By Chris Clements , KNAU News - Arizona Public Radio.  Excerpt: Western rivers like the San Juan and the Colorado are mostly fed by burbling mountain streams, which are themselves fed by groundwater and snowmelt. But a study published on June 5 says those tiny streams are in trouble. The study in the journal Earth's Future says the base amount of water in streams and rivers that doesn’t come from rain, also known as “base flow,” has been steadily declining since 1950, though that trend varies depending on the specific time period. ...The study...predicts that if climate warming continues, by the end of the century, headwater streams could have anywhere from 45% to 65% less base flow to sustain them. ...water levels in Lake Mead reach their lowest point ever . The Colorado River Basin has faced aridification for the last 26 years. Tiny, ephemeral streams like Flagstaff’s Rio de Flag give mighty rivers the juice to flow freely. But they depend on base flow to do that. ...[The Rio de...

By Erik Stokstad , Science.  Excerpt: In 2024, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) opened outlets at the base of the Colorado River’s mighty Glen Canyon Dam, unleashing gushers of water in an experiment meant to cool waters downstream. The strategy, called a “cool mix” release, aimed to thwart breeding of invasive smallmouth bass and protect native species. “It was very effective,” says Kevin Bestgen, a fish biologist at Colorado State University. So much so that the release was repeated in 2025. But with the Colorado’s reservoirs at historically low levels, there may be little political will to release water to protect ecosystems. On 6 August, USBR, which operates dams on the river, canceled this year’s cool mix release. In April, the agency had also nixed one of the periodic “controlled floods,” a much larger cascade intended to redistribute sediment and build sandbars that provide habitat for fish. ...The developments are the latest sign of trouble on the river system, which s...

By Dylan Baddour , Inside Climate News.  Excerpt: The Romanian Navy is blasting out the Danube River bed to maintain the flow of cooling water to a nuclear power plant as a continent-wide drought dries up rivers across Europe. ...The plant’s operator, Nuclearelectrica, shut down Unit 1 due to low water last week, warning in a press release last Wednesday that, without intervention, “Unit 2 will be shut down in a controlled manner due to the extremely low, unprecedented level of the Danube, caused by severe drought.” One thousand miles away, officials in the Netherlands last week announced the lowest levels ever measured on Europe’s third largest river, the Rhine. In a press release Thursday , the Dutch national government said drought was disrupting commercial traffic on the river system and causing intrusion of salty seawater into water supplies meant for crop irrigation. ...In Italy, the Po River Basin Authority reported on Thursday that 101 municipalities faced medium-to-high ...

By Sushmita Pathak , Science.  Excerpt: In response to the 22 April attack that killed 26 people, India said it was putting “in abeyance” its participation in the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), a 65-year-old pact that governs how Pakistan and India share water from one of Asia’s major river systems. Pakistan, in turn, said it would consider any move by India to withhold Indus water, which irrigates most of its farmland, as an act of war. Researchers say the jousting highlighted not only the political sensitivity of the treaty, but also the increasingly urgent need to update the IWT to reflect the ongoing impacts of climate change and population growth....  Full article at https://www.science.org/content/article/climate-change-threatens-india-pakistan-pact-over-major-river-system .

By Madeleine Cuff , New Scientist.  Excerpt: Rivers around the world are leaking ancient carbon back into the atmosphere. The finding has taken scientists by surprise and suggests human activities are damaging the natural landscape far more than first thought. Researchers already knew rivers released carbon dioxide and methane as part of the global carbon cycle – the short-term movement of gases that happens as living things grow and decompose. They are thought to emit around 2 gigatonnes of this carbon each year. But when  Josh Dean  at the University of Bristol, UK, and his colleagues set out to determine how old this carbon really is, they found that around 60 per cent of global river emissions are from thousands-of-years-old stores. Ancient carbon is trapped in rocks, peat bogs and wetlands. The findings suggest that as much as 1 gigatonne of it is being released back into the atmosphere each year through rivers. ...The pressing question now is why rivers are releasin...

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10022024/how-one-of-the-nations-fastest-growing-counties-plans-to-find-water-in-the-desert/ By David Condos, KUER (NPR Utah).  Excerpt: Like many places across the West, two things are on a collision course in Utah’s southwest corner: growth and water. Washington County’s population has  quadrupled  since 1990. St. George, its largest city, has been the  fastest-growing  metro area in the nation in recent years. ...The region has essentially  tapped out  the Colorado River tributary it depends on now, the Virgin River. ...The district’s 20-year plan comes down to two big ideas: reusing and conserving the water it already has....