[Music] welcome back it's Earth week and all week ABC News is looking at the power of water today it's all about the Colorado River the most endangered River in the country and an Innovative tool to help fight the mega drought Ginger Zee has more the Colorado River called the hardest working river in the United States is in danger this is due to two causes reductions in precipitation and increased air temperatures we're now seeing flows in the Colorado River that we've never seen before since records were kept the river provides hydropower to seven states irrigation to
more than 5 million Acres of Farmland drinking water to 40 million Americans and of course the breathtaking whitewater rapids running through the Grand Canyon all of it threatened by more than two decades in a mega drought there's actually a better term for what we're in an ongoing eridification of the American West a ratification means the warming and drying the long-term warming and drying is permanent it's not temporary we can't just flip a switch like Colonel Joe Moore in Mad Max Fury Road but we do have a superpower straight out of science Fiction's X-Men the Last
Stand it's called weather modification or cloud seating we can't create the cloud there has to be an existing storm system we just give it a bump yeah Garrett kamins heads up one of the largest cloud seeding companies in the U.S has the desperation in the mega drought made the interest in cloud seeding Skyrocket oh definitely there are currently 42 cloud seating projects across the American West like this one in Utah where they take planes like this with flares attached they fly right into the storm and send microscopic particles into the cloud particles that act like
magnets for water droplets bonding together until they are heavy enough to fall to the ground as rain or snow whose pilot showed us a cloud seating demonstration flight s that cloud seating can make three to fifteen percent more snowpack that water can be Priceless it can make the difference of adding a couple weeks to your irrigation cycle for your crops in fact the lower Colorado River Basin states of Arizona Nevada and California actually pay for cloud seeding all the way over here in Utah to increase their snowpack that will melt into the Colorado River at
the University of Colorado researchers are working on artificial intelligence to deploy cloud-seeding drones and it's not just cloud seeding from the sky there are hundreds of those things that Shack you see in the foreground is a ground-based cloud seeder the little flame coming out is sending tiny silver iodide particles up into the sky when a storm comes through they go up to 2 000 feet above our head into the storm up those mountains and make more snow than it naturally would while cloud seeding has been helping get every last drop out of some of the
driest years on record this past winter Mother Nature came through the southern Rockies which feed the Colorado River got more than four times their average snow but experts say it's still not enough it would take five or six years just like this year to refill this system and most people myself included think we will never ever see these reservoirs refill again so even with ramped up cloud seating something has to give it's really hard to tease apart you know what's over use and and what's climate change agriculture is somewhere around 75 percent of all water
use in the lower Basin the cities are actually quite a tiny part so it comes down to what's AG going to do about this as much as cloud seeding is a boost or a help it's not a solution the main solution is conservation conservation is it truly and what we do know is that cloud seating is booming they anticipate at least another 200 ground cloud seeding machines to be put in before next season and ginger this is such a cool concept but is it too good to be true I mean how do we know that
the chemicals that they're spraying from the air aren't bad for us or the planet the good news is we've been doing this since the 1940s and 50s other countries do it and there have been a lot of research projects that have shown that the silver iodide for example is not found it's negligible once it gets down to ground level so again I don't want to be too skeptical but is there anything wrong with manipulating nature like this I think that's the question we should have asked when we built every single parking lot and every rooftop
we have been manipulating weather with our us for a very long time I do think that looking at and continuing research on when these programs get bigger if it will affect people Downstream that needs to be watched at least we're manipulating it now to help the planet so thank you hi everyone George Stephanopoulos here thanks for checking out the age C News YouTube channel if you'd like to get more videos show highlights and watch live event coverage click on the right over here to subscribe to our Channel and don't forget to download the ABC News
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