US West, already in drought, is facing dwindling snowpacks
The Western US is an empire built on snow. And that snow is vanishing. … That snowmelt, often traveling hundreds of miles from mountain top to tap, sustains the booming desert communities of Las Vegas, Phoenix and Salt Lake City — even coastal Los Angeles and San Francisco. … Those dwindling snow levels — a trend that’s extremely unlikely to reverse as temperatures keep rising — will demand hard choices if the 11 states in the Western US are to continue to thrive. So far, responses to the worsening water crisis have not matched the scale of the problem.