How Can Rain Create Conflict? Precipitation and Water Use: Crash Course Geography #11
Summary
TLDRThis Crash Course Geography episode, hosted by Alizé Carrère, delves into the critical role of precipitation in shaping Earth's ecosystems and human life. It explores how precipitation varies with latitude and topography, affecting regions like Borneo and the Arctic, and how the Great Plains' unpredictable rainfall leads to challenges like drought. The episode also discusses the Colorado River's significance as a water source for the Southwest, highlighting water management issues, including the impact of dams, urban growth, and legal disputes over water rights. It raises questions about water control, rights, and the environmental costs of human water usage, emphasizing the importance of understanding precipitation patterns for geographical and geopolitical insights.
Takeaways
- 🌍 The map of world's precipitation is crucial for understanding life on Earth as it shows how water circulates between Earth systems.
- 💧 Precipitation, including rain, snow, sleet, and hail, is vital for agriculture, industry, transportation, and ecosystems.
- 🌱 Water acts as a universal solvent, dissolving and transporting nutrients and pollutants across different environments.
- 🗺 Comparing precipitation maps with population distribution reveals a pattern: where there is water, there are people.
- 🏔 Orographic precipitation occurs when air rises over mountains, cools, and forms clouds, leading to rain or snow on the windward side.
- 🌬 The Great Plains experience unpredictable precipitation due to continental effects, rain shadow from the Rocky Mountains, and atmospheric circulation.
- 🌋 The Dust Bowl, a severe drought in the 1930s, demonstrated the impact of precipitation patterns on human and environmental health.
- 🏞️ The Colorado River, a significant water source in the southwest, faces challenges in water distribution due to its reliance on a single source.
- 🏛️ Water management involves spatial problems, such as allocating water between farms, factories, towns, and maintaining ecological balance.
- 🏗️ Dams like Hoover and Glen Canyon were built to control water flow, impacting water distribution and raising questions about water rights and environmental justice.
- 🌐 Geopolitical issues related to water control are prevalent in regions like the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia, and the Western US, affecting public health and agriculture.
Q & A
Why is the map of the world's precipitation considered so important by geographers?
-The map of the world's precipitation is considered important because it helps us understand all life on Earth by tracking water, which is essential for agriculture, industry, transportation, recreation, and all flora and fauna.
What is the hydrological cycle and how does precipitation fit into it?
-The hydrological cycle is the process that circulates water molecules between the Earth's systems, and precipitation is the final step in this cycle, involving rain, snow, sleet, hail, or any liquid or solid that falls from clouds.
How does water's role as a universal solvent impact its movement through the water cycle?
-As a universal solvent, water can dissolve more substances than any other liquid, which means as it moves through the water cycle, it transports both vital nutrients and harmful pollutants across different spaces and places.
What geographical pattern can be observed when comparing the map of precipitation with the map of population distribution?
-A simple but powerful pattern observed is that where there is water, there are people, indicating a direct correlation between water availability and human settlement.
How does the continental effect influence precipitation patterns in the Great Plains?
-The continental effect causes huge temperature fluctuations in the Great Plains due to its location far from oceans, leading to scorching summers and frigid winters, and affecting precipitation patterns.
What is orographic precipitation and how does it occur?
-Orographic precipitation occurs when air is forced to rise over mountains, cools, and the water vapor condenses to form clouds and precipitation, such as rain or snow.
Why is the Great Plains region prone to drought?
-The Great Plains is prone to drought due to a combination of factors including the continental effect, its location in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains, and subtropical high pressure systems in the atmosphere.
What was the Dust Bowl and how did it affect the Great Plains?
-The Dust Bowl was a significant drought that ravaged the Great Plains from 1930 until 1939, causing devastation for people, animals, and plants, and changing the perception of the region.
How does the Colorado River serve as a water source for the southwestern United States?
-The Colorado River is a major water source for the southwestern United States, with ninety percent of its surface water coming from snow in the Rocky Mountains that melts and flows into the river.
What challenges arise from relying on a single water source like the Colorado River?
-Challenges include managing water distribution among different users who may not be located near the river, dealing with unregulated water use upstream that can leave less water for downstream users, and navigating political boundaries that don't align with the river's course.
How has the management of the Colorado River water been historically problematic and what are some proposed solutions?
-Historically, the management of the Colorado River has been problematic due to overestimation of its flow, misallocation of water rights, and physical alterations like dams. Proposed solutions include privatizing water rights, which would allow market forces to determine water distribution and value.
