. But that’s probably a 2023 project.

Fow now, I hope you enjoyed the graphic above. After I saw the statistics on water discharge I knew I had to visualize it in some way.

Tomorrow’s episode is on what if we the United States built a water pipeline from the Mississippi River to the southwest. As you can imagine, it’s a bad idea, but tune in tomorrow at 2:00pm to learn all about it!