Glen Canyon dam is slowly losing capacity as sediment collects in its basin.
Sand waves are one of many sediment-related phenomena at Lake Powell . They form in water containing a high percentage of sediment when the river’s bottom isn’t perfectly flat.
Created on the Utah-Arizona border with the 1963 construction of the Glen Canyon Dam, Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir, could once hold almost 26 million acre-feet of water. But, according to a 2022 report from the, its capacity has since dropped by nearly 7%, primarily due to sediment deposited by the Colorado River’s tributaries and trapped by Lake Powell’s still waters.
The Returning Rapids Project is run under the Glen Canyon Institute, in which a “group of river-loving folks based in Moab” document “the recovery of the Colorado River in Cataract Canyon, upper Glen Canyon, and along the San Juan,” according to its “Runoff this year has been just below average,” Stauss said. “But new research is being done on how much sediment is moving through the canyons overtime, and where it is going and at what rate. A finding, for example, from 2023, that there was as much as 10 meters of sediment downcut from the river corridor in 2023 during runoff.”
However, while Glen Canyon’s ecosystems have begun to regrow in these areas, Ippolito said one issue facing the native flora and fauna is that there’s too much sediment all at once.Comparatively, Stauss said he’s received reports that the Grand Canyon is starved of sediment, with only 5% of the historic sediment amount making it downstream.
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