The United States faces a grim future due to risks of mega-droughts
The American southwest and central plains – a large swath of land that extends from North Texas to the Dakotas – could be headed for extreme droughts such as had never been seen in thousands of years. A few places like California is currently going through some dry conditions, but this is nothing compared to what took place in the 12th and 13th centuries – and which might happen again.
“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 of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
“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.”
Published in the journal Sciences Advances, and also discussed at the yearly meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the researchers constructed climate simulations of what might happen far ahead in comparison with given earlier droughts.
--- Ben Kochman
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