If we’re not careful, the shrinking Aral Sea may offer a glimpse of the future of America’s freshwater lakes.

The Aral Sea, which once played host to a booming fishing industry that supported tens of thousands of people in Central Asia, is practically dead. It has become a surreal landscape of cracked earth, dotted with clusters of abandoned boats, docks and homes—the only indicators that less than 40 years ago the area was one of the Earth’s greatest sources of fresh water.
But this is only the most dramatic example of a much bigger problem: a combination of poor resource management and climate change is taxing many of the Earth’s lakes to the point of extinction.
This isn’t just another case of Earthwatch hysteria, but an everyday fact of life in many parts of the world—and increasingly in the U.S. The roll call of American lakes with dropping water levels includes Michigan, Superior, Huron, Mead, Powell and Okeechobee, among others. The question is whether these declines are temporary or can be reversed.

Rising temperatures and increasing demand are causing lakes around the U.S.—from Florida’s Lake Okeechobee to Utah and Arizona’s Lake Powell—to dry up. We show you six of the most serious cases in our slideshow feature.

A decade of drought conditions across much of the country is a key reason why so many lake levels are falling. And with no relief in sight—Southern California’s wildlands, for example, have already experienced the driest March and April on record, and the Southeast is entering its second year of one of the worst droughts in its history—the problem is only going to get worse.
Scientists who are working to preserve America’s water supplies aren’t necessarily surprised. “It’s not that we don’t know about the problem, it’s that we refuse to do anything to change it,” said Dr. Wade Graham, an environmental writer and trustee of the Glen Canyon Institute.
He points out that some of the nation’s fastest growing areas are also some of its most water-starved. As the populations have exploded in cities like Phoenix and Atlanta, water-planning projects have been left literally high and dry.
Graham points out that people living in these areas typically use more water—for things like golf courses, swimming pools and irrigation—than people in the North or in wetter regions. A perfect example is the recently approved Waveyard water sports complex near Phoenix, a 125-acre recreation facility that will use 100 million gallons of groundwater per year in one of the most water-starved areas of the U.S.
“You have kind of a perfect storm of more and more people wanting more and more water and nature providing less and less every year,” said Graham.
In theory, the Great Lakes, which contain 90 percent of America’s fresh surface water, could be the answer to the nation’s growing water needs. Developers and engineers around the country have begun to imagine elaborate projects to pump some of this water huge distances to attempt to satisfy the growing thirst in many southeastern and southwestern states.
But there are some serious problems with the proposals to exploit this aquatic mother lode.
First, the Great Lakes themselves already may be in trouble. Recently, water levels in Lakes Huron, Michigan and Superior all have fallen to or near record lows. Although the amount of water has always fluctuated, the warming climate in the area—Lake Superior’s average water temperature is up 4.5 degrees since 1979—is changing the overall dynamic, keeping the levels lower for longer periods.
Second, the costs of the proposed projects are astronomical. Dr. Jonathan Buckley, a professor of sustainable systems at the University of Michigan, estimated that transporting Great Lakes water 700 miles would cost more than $50 billion at today’s prices—the kind of expenses that will keep the projects on the drawing board.
Third, lawmakers in the Great Lakes region are fighting to keep control of what they see as “their” water. Currently, the governors of all eight Great Lakes states must approve plans to divert water. But a new proposal, known as the Great Lakes Compact, which would give them—along with the heads of two Canadian provinces—the ability to veto any water-diversion plans, has been in the works since 2005.
According to Jay Austin from the Large Lakes Observatory, “one of the primary concerns around the Great Lakes is seeing that the water stays in the area, because diverting water out of the region is the greatest threat to the region overall.”
One thing that is clear: using short-term solutions to address a long-term problem like water scarcity is only going to get us in more trouble. If we’re not careful, the devastation caused by the draining of the Aral Sea could be a mere prelude to the much more severe environmental crises to come.