Can the Dust Bowl Happen Again?
- Jann Alexander
- Jul 27
- 3 min read
A study examined 22 years of data on the world's fresh water supply and finds it's quickly disappearing, as unabated groundwater mining has increased
As I read the latest reporting in ProPublica, it's not hard to imagine a dystopian future for the U.S. Southwest and West that's closer than we think. Picture a world where the aquifers we rely on for fresh water have been tapped dry, with parched lands facing drought, and imagine the ensuing mass migrations that would follow, and once again, loose soil from abandoned farm fields blows across the country. It's a scene right out of the 1930s U.S. Dust Bowl.
In ProPublica's alarming account, "The Drying Planet," by Abrahm Lustgarten (based on research first published in the journal Science Advances, July 2025), aquifers that have taken millions of years to form are being depleted rapