Watch our series of short videos on the importance of the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, how it works as a water hub for
California and the challenges it is facing.
When a person opens a spigot to draw a glass of water, he or she
may be tapping a source close to home or hundreds of miles away.
Water gets to taps via a complex web of aqueducts, canals and
groundwater.
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Unlike California’s majestic rivers and massive dams and
conveyance systems, groundwater is out of sight and underground,
though no less plentiful. The state’s enormous cache of
underground water is a great natural resource and has contributed
to the state becoming the nation’s top agricultural producer and
leader in high-tech industries.
A new era of groundwater management began in 2014 in California
with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. The landmark law
turned 10 in 2024, with many challenges still ahead.
For the past 20 years, the Colorado
River has been operated under a set of guidelines negotiated
between the seven states that depend on the river. Those
guidelines expire this year, and after five years of grinding
negotiations over a new agreement, the upstream states of
Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico remain deadlocked against
the downstream states of California, Arizona and Nevada.
Some 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of farmland depend
on the river’s water. But after the states failed to meet two
federal deadlines in three months, the river is in a moment of
unprecedented crisis. A dire snowpack has left flows just 15
percent of normal, many farms without water and several cities
scrambling to secure water supplies as they gird themselves for
shortages.
High in the Rocky Mountains, spring-fed streams and ponds have
vanished, leaving patches of cracked mud in what were once
spongy meadows. This year has been so extremely warm and arid
that the mountains have remained largely snowless. The
water-generating source of the Colorado River, its headwaters,
is drying up. … About three-fourths of the
water that’s taken out of the Colorado River is used for
agriculture, producing alfalfa, corn, lettuce, broccoli and
other crops. In Colorado, farmers and ranchers are struggling
with the immediate consequences. They’re leaving many fields
and pastures dry, selling off cows, and bracing for tough
economic times.
The president of the Utah State Senate, who championed a huge
data center beside the Great Salt Lake, was defeated in his
Republican primary on Tuesday night, one of the most
high-profile signs of the voter backlash to data center
projects. … Mr. Adams did not directly represent the
40,000-acre proposed site of the data center in Box Elder
County, a fast-growing farming and industrial area about 60
miles north of Salt Lake City. But he became the focus of
an anti-data-center groundswell because he served as chairman
of a Utah agency that approved initial plans this spring to
build the data center, known as Stratos. … They [voters]
worried about how much energy it would consume and how its
water usage would affect the drought-stricken Great
Salt Lake.
The sea wants to move inland, a fact that’s been known in the
region for over 80 years as agricultural production increased.
But over time, groundwater was pumped faster than could be
replenished, exacerbating the inland march of salty water
beneath Castroville toward Salinas. … Thanks to California’s
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, passed
just over a decade ago, local water agencies need to decide on
a plan to protect future water supply. … Now, 2026 marks a
pivotal year. All of the groundwater modeling, the public
meetings, the basin boundary decisions and feasibility studies
of the last 10 years culminate in this moment, where local
agencies must push plans across the line into implementation.
Western wildfires start and spread because of a whole host of
factors — wind, temperature, drought, forest health. But
scientists are finding that the most important indicator of
where the next big fire might ignite isn’t held in the trees
themselves, but in the soil their roots are buried in. Recent
studies demonstrate how soil moisture data can help
wildfire experts predict a potential fire’s location and
severity. Those studies could eventually aid in
developing more precise forecasts for fires across the
country. This link, between how moist the ground is under
a forest or grassland and fire risk, is gaining more traction
among scientists due to an increasingly expansive network of
monitoring equipment.
Operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the
Bay Model is a giant hydraulic replica of San Francisco
Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin
Delta. It is housed in a converted World II-era
warehouse in Sausalito near San Francisco.
Hundreds of gallons of water are pumped through the
three-dimensional, 1.5-acre model to simulate a tidal ebb
and flow lasting 14 minutes.
As part of the historic Colorado
River Delta, the Salton Sea regularly filled and dried for
thousands of years due to its elevation of 237 feet below
sea level.
The most recent version of the Salton Sea was formed in 1905 when
the Colorado River broke
through a series of dikes and flooded the seabed for two years,
creating California’s largest inland body of water. The
Salton Sea, which is saltier than the Pacific Ocean, includes 130
miles of shoreline and is larger than Lake Tahoe.
Drought—an extended period of
limited or no precipitation—is a fact of life in California and
the West, with water resources following boom-and-bust patterns.
During California’s 2012–2016 drought, much of the state
experienced severe drought conditions: significantly less
precipitation and snowpack, reduced streamflow and higher
temperatures. Those same conditions reappeared early in 2021
prompting Gov. Gavin Newsom in May to declare drought emergencies
in watersheds across 41 counties in California.
