This transcript has been edited for greater length and clarity.

California and Arizona are currently fighting each other for water from the Colorado River. But this is not new—in fact, it has been happening for over 100 years. At one point the states went to war over this. The problem boils down to very bad mathematics in 1922.

To some extent, climate change can be blamed for the crisis. The West is experiencing a drought that happens once in a millennium. As temperatures rise, the snow cover that feeds the river has become much thinner, and the main river reservoirs have all but dried up.

But that’s only part of the story: The United States has also been abusing Colorado for over a century, thanks to a Byzantine set of flawed laws and lawsuits known as the River Law. This legal confusion not only led to an over-allotment of the river, but also led to conflict in the region, especially between the two largest water users, California and Arizona, who are trying to get as much water as possible. And now, with a severe drought sweeping across the region, the law of the river has reached its breaking point.

The Colorado River originates in the Rocky Mountains and meanders southwest, meandering through the Grand Canyon and emptying into the Pacific Ocean at Baja California. In the late 19th century, when white settlers arrived in the West, they began diverting water from the mighty river to irrigate crops, channeling it through dirt channels. For a while this worked very well. The canals turned the desert into a Mecca for industrial farming, which was considered “useless” by early colonial settlers.

Even then, the largest water users were Arizona and California, which took so much water that they began to drain the river upstream, literally drying it up. According to American legal precedent, whoever first uses a body of water usually has the strongest rights to it. But the other states soon rebelled: California was growing much faster than they were, and they felt it was unfair that the Golden State had to suck up all the water before they had a chance to develop.

In 1922, the states came to a decision – sort of. At the suggestion of newly appointed Cabinet Secretary Herbert Hoover, the states agreed to divide the river in two, drawing an arbitrary line down the middle of its length at a place called the Lee Ferry. The states in the “upper” part of the river – Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, and New Mexico – agreed to send the states in the “down” part of the river – Arizona, California, and Nevada – what they believed was half the river’s total flow of 7. 5 million acre feet of water per year. (An acre foot is enough to cover an acre of land in a foot of water, which is about enough to supply two houses for a year.)

This agreement was supposed to prevent one state from drying up the river before other states could use it. The Upper Basin states received half and the Lower Basin states received half. Simple.

But there were serious shortcomings in this plan.

First, the Law of the River overestimated the amount of water flowing through the river. The states’ numbers were based on primitive data from water meters placed at arbitrary points along the waterway, and they sampled during an unusually wet decade, leading to a very optimistic estimate of the size of the river. The river would average about 14 million acre-feet per year, but under the agreement, the seven states received 15 million.

While the states could not immediately use all of that water, today it has created a fundamental problem: the states have the legal right to use more water than is actually available in the river.

And you’ll notice that the Colorado River doesn’t end in the US – it ends in Mexico. Initially, the Law of the River simply ignored this fact. Decades later, Mexico was squeezed into the agreement and pledged 1.5 million acre feet, further straining an already redistributed river.

On top of all this, the indigenous tribes that had been dependent on the river for centuries were now forced to compete with the states for their share of the water, leading to these protracted lawsuits that took decades to resolve.

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Tribes in the Colorado River Basin fight for their water. The states wish they didn’t.

But in the short term, Arizona and California got rich – they were promised the largest share of the Colorado River’s water, and they had to prepare for growth. However, there was a catch for Arizona: the state could not use its water.

The state’s largest population centers in Phoenix and Tucson were hundreds of miles from the river itself, and to bring water across the desert required a 300-mile canal that the state could not afford to build on its own. The larger and wealthier California was able to build all the canals and pumps needed to divert river water to farms and cities. This allowed it to swallow both its share and excess Lower Basin water that Arizona could not access. A powerful congressional delegation from California lobbied to prevent Congress from approving the Arizona canal project, as the state wanted to keep the Colorado River to itself.

Arizona was furious. So, in 1934, Arizona and California went to war—literally. Arizona tried to stop California from building new dams to draw more water from the river, using “military” force if necessary.

Arizona sent National Guard troops to stop California from building the Parker Dam. This delayed construction, but not for long, because their boat became tangled in some kind of electrical wire and had to be rescued.

For the next 30 years, Arizona and California argued over whether Arizona could build this canal. They also sued each other in the Supreme Court at least 10 times, including one 1963 case that set the record for the longest oral argument in modern court history, lasting 16 hours over four days and involving 106 witnesses.

This 1963 case also made some pretty serious assumptions: although the states now knew that the original estimates were inflated, a court-appointed expert said he was “morally certain that neither in my lifetime, nor in your lifetime, nor in the lifetime of your children and great-grandchildren will miss the water” from the river for the cities of California.