Outlines
🌍 Importance of Precipitation in Geography
This paragraph introduces the significance of the world's precipitation map in understanding life on Earth. It explains precipitation as a critical part of the hydrological cycle, affecting agriculture, industry, transportation, and ecosystems. The universal solvent properties of water and its role in transporting nutrients and pollutants are highlighted. The paragraph also discusses how precipitation maps can reveal disparities in water access, leading to geographical patterns and potential conflicts. It sets the stage for the Crash Course Geography series by Alizé Carrère, emphasizing the interplay between Earth's physical and human geography.
💧 Precipitation Patterns and Their Impact
The second paragraph delves into the geographical patterns of precipitation, influenced by Earth's spheroid shape, rotation, revolution, and tilt. It contrasts areas of high precipitation like Borneo with arid regions like the Svalbard islands, explaining the role of latitude and atmospheric conditions. The concept of orographic precipitation is introduced, detailing how mountain ranges like the Rockies influence rainfall patterns, creating 'rain shadows'. The paragraph discusses the challenges of managing water resources in regions like the Great Plains, where precipitation is unpredictable and can lead to droughts. It also touches on the historical and environmental consequences of mismanagement, such as the Dust Bowl, and the ongoing struggle for water rights among various stakeholders.
🌱 Water Management and Its Geopolitical Ramifications
The final paragraph focuses on the Colorado River as a case study for water management challenges. It discusses the river's importance as a water source for the southwest United States, the challenges of distributing water from a single source, and the historical and legal complexities of water rights. The paragraph outlines the 'prior appropriation doctrine' and the Colorado River Compact, which have led to over-allocation and legal disputes. It also addresses the impact of urban growth on water demand and the proposed privatization of water rights. The paragraph concludes by emphasizing the broader geopolitical issues related to water control and the need for geographers to continue exploring these challenges.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Precipitation
💡Hydrological Cycle
💡Universal Solvent
💡Orographic Precipitation
💡Rain Shadow
💡Continental Effect
💡Drought
💡Water Rights
💡Prior Appropriation Doctrine
💡Cyclonic Systems
💡Indigenous Peoples
Highlights
The map of world's precipitation is crucial for understanding life on Earth.
Precipitation is a critical part of the hydrological cycle, affecting all Earth systems.
Water is essential for agriculture, industry, transportation, and ecosystems.
Water acts as a universal solvent, transporting nutrients and pollutants.
Precipitation maps can reveal disparities in water access and potential conflicts.
Population distribution often correlates with areas of high precipitation.
The Great Plains experience extreme temperature fluctuations due to the continental effect.
Orographic precipitation occurs when air rises and cools, forming clouds and precipitation on mountain slopes.
The rain shadow effect creates dry areas on the leeward side of mountains.
The Great Plains have a semi-arid climate, prone to unpredictable rainfall and drought.
The Dust Bowl was a significant drought that devastated the Great Plains in the 1930s.
The Colorado River is a critical water source for the Southwest, with challenges in distribution and management.
Water rights and management are complex, involving legal battles and political boundaries.
The Colorado River Compact was an attempt to divide water resources among states, but it overlooked variability.
Dams like Hoover and Glen Canyon were built to store water, impacting water distribution and ecosystems.
Urban growth has increased water demand, affecting rural communities and agriculture.
Privatizing water rights is a proposed solution, potentially changing water distribution and access.
Native American tribes are still fighting for water rights, highlighting ongoing struggles for resource control.
Precipitation patterns and water management are key to understanding geographical and geopolitical issues.
Water shortages can impact public health, agriculture, and ecological systems.
Geographers continue to explore the stories and patterns of Earth, including cyclonic systems and their impacts.
Acknowledging Indigenous peoples' relationships with land is important in understanding geography.
Transcripts
Even though lots of maps help us understand our geographical space, there’s one map
that some geographers would say is the most important to understand all life on Earth:
the map of the world’s precipitation.
We can think of precipitation as the final flourish in the hydrological cycle that
circulates water molecules between the four Earth systems. It’s all the rain,
snow, sleet, hail or any liquid or solid that falls from clouds in the atmosphere.
And we need water for so many parts of our lives: agriculture, industry,
transportation, recreation, and not least for all the flora and fauna that live here.
Water is the universal solvent, which means it can dissolve more substances
than any other liquid and we almost never find completely pure water.
That's pretty important, because as water moves through the water cycle,
it transports both vital nutrients and harmful pollutants across spaces and places.
