New York Magazine: In March, Bradley Udall, a water and climate researcher at Colorado State University, gave a presentation at the University of Utah’s Wallace Stegner Center that laid out several models for how much drier the basin could become by 2050, including an especially frightening forecast that the river may end up carrying 40 percent less water than it averaged during the 20th century. “There’s just a lot of worrisome signs here that these flows are going to go lower,” Udall says. Tanya Trujillo, who, as the assistant secretary for water and science at the Department of the Interior, is effectively the federal government’s top water official, agrees with that assessment. “The bottom line is we’re seeing declining storage in both Lake Mead and Lake Powell,” she says. “But we’re also seeing increasing risk of the system continuing to decline.”

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