A few years after that court case, in 1968, Arizona finally struck a life-changing deal to secure its share of the river. California abandoned its anti-canal campaign and the federal government agreed to pay for the construction of a 300-mile project that would bring water from the Colorado River across the desert to Phoenix. The move helped save Arizona’s cotton industry and allowed Phoenix to eventually become the fifth largest city in the country. It seemed like a success—Arizona was booming!

But in exchange for the canal, the state made a fatal concession: if the reservoirs on Lakes Powell and Mead run out, Arizona, not California, will be the first state to cut back. It was a decision that the leaders of the state will regret.

In the early 2000s, as a severe drought gripped the southwest, water levels in two of the river’s key reservoirs dropped. Now that both Arizona and California have made full use of their shares of the river, combined with the use of other states, the melting snow is suddenly not enough to fill the reservoirs. increasing demand.

Today, after more than 20 years of drought, Arizona has had its heaviest burden to bear. Through its previous compromise decades earlier, the state received “secondary water rights,” meaning it made the first cuts as part of the drought plan. In 2021, these cuts officially went into effect, drying up cotton and alfalfa fields in the central part of the state until most of the landscape turned brown. However, these cuts were not enough.

This century, the river area averages about 12.4 million acre-feet. The Upper Basin states technically have rights to 7.5 million acre feet, but they only use about half of that amount. Meanwhile, in the Lower Basin, Arizona and California are absorbing about three and four million acre feet, respectively. Overall, this overdraft resulted in a drop in reservoir levels. It will take much more than a few rainy seasons to solve this problem.

Thus, for the first time since the River Act was written, the federal government had to intervene by ordering the states to reduce the overall water use of the river, this time by almost a third. This is an amazing claim!

These new cuts will spread to Arizona, California and other regions, drying up thousands more acres of farmland, not to mention the cities around Phoenix and Los Angeles, which depend on the Colorado River. These new restrictions will also put increased pressure on the many tribes that have used the Colorado River for centuries: tribes with water rights will be forced to sell or lease them to other water users, and tribes with no recognized water rights will face growing resistance. as they try to secure their share.

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The Colorado River Dries Up: How It Affects Indigenous Water Rights

And Arizona and California quiet a fight over who should bear the brunt of these new cuts. California insists that the River Law requires Arizona to take the pain, and legally speaking, they may be right. But Arizona says further cuts would be disastrous for the state’s economy, and the other five river states are siding with it.

Either way, the painful cuts must come from somewhere, because the Law of the River was built on math that doesn’t add up.

A rare white killer whale calf has been sighted off the coast of southern California.

In a video filmed Monday by whale watching travel company Newport Coastal Adventures, a white calf was seen swimming with six other killer whales near Newport Harbor.

The 3-year-old was initially spotted by a whale watching company in Long Beach, who then reported the sighting to Newport Coastal Adventures, Fox 5. reported.

“In just a few hours, we loaded three boats for a special trip and drove 50 miles before we finally found the CA216 capsule,” Newport Coastal Adventures wrote in the caption alongside. footage calf.

The hatchling is completely white, except for a greyish dorsal fin and head. The tour group named him “Frosty” because of his “unusually fair skin…[the] the result of a rare genetic disease.”

Passengers on the whale-watching tour could watch the killer whales for more than two hours as they paddled along the coastline until sunset, boat captain Delaney Trowbridge told Fox 5. According to him, the flock approached the boat several times.

V statements Newsweek, whale and dolphin conservation spokesman Danny Groves explained that white killer whales are not driven out of their herds, as some people might think.

“They are completely accepted,” he said.

Mark Girardot, also of Whale and Dolphin Conservation, told the publication that this particular flock has been sighted as far south as Mexico and as far north as Canada.

According to experts, several well-known conditions make some animals, including killer whales, look white. One condition is leucism, in which skin pigmentation becomes paler. The other is Chediak-Higashi syndrome, an inherited immune deficiency that can cause partial albinism.

In the case of the California killer whale, the disease is leucism, which is rare in killer whales.

“There are many reasons why these patterns emerge, but genetics is an important factor,” Luke Rendell, professor of biology at the University of St. Andrews’ Department of Marine Mammal Research, told Newsweek.

“Albinism is the almost complete absence of pigment… There is also leucism, which Frosty suffers from, a partial loss of pigment due to a failure in the development of skin cells. Thus, leucism may have both genetic and developmental causes.”