New Mexico is the driest of the dry (LA Times)

[pinto]

New Mexico is the driest of the dry

As an extended drought bakes the West, nowhere are ravages of changes in the climate worse than in New Mexico.

By Julie Cart
Photography and video by Michael Robinson Chavez
Reporting from RIO GRANDE VALLEY, N.M.

Aug. 6, 2013

Scientists in the West have a particular way of walking a landscape and divining its secrets: They kick a toe into loamy soil or drag a boot heel across the desert's crust, leaning down to squint at the tiny excavation.

Try that maneuver in New Mexico these days and it yields nothing but bad news in a puff of dust.

Across the West, changes in the climate are taking a toll. Almost 87% of the region is in a drought.

Nevada is removing wild horses and stocks of cattle from federal rangelands, Wyoming is seeding clouds as part of a long-term "weather modification program," officials in Colorado say the state's southeastern plains are experiencing Dust Bowl conditions, and the entire western U.S. has been beset by more frequent and ferocious wildfires across an ever-more combustible landscape.

But nowhere is it worse than in New Mexico. In this parched state, the question is no longer how much worse it can get but whether it will ever get better — and, ominously, whether collapsing ecosystems can recover even if it does.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-me-parched-20130806-dto,0,5922502.htmlstory

[OKIsItJustMe]

1. See also…

http://www.democraticunderground.com/112751023

[pinto]

2. +1, missed your earlier post.

Good article.

[theHandpuppet]

3. This is worth cross-posting to GD

Too important not to have a wider audience.

[pinto]

4. Agree. Go for it.

[CRH]

5. Times that try mens' souls, ...

and in this crisis of drought you have farmers selling their aquifer water to Oil and Gas companies for fracking.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/08/05/2395051/drought-new-mexico-farmers-drain-aquifer-fracking/