So using a map of precipitation helps us track water on Earth and reveals potential
consequences of differing access to water. Like if we compare our precipitation map with the
map of population distribution, we can understand a simple but powerful pattern of human geography:
where there is water, there are people.
But it gets a little more complicated than that, because where there are people and
limited resources, there's often conflict and bigger geographical questions at stake.
I’m Alizé Carrère and this is Crash Course Geography.
[INTRO]
We started our journey into physical geography by looking at the big,
big picture to reveal the geographic patterns and processes that create
Earth’s environments and support all living things.
And we’ve learned that the spheroid shape,
rotation, revolution, and tilt of the Earth cause insolation, air temperature, pressure,
and wind to form worldwide patterns that strongly depend on latitude.
Ultimately, precipitation comes from clouds in the atmosphere,
which are complex structures that change based on many of those patterns.
So precipitation varies a lot between different places, especially different latitudes.
Looking at our map, there are areas with a lot of precipitation,
like the island we call Borneo. The air here near the equator is hotter and has a higher dew point,
the temperature when the air is saturated with water vapor and condensation is imminent.
But areas like what we call the Svalbard islands in the Arctic Ocean get very
little precipitation because the air at those latitudes is cold and dry.
A different kind of precipitation variability can happen within a place that spans similar
latitudes. Like there's a region that makes up a large chunk of the continental interior
of the US and Canada, often called the Great Plains or the Prairies.
Because the Great Plains sit deep within the interior,
far from oceans, a phenomenon called the continental effect causes
huge temperature fluctuations with scorching summers and frigid winters.
In addition, the Rocky Mountains, which are west of the Great Plains, form a barrier to the warm,
moist winds blowing in from the Pacific. Basically, as the winds hit the side of the
mountains, the air is forced to rise. As it rises, the air expands and cools
enough that the water vapor molecules can condense to form clouds and precipitation.
The resulting rain or snow (or fog or whatever!)
is called orographic precipitation, which got its name from “oros” -- a Greek word for mountain.
Then, as the air descends the other side of the mountains,
it gets warmer as the air molecules are compressed together, and any leftover water
droplets evaporate. So we say the side of the mountains not facing the winds -- like where
the Great Plains are -- is in a warm, dry area called the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains.
Orographic precipitation patterns can be found on mountains worldwide.
In Argentina, the Patagonia desert lies in the rain shadow of the Andes Mountains,
while the Trans-Himalayan region of Tibet and Central Asia lies in the rain shadow
of the Himalaya Mountains. The Great Plains straddle the
98th meridian. So there’s precipitation sometimes... it's just unpredictable.
The result is a steppe or semi-arid climate which is too dry to support forest,
but too moist to be a desert.,
The dryness can be linked to some combination of the continental effect, the rain shadow location,
and subtropical high pressure systems in the atmosphere. The unpredictability comes
from local conditions and the constantly flowing atmospheric and ocean circulation. So, basically,
rainfall amounts can change dramatically from one year or season or month to the next.
A year with lots of rain could be followed by several years of below average precipitation.
So drought can be a major, recurring problem for people, animals, and plants.
In fact, at one point the Great Plains was called the Great American Desert,
even though it’s technically a stretch of grasslands between forests to the
east and deserts to the west. By thinking about the physical space,
we learn more about how our perception of the perceived space has changed.
It wasn’t until the inventions of barbed wire, the steel plow,
well-drilling techniques, and the railroad solved the region’s
unique spatial problems that it became a place where European people settled.
Over long periods of time, grasslands produce excellent soils, making them extremely productive
farmlands -- but also prone to severe soil erosion from overfarming and overgrazing.
So the combination of mass settling and farming, unpredictable precipitation,
and high temperatures led to devastation in this physical space.
One of the most significant droughts in the last century was the Dust Bowl, which ravaged the
Great Plains for nearly a decade from 1930 until the fall of 1939, when the rains finally came.
So now our idea of the Great Plains as a place is forever tied to hardship and even lack of
opportunity, not just precipitation patterns like the rainfall effect. All because of the
physical geography of the space layered with the human geography of our lived experiences there.
On the other side of the Rockies and east of the Sierra Nevadas,
there are also vast stretches of semi-arid regions, with some true deserts in the southwest.
Like in the Great Plains, precipitation is rather unevenly distributed, so the Colorado
River is actually the region’s largest water source, dubbed the "lifeline of the southwest."
Actually ninety percent of the surface water in
the Colorado River comes from snow in the Rocky Mountains,
which melts, flows down a network of smaller tributary streams, and reaches the main river.
