Headline

The American West is experiencing the worst drought in at least 1,200 years

 Western US

A kayaker paddles in Lake Oroville as water levels remain low due to continuing drought conditions in Oroville, Calif., on Aug. 22, 2021. The American West's megadrought deepened so much last year that it is now the driest it has been in at least 1200 years and a worst-case scenario playing out live, a new study finds. (Credit: AP Photo/Ethan Swope, File)

The drought, which began in 2000 and has taken a toll on water supplies and fueled wildfires across the region, had previously been considered the worst in 500 years but a dramatic drying in 2021, when about two-thirds of the American West was in extreme drought, “really pushed it over the top,” A. Park Williams, a climate scientist and author of a new study, told the New York Times. “The drought conditions [are] substantially worse because of climate change, but there is quite a bit of room for [the drought] to get even worse” Park explained to the LA Times. Park and his colleagues examined tree rings at about 1,600 sites across the region, from Montana to California and northern Mexico. The study, which was published in the journal Nature Climate Change, warns that we “need to be even preparing for conditions in the future that are far worse than this.” Climate change is believed to be responsible for 42% of the drought's severity.

(AP, NPR, ABC, CNN, Axios, CNBC, The Hill, LA Times $, Wall Street Journal $, Bloomberg $, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times $; Climate Signals background: Extreme heat and heatwaves & Drought)