Dust bowl can it happen again

Well outputs in the central and southern parts of the aquifer are declining due to excessive pumping, and prolonged droughts have parched the area, bringing back Dust Bowl-style storms. According to the federal government's National Climate Assessment, parts of the Ogallala Aquifer should be considered a nonrenewable resource. As a result, Cowan warns, "Dwindling water availability in regions of low groundwater recharge may mean that cooler summer conditions may switch to warmer temperatures in decades to come under the influence of rising greenhouse gas emissions.

If these Dust Bowl conditions do return, scientists say we should prepare for a shock to the food system. A recent study predicted that the U. Besides the impacts on food systems, an April study from the University of Washington finds the expected increase in extreme heat will also be a health shock.

The research warns of danger for agricultural pickers in the U. The bottom line, Cowan says: "It is likely that there will be more extreme heat wave conditions in the central U. Warming climate could lead to another Dust Bowl. Please enter email address to continue. Please enter valid email address to continue. Chrome Safari Continue. The result is that droughts lead to more severe heatwaves, and those heatwaves in turn lead to drier conditions.

Data shows that both drought and heat are becoming more common—and perhaps increasing the feedback effects between them.

In a recent study in Nature , Cowan and his coauthors found that greenhouse gas emissions have made a period of Dust Bowl-like heatwaves more than two-and-a-half times more likely compared to the s. Meanwhile, agriculture continues to thrive in the Midwest and Great Plains. The combined regions are top producers of crops like corn, wheat, and soybeans, as well as livestock.

That level of agricultural intensity, paired with increasingly hotter weather, raises the stakes for the United States should another historic drought occur.

One paper in relied on computer simulations to model the effects of Dust Bowl conditions on modern agriculture. Corn and soy crop yields would decline by around 40 percent, the authors estimate, and wheat yields would drop 30 percent.

And every one degree Celsius 1. In a world where drought and heatwaves become routine, the two might combine to tip the country into a situation where agriculture becomes increasingly threatened, with profound impacts on US food supplies.

In , the country experienced one of its worst droughts on record , along with a sizzling heatwave. By July, nearly two-thirds of the country was in drought conditions, according to the US Drought Monitor.

Meanwhile, July was the second-hottest month on record at the time. But even though the drought was similar in character to the Dust Bowl, billowing dust storms and wholesale agricultural collapse were absent.

Similarly, a severe drought in the s also failed to kick off another Dust Bowl. For the time being in the Great Plains, irrigation allows farmers to weather even severe droughts by drawing on water stored in underground aquifers.

The volume of water in the aquifer in had fallen by A map in the report shows red blotches spread across Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado, revealing stark declines in the amount of water infusing the soil.

Water levels in some places are less than half of what they were a century ago, McGuire says. So much irrigation is taking place on the Great Plains and in other global agricultural zones that the added water is actually cooling regional temperatures. In a paper in Nature Communications , Thiery and his colleagues compared average temperatures in heavily irrigated regions to those in the rest of the world. Regions that were irrigated warmed on average by 0. But the cooling effect of large-scale irrigation is ultimately unsustainable.

Water managers and farmers are already making changes to reduce water use, such as irrigating just half of their fields, or using multiple smaller wells to increase water yields from parched groundwater reserves, according to McGuire. But depleted aquifers take a long time to recharge, especially in areas like the southern Plains, where the water table is far below the surface. Meanwhile, dry years continue to stress the aquifer. In , severe drought afflicted three-quarters of the country.

Massive dust clouds swept across the landscape, darkening the sky, and farmers watched — helpless — as winds blew away their bone-dry soil. The Dust Bowl is a distant memory, but the odds of such a drought happening again are increasing.

This article is more than 1 year old. Abandoned farm buildings and machinery in the dust bowl caused by poor farming technique, as seen in May The dust bowl wanderer — in pictures. Read more. Reuse this content.