The challenges of relying on water from one source like a river,
instead of from widespread rainfall, involve both who needs the water and
where they are relative to the source. Managing water resources is a spatial problem.
For example, the biggest water-users are farms, factories, and towns, but they aren't all on
the riverbanks, so they have to find ways to transport the water they need.And those that
live near the upstream parts of the Colorado River can use a ton of water if unregulated,
leaving less for anyone who lives downstream.
And the Colorado River is well, a river. So as it winds from its source to its mouth,
it's unaware of any political boundaries, like those from counties, Native American tribal land,
or even international boundaries. But the humans that have made this semi-arid region
their home generally use all these political boundaries for decision making about water.
Understanding why precipitation is unevenly distributed, how drought can change seasonally,
and how people use water are key parts of geography. And the intersection between
these physical geography processes and human geography decision-making can be
the source of a lot of tension -- especially when it comes to environmental policies.
For example, Native Americans have used the Colorado River’s water and managed
its resources for thousands of years. But the modern legal doctrine that governs
water rights in the West -- which goes back to the Gold Rush of the 1840s and 50s in some
places -- is the “prior appropriation doctrine.” This doctrine allocates rights based on who
started using the water first...except traditional Native American claims.
Then in 1922 the seven states of the Colorado River Basin
drew up the Colorado River Compact on how to divide the waters, because
seasonal precipitation alone wouldn't provide enough water for everyone that lived there.
But they overestimated the flow of the river and didn’t account for how the
amount of water varies year-to-year. So each state was allocated more water than
actually exists -- a problem that’s led to intense legal battles between states.
Like California is a downstream user but also a very powerful state,
and for decades was using more water than it was allocated. So in 2003,
after threats that their water would be cut off, California agreed to reduce its use of
Colorado River water over the next 14 years to allow the upstream states their share.
The other big problem was that the river's natural flow had to be physically moved to
suit certain human wants and needs, which made things even less fair.
Like two huge dams -- the Hoover dam on the Arizona-Nevada border and the Glen Canyon dam
in Arizona -- were built in the 1930s and 60s to store and hold back water in reservoirs.
Lake Mead, the reservoir for the Hoover dam, supplies water to 25 million people in California,
Arizona, and Nevada, and generates hydroelectricity for the region.
But all that water still has to be divided between different needs.
And since the 1950s, explosive urban growth in upstream states,
like the growth of cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas, meant skyrocketing demand
for water there -- and, as a consequence, less water for farmers and other rural communities.
Basically, early miscalculations and mismanagement has created a water
crisis that affects 40 million people and 5.5 million acres of farmland.
As of 2021, privatizing water rights is being proposed as a new solution. Private investors
would buy water rights, and cities, states, and individual farms could buy water from them,
even across state lines. This way the market would decide whether water was more valuable
serving urban or rural populations, redefining the century-old rules for sharing the river.
So yes, this would turn the river water into a commodity that could be bought and sold.
Private investors would redraw the map of water distribution in the West and make a profit.
But while water management enters a new phase with big players from Wall Street staking a claim,
Native American tribes are still working to obtain
their water rights that they were finally awarded in 1908.
There is no substitute for water. Today we mainly focused on one region with one kind
of precipitation pattern, but we still saw how studying precipitation opens up lots of deeper
questions in geography, from what makes a region habitable to political struggles over resources.
Some of the most serious geopolitical issues in the Middle East, North Africa,
South Asia, and the Western US relate to control over water.
Like water shortages affect public health, reduce agricultural productivity, and
damage ecological systems on which we depend. So, really, that map of the Earth's precipitation,
and where and how much water falls from the sky, is the foundation of a bunch
of big geographical questions: who should control water? Is water a basic human right?
And how have humans altered the environment to get the water we need -- and at what cost?
As geographers, we’ll keep looking for new answers in the stories and patterns of the Earth.
Like next time when we’ll look at cyclonic systems that bring dramatic weather and spatial
implications affecting human activities like where we build our homes and choose to live.
Many maps and borders represent modern geopolitical divisions that have often
been decided without the consultation, permission, or recognition of the land's original inhabitants.
Many geographical place names also don't reflect the Indigenous or Aboriginal peoples languages.
So we at Crash Course want to acknowledge these peoples’ traditional and ongoing relationship
with that land and all the physical and human geographical elements of it.
We encourage you to learn about the history of the place you call
home through resources like native-land.ca and by engaging with your local Indigenous
and Aboriginal nations through the websites and resources they provide.
Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Geography which is filmed at the
Team Sandoval Pierce Studio and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want
to help keep all Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our community on Patreon.
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