Another apocalyptic risk - running out of water

Not trying to be funny but,,, wasn’t there a study about pumping water from the Mississippi River out west?

 

Let's ask Kevin costner

 

There was talk of trying to divert "the Mississippi" to the Colorado, but as a layman, this seems to be absolutely absurd.

I can imagine we may have the engineering ability to diverting a small part of the upper/west-central Miss watershed, but how effective can this really be? Here's a map of US watersheds if someone wants an idea of the task at hand (lime green: Colorado / pink: Mississippi):


(as a point of reference, the Arkansas river confluences with the Miss at a 300' above sea level. The Green river confluences with the Colorado at 4,000' above sea level)

And even if we do the near impossible: at what costs? Not just in terms of building it (which I can only imagine would be astronomically and prohibitively expensive as well as environmentally disasterous), but also the cost to the downstream Miss, plus all the unintended consequences. And what happens when the Mississippi watershed has another drought like it just had in the fall of '22?

 

Cool map!

 

agreed, amazing when you look at old muddy all alone

 

More than half of water from Colorado River used for agriculture industry, report finds