Arizona: Small spring

 

The general belief is that the name of the state comes from an earlier Spanish name, Arizonac, derived from the O'odham name alĭ ṣonak, meaning small spring.

The all-too-fittingly-named Arizona could be out of water in six years

Prolonged drought and a rapidly expanding population are pushing Arizona’s water system to its limit.  Arizona is bone dry, desiccated by the worst drought ever seen in the state’s 110-year long observational record. 

The Grand Canyon State has been in drought conditions for a decade, and researchers think the dry spell could hold out for another 20 to 30 years, according to sources at the City of Phoenix. That people have not been fleeing Arizona in droves, as they did from the plains during the 1930s Dust Bowl, is a miracle of hydrological engineering. 

But the magic won’t last, and if things don’t start to change Arizona is going to be in trouble fast, says the New York Times. A quarter of Arizona’s water comes from the Colorado River, and that river is running low. There’s not enough water in the basin to keep Arizona’s crucial Lake Mead reservoirs topped up. If changes aren’t made to the entire multi-state hydrological system, says the Times, things could get bad.
 

 
Lake Mead has begun a sharp decline; the principal upstream reservoir, Lake Powell, now holds only 42 percent of its capacity, and Lake Mead about 45 percent. This photo of Lake Mead shows how much the water had dropped. Water used to rise to top of that area now bleached white. Since 2000, the lake has lost 4 trillion gallons of water.
 

If upstream states continue to be unable to make up the shortage, Lake Mead, whose surface is now about 1,085 feet above sea level, will drop to 1,000 feet by 2020. Under present conditions, that would cut off most of Las Vegas’s water supply and much of Arizona’s. Phoenix gets about half its water from Lake Mead, and Tucson nearly all of its.