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By Root 968 0

big problems for the North American West and other places that rely on winter snowpack to sustain agriculture through long, dry summers. California’s Central Valley—the biggest agricultural producer in the United States—depends heavily on Sierra snowmelt, for example. But the long-term projection for health of the western U.S. snowpack is not good. It has already diminished in spring, despite overall increases in winter precipitation, in many places.255 By late 2008, Tim Barnett at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography and eleven other scientists had definitively linked this phenomenon to human-caused climate warming. This is not good news, they wrote in Science, warning of “a coming crisis in water supply for the western United States” and “water shortages, lack of storage capability to meet seasonally changing river flow, transfers of water from agriculture to urban uses, and other critical impacts.”256

High-profile research like this does not go unnoticed by policy makers. One response is to build more reservoirs, canals, and other engineering schemes to store and move water. China is now planning fifty-nine new reservoirs in its western Xinjiang province to retain water from glacier-fed rivers. In 2009, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced $1 billion in new water projects across the American West, with over a quarter-billion going to California alone.257

Thus begins our new technological race—to adapt to a shrinking water storage capacity, once provided for free by snow and ice. But it is important to understand that no amount of engineering can replace that storage. Think back to I. A. Shiklomanov (p. 86), his huge container of ice, and trifling container of surface water. Even if we quadrupled the world’s reservoirs, they wouldn’t come remotely close to replacement. And even if they did, we’d still end up with less water: Unlike snow and ice, water evaporates like crazy from open reservoirs.

We can’t hold it all back. More of the world’s water is leaving the mountains to run to the sea.

Into the Sea

It’s abnormal to be thinking about melting glaciers when standing on a nice sunny beach during holiday break. But this was no ordinary beach and no ordinary holiday. It was Christmas 2005, and I and other members of the Smith family were staring dumbly at the bones of what had once been my aunt and uncle’s house, a dozen blocks inland from the Mississippi coast. With the ease of a kid blowing foam across a cup of hot chocolate, Hurricane Katrina had thrown a wall of water—a storm surge—right through their lovely Biloxi neighborhood.

The place was a deserted war zone. Houses smashed to splinters, cars crushed and tossed into swimming pools. Nearer the beach, there were no house bones at all, just smooth rectangles of white concrete, scrubbed and gleaming to show where million-dollar homes had once stood. It was four months since the hurricane but the place was abandoned. No one was hauling away debris, no sound of hammering nails. All was silent except for the songbirds, cheeping and squabbling amid the wreckage. To them it was just another beautiful day on the American Gulf Coast.

In devastated New Orleans, ninety miles to the west, we saw a similar abandonment of entire neighborhoods. There were blocks and blocks of leaning houses, trashed and dark except for the colorful graffiti of rescue-worker symbols. The hieroglyphs recorded each house’s history in spray paint—the date searched, any noted hazards, whether any human bodies had been found. Living in one home was a pack of feral dogs.

So that is why, while standing on a gorgeous sunny beach, I was thinking about glaciers. In smashing my uncle’s former home, Hurricane Katrina had made the dry statistics of my field feel real—on a personal, visceral level. Although glacial melt hadn’t caused Katrina, I was thinking about the indelible control the world’s ice holds over our coastlines. When the glaciers grow, oceans fall. When they shrink, oceans rise. Oceans and ice have danced in this way, embraced in lockstep, for hundreds of millions of years.