Since mid-June, many places in the United States have experienced high temperatures that are rare in history. Especially in the Northwestern United States, wave after wave of heat waves frequently set the record for the highest temperature in history.

On June 27, the National Weather Service issued an early warning that “the strongest heat wave since the end of the 19th century is landing in North America. It will sweep the entire Pacific Northwest and reach its peak this week.” Recently, many cities in the United States, including Seattle, Portland, and Spokane, have experienced the highest temperatures ever recorded.

According to US media reports, the hottest so far is Oregon, where daytime temperatures have generally soared above 40 degrees across the state, and Salem set a record of 47 degrees in the city. Sneakers2090 ,On Twitter, Oregon residents posted pictures of “road cracks” and “plastic parts on machines melted directly into liquid.” Others claimed that because it was too hot, they had to wear oven gloves to drive.

High temperature and severe drought always accompany each other. Entering the “barbecue mode” in the United States, many places are thirsty. The high temperature will eventually subside, but the water shortage in the United States may be a potential “climate bomb.”

Climate experts generally attribute it to global climate change. The British “Guardian” quoted Catherine Johnson, a paleoclimatologist at the University of California, Irvine, as saying that the current drought may become the worst drought that people have seen in at least 1200 years. The cause is related to climate change caused by human activities. direct relation.

High temperature, lack of water
According to a CNBC report on July 1, historically rare high temperatures have caused hundreds of deaths in the northwestern United States and parts of nearby Canada. Oregon’s official data is (as of June 30), the death toll related to extreme heat has reached 63 people. In addition, Seattle, Spokane, etc. have reported deaths, and the number is still increasing.

According to data from the United States Drought Monitoring Agency, approximately 40% of the United States is experiencing drought. In the thirsty western region, Hot Sale Jordans ,the overall precipitation in 2021 is less than half of normal. Precipitation in Nevada, Arizona, and California is even only one-third of the normal level.

According to the official standards of the United States, “abnormal drought” is one of the most severe droughts. However, according to CNN, about half of the U.S. area is in abnormal drought or worse, and about 143 million people are affected (the total U.S. population is about 310 million).

It’s hard to imagine that this big country with freshwater resources near the sea, sitting on the Great Lakes, with a per capita water resource of nearly 12,000 cubic meters, has also sounded the water shortage alarm, or in the words of US Vice President Kamala Harris, it used to be The United States, which is fighting for oil, will “fight for water” in the future.

The water in the pond does not evaporate in a day, and the cracks in the dry land are not formed in a day. In fact, there are traces of the freshwater crisis in the United States.

As early as the 1920s, one of the world’s most affluent agricultural areas-California’s Central Valley was found to be sinking. During the most recent severe drought (2012-2016), parts of the valley sink as much as 60 cm per year.

There are many reasons for land subsidence, but Utah geologist Mike Low said that most land subsidence in the United States is related to the pressure drop caused by water storage compaction and excessive groundwater extraction. This is already a sign of “overexploitation” of groundwater resources, that is, a sign that the amount of groundwater extracted is greater than the amount of recharge.

Water experts Scott Jasecco and Debra Perone of the University of California, Santa Barbara, a study published in the journal “The Future of the Earth” also showed that only between 2013 and 2018, Thousands of wells in the Central Valley have dried up.

In 2020, a survey by Science magazine found that for decades, people have been ruthlessly pumping groundwater to irrigate crops and draining thick layers of water-bearing clay deep underground. At the same time, as the clay continues to compress, roads, bridges and irrigation channels have cracked, causing more extensive and costly damage.

Approximately 80% of groundwater use in California is agricultural water. Rowena Lowman, associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Cornell University, Jordan Release News ,said that in the agricultural area of ​​the Tulare Basin in central California, farmers have been mining groundwater for more than a century. Even though the annual winter rainfall in the valley and the snowmelt in the surrounding mountains will replenish groundwater to a certain extent, since 2011, such replenishment has been a drop in the bucket in the face of human overuse.

In 2014, when NASA scientists controlled radar equipment and flew over the important water infrastructure of California’s aqueduct, they detected an area that had sunk 20 centimeters within 4 months. According to Graham Fogg, a hydrogeologist at the University of California, Davis, this is the “ultimate irony.” Because the California aqueduct was built to reduce the demand for groundwater, but this kind of fall will make the amount of water carried by the canal continue to decrease.

“It’s not like an earthquake. It doesn’t happen suddenly.” Claudia Fatt, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, believes that the sinking foundation is evidence of a slow disaster, and it is also California’s reckless mining. The result of groundwater.

In June, nearly 2 million people in the San Francisco Bay Area were in a water shortage emergency. Tony Estremela, director of the Santa Clara Valley Water District, said at a press conference: “We can’t wait to take action because our water supply is threatened locally and throughout California.” Currently Santa Clara County is also Mandatory water use restrictions have been issued, and nearly 2 million people have been asked to reduce their water consumption by 15% compared to 2019.