14 DAY TRIAL // Except for Merfolk, who never have to worry about not having enough water to go around, pretty much everybody knows what a drought is. Simply put, it's an extended period of time during which a given region experiences a deficiency in its water supply.
Droughts are pretty bad. They affect wildlife, agricultural practices, the economy, and even public health. Hence, they aren't exactly everybody's favorite time of the year.
The trouble is that, according to a recent paper set to be published in the Journal of Climate, folks living in the southwestern US might soon have to deal not with a run-of-the-mill water crisis, but with a megadrought.
Specifically, it appears that, courtesy of climate changes brought about by global warming, states in this part of the country are now staring down the barrel of a 20 to 50% chance of being hit by a megadrought over the next century.
In case anyone was wondering, megadroughts are just like regular droughts in the sense that they too boil down to mind-bogglingly reduced water availability. The difference between them is that megadroughts can last up to 35 years.
“For the southwestern U.S., I'm not optimistic about avoiding real megadroughts. As we add greenhouse gases into the atmosphere – and we haven't put the brakes on stopping this – we are weighting the dice for megadrought.”
“This will be worse than anything seen during the last 2,000 years and would pose unprecedented challenges to water resources in the region,” researcher Toby Ault with Cornell University said in a statement, as cited by Phys Org.
To make things ever worse, it appears that, even if the southwestern US somehow manages to avoid being hit by a megadrought, this does not necessarily mean that it will not have to struggle with poor access to water resources sometime over the course of the following century.
Thus, specialist Toby Ault and fellow researchers say that, according to evidence at hand, the chances that states in this part of the country will go through a decade-long drought in the not-so-distant future revolve around 50%. Otherwise put, the future is looking a bit too bright and sunshiny for these regions.
It is believed that, apart from the southwestern US, southern Africa, Australia, and even the Amazon basin are likely to experience a megadrought in the years to come. Should this happen, man-made climate change and global warming will be the ones to blame, specialists stress.