Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Below Imperial Dam the remnants of the Colorado river lessen in gradient and in its lower course flows through the Colorado Desert in a broad sedimentary plain upriver from Yuma, Arizona, where it is joined by the Gila River. The Gila was once one of the Colorado's largest tributaries, draining a huge swath of Arizona and western New Mexico.
Dams on tributaries are listed if they are taller than 250 ft (76 m), store more than 50,000 acre⋅ft (62,000 dam 3), or are otherwise historically notable. Tributary dams are organized into two lists; those in the Upper Basin, defined as the half of the Colorado River basin above Lee's Ferry, Arizona, and the Lower Basin.
A large dam on the Colorado River had been envisioned since the 1920s. In 1928, Congress authorized the Reclamation Service (today's U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, or USBR) to build the Boulder Canyon Project, whose key feature would be a dam on the Colorado in Black Canyon 30 miles (48 km) southeast of Las Vegas, Nevada.
Prior to the construction of major dams along its route, the Colorado River fed one of the largest desert estuaries in the world. Spread across the northernmost end of the Gulf of California, the Colorado River delta's vast riparian , freshwater, brackish, and tidal wetlands once covered 7,810 km 2 (1,930,000 acres) and supported a large ...
Before the dam could be built, the Colorado River needed to be diverted away from the construction site. To accomplish this, four diversion tunnels were driven through the canyon walls, two on the Nevada side and two on the Arizona side. These tunnels were 56 ft (17 m) in diameter. [51]
A visual journey along the Colorado River, from the headwaters to Mexico, that shows the environmental toll on the depleting resource.
Glen Canyon Dam is a concrete arch-gravity dam in the southwestern United States, located on the Colorado River in northern Arizona, near the city of Page.The 710-foot-high (220 m) dam was built by the Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) from 1956 to 1966 and forms Lake Powell, one of the largest man-made reservoirs in the U.S. with a capacity of more than 25 million acre-feet (31 km 3). [4]
Hostility and mistrust are at the heart of the inability of California and six other states to reach an agreement on the Colorado River.