elephant butte reservoir – mammoth // building nothing out of something

elephant butte reservoir

Elephante-Butte
[Elephant Butte Reservoir, New Mexico’s largest reservoir, which supplies water to “about 90,000 acres of farmland and nearly half the population of El Paso”; the GIF above (by mammoth) combines NASA Earth Observatory satellite imagery from 1994 and 2013 to show the depletion caused by repeated droughts since 2000. Now off to start tumblrs of GIFs of large-scale landscape change.]

4 Responses to “elephant butte reservoir”

  1. Jack Doil says:

    As a fishing guide on this lake, I am living this drought every day. We will make it and the lake will survive!

  2. Zen says:

    Bullshit, The reason the butte is so low is because suddenly the New Mexico Governor decided it would honor a 100 year old deal with Texas for water, and they opened the dam and let all the water go. Sure the drought may have some responsibility, but the reality is, the low level of the lake is because they let all the water out. Way to kill the local tourist economy. Keep it up dumbasses.

    • Jack Doil says:

      The governor did not make that decision, it was because Texas and Mexico filed lawsuits for their water.

    • Anchorite says:

      If NM fails to meet its water obligations to TX they don’t pay a simple penalty, a federal judge said the state engineer goes to jail. Why should he go to jail so everyone else can take the water TX is entitled to? It’s an artificial reservoir to begin with, and global climate change which started this drought is the fault of all of us. If we want that water back we have to start paying a premium for food so it can be farmed by techniques that don’t destroy the soil, and we have to plant a ton of trees in a hurry to keep it here, and stop acting like sacrificing our cars for our childrens’ future is out of line. Government is not going to solve this as industry capture is all but complete. We have to just go ahead and fight it on all levels.