Buried Treasure

One paradox of global warming is that it can cause both too much and too little rain, flooding some areas while others suffer prolonged drought. Australia has been parched for more than five years, making the water crisis a central issue in that country’s politics. In southwest China’s Sichuan region, no enduring its worst drought in more than a century, a 2006 crisis left more than 17,000 people without drinking water; in 2007 the government- and university- operated U.S.
Drought Monitor website reported that half the continental U.S. was experiencing abnormal dryness or drought. Over the previous four years, drought patterns migrated cast, crippling crops, shrinking lakes and drying up wells in eight southern states. Florida’s lake Okeechobee, the second largest body of fresh water in America, fell to a record low level in 2007, leaving so much of the bed dry that 12,000 acres of it caught fire in may.Draught can lead to desertification, the process by which once arable land is replaced by arid desert. In some cases, including the current humanitarian crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan, war and genocide are the ghastly offspring of drought, as shrinking supplies of water and fertilizer land breed violence. Here, farmers in Garissa, Kenya, seek water in 2006 at a well dug by hand