Other regions-the Mediterranean, southern Africa, parts of South America and Asia-also face fresh-water shortages, perhaps outright crises. “You’re going to see earlier runoff and lower flows later in the year,” so water will be more scarce during the growing season, says Udall. Higher overall air temperatures will mean more water lost to evaporation. Less precipitation in the Rocky Mountains will yield less water to begin with. Water resource officials say some of the reservoirs fed by the river will never be full again.Ĭlimate change will likely decrease the river’s flow by 5 to 20 percent in the next 40 years, says geoscientist Brad Udall, director of the University of Colorado Western Water Assessment. But at the lake’s edge they can see lines in the rock walls, distinct as bathtub rings, showing the water level far lower than it once was-some 130 feet lower, as it happens, since 2000. And boaters still roar across Nevada and Arizona’s Lake Mead, 110 miles long and formed by the Hoover Dam. It still tumbles through the Grand Canyon, much to the delight of rafters and other visitors. The river has been running especially low for the past decade, as drought has gripped the Southwest. The damming and diverting of the Colorado, the nation’s seventh-longest river, may be seen by some as a triumph of engineering and by others as a crime against nature, but there are ominous new twists. states and Mexico, with 70 percent or more of its water siphoned off to irrigate 3.5 million acres of cropland. The river now serves 30 million people in seven U.S. Then, beginning in the 1920s, Western states began divvying up the Colorado’s water, building dams and diverting the flow hundreds of miles, to Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and other fast-growing cities. That is, it did so for six million years. Ernest Wright and John Bright) were too optimistic in making connections between archaeology and the Biblical sources before the emergence of Israel in Canaan in the 13th century B.C.E.From its source high in the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado River channels water south nearly 1,500 miles, over falls, through deserts and canyons, to the lush wetlands of a vast delta in Mexico and into the Gulf of California. I too have written numerous papers noting that Albright and many of his students (including Nelson Glueck, G. Today, the conventional wisdom-or at least the view of many mainstream scholars-is that the patriarchal stories do not have a setting in a particular archaeological period, that there is no patriarchal period as such. Albright in the heyday of Biblical archaeology to place the patriarchs in the Middle Bronze period, shortly after 2000 B.C.E. Every scholar (and many BAR readers) knows of the egregiously failed effort by the great William F. It may even enable us to locate at least one of the four rivers associated with the Garden of Eden. Evidence of climatic change has the potential, already partially realized, of dating the patriarchal age, the sojourn in Egypt (the Joseph story) and the origins of the Biblical Flood story.
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