{"id":5665,"date":"2015-02-13T07:27:24","date_gmt":"2015-02-13T12:27:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5665"},"modified":"2015-02-13T07:27:24","modified_gmt":"2015-02-13T12:27:24","slug":"us-at-risk-of-mega-drought-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=5665","title":{"rendered":"US ‘at risk of mega-drought future’"},"content":{"rendered":"

US ‘at risk of mega-drought future’<\/a><\/h3>\n

The American south-west and central plains could be on course for super-droughts the like of which they have not witnessed in over a 1,000 years.<\/p>\n

Places like California are already facing very dry conditions, but these are quite gentle compared with some periods in the 12th and 13th Centuries.<\/p>\n

Scientists have now compared these earlier droughts with climate simulations for the coming decades.<\/p>\n

The study suggests events unprecedented in the last millennium may lie ahead.<\/p>\n

“These mega-droughts during the 1100s and 1200s persisted for 20, 30, 40, 50 years at a time, and they were droughts that no-one in the history of the United States has ever experienced,” said Ben Cook from Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.<\/p>\n

“The droughts that people do know about like the 1930s ‘dustbowl’ or the 1950s drought or even the ongoing drought in California and the Southwest today – these are all naturally occurring droughts that are expected to last only a few years or perhaps a decade. Imagine instead the current California drought going on for another 20 years.”<\/p>\n

Dr Cook’s new study is\u00a0published in the journal Science Advances<\/a>, and it has been discussed also at the annual meeting of the\u00a0American Association for the Advancement of Science<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

US ‘at risk of mega-drought future’ The American south-west and central plains could be on course for super-droughts the like of which they have not witnessed in over a 1,000 years. Places like California are already facing very dry conditions, but these are quite gentle compared with some periods in the 12th and 13th Centuries. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[101,141,220,369,3511,929,834,3510],"class_list":["post-5665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-california","tag-climate-change","tag-drought","tag-global-warming","tag-mega-drought","tag-nasa","tag-us","tag-us-drought"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5665"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5665\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5666,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5665\/revisions\/5666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}