Causes Of Drought In California

Ecology Lab

California is currently in a water crisis where we are in a loss of water. Californians need a solution to this water crisis or else the entire state may be stuck without water to supply our water needs. Water is necessary in all of California to maintain a sustainable biodiversity. In order to survive, we need to figure out ways to reduce water use in California, which is famous for its farming and weather. Farmers need to find a new way to reduce water. California is in a severe drought of water. And to sustain a healthy state, this water must be obtained in some fashion. However, during the period between finding a new source of water, the water that we have needs to be saved. During this period, scientists have been finding

One of which, is water. The causes of the drought is the overpopulation of Californians and the fact that most of Southern California is a desert. Also most of California’s water is used in farming because the state has the most utilized valley in the country. So many crops, such as almonds, require massive amounts of water. The effects of overpopulation and lack of natural resources have caused the supply of water in California to become limited. The state needs about eleven trillion gallons of water to recover from this ferocious three year drought. This complication started from 2011 and has been continued throughout 2015 and has been the driest record of California in the past 1200 years causing less fog in the valley and less snow in the mountains. Many costs have risen from the lack of water, included political bills, water implementation, and general usage of the now precious substance. State Climatologist Michael Anderson has said that California cannot count on potential El Niño. The El Niño, under study and statistics, will not fully overcome the

However, desalination plants require lots of energy which means that it runs on a lot of money. The desalination plant would create a massive amount of fresh water that could slightly replenish the water crisis but, the desalination plant is expensive and we would not have a place for all of the salt. Technology has created ways to directly clean and reuse water that has already been contained. In Orange County water officials built the Groundwater Replenishment System (GRS) which takes in 70 million gallons of used water per day and puts it through a cleaning process to repurpose wastewater. Also, desalination technology exists to convert seawater to drinkable water through a high pressure osmosis system getting rid of all salt and other unwanted substances. However, our experiment was to test if the amount of water used to water each crop was unnecessary. We watered a group of plants with the average amount of water used in farms, watered a group of plants with a little less than average, and watered a group of plants with a small amount of water. We normally watered the plants with the average amount until all of the plants germinated. After the plants germinated, we started our experiment and controlled the amount of water. After about two weeks our experiment was over. All of our plants had died except for one that still continues to grow and it is the plant