Could Lake Mead Dry Out Like Aral Sea Due to Climate Change? Here’s What an Expert Says

Lake Mead has been plagued by bouts of drying for years. The water level has been declining, prompting some to wonder if it would end up like the ill-fated Aral Sea.

Could Lake Mead Dry Out Like Aral Sea?

Lake Mead is a reservoir located on the Colorado River between Arizona and Nevada. It is getting closer to reaching the dead pool level --the point at which water stops flowing out of the Hoover Dam due to the region's drought.

More than 25 million people in the states around the lake receive both water and hydroelectric power from it. Still, rising water demand is straining the reservoir and the Colorado River.

The receding waters also revealed dead bodies believed to have been dumped there. There were already multiple bodies found in 2022, with one believed to be connected to a mafia killing in the 1970s.

Tamlin M. Pavelsky, an associate professor of global hydrology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, shared his thoughts about the similarities and differences between Lake Mead and the Aral Sea.

In reaction to the protracted drought in the area, Lake Mead's lake level has undoubtedly decreased during the past few decades, Pavelsky confirmed. He added that last year's case was an exception, but the water stored wasn't enough to refill the lake. Despite that, he seemingly hinted that Lake Mead is unlikely to completely dry up like the Aral Sea despite their similarities.

"So it's similar to the Aral Sea in that human water withdrawals and climate change are affecting its water levels substantially. However, it's also different in the sense that we can control how much water flows out of it and down the Colorado," he explained.

"Lake Mead is different-it's a reservoir, and there is a river flowing in and flowing out. This makes the lake different from a closed lake in important ways, including that it's not salt."

A better comparison for the Aral Sea in the United States would be the Great Salt Lake, where significant water level drops significantly impact the lake's area and the surrounding ecosystems.

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What Is the Aral Sea?

Formerly ranked as the fourth largest lake in the world, the Aral Sea is located in Central Asia. Industrial-scale water abstraction has caused it to shrink by more than two-thirds, resulting in what has been called the world's largest environmental calamity since the 1960s.

The thirsty cotton fields, known as "white gold," in Uzbekistan are irrigated with upstream water, per Timothy Clack, an associate professor and director of the Climate Change & (In)Security Project at the University of Oxford.

The lake level fell by around 8 inches yearly in the 1960s, tripling to 20 to 24 inches annually by the 1970s and falling by 31 to 35 inches annually in the 1980s. The lake's area decreased by 60% by 1998, reaching a mere 11,000 square miles, comparable in size to Hawaii. It has only gotten smaller in the 25 years that have passed. The Aral Sea had dried for over 40 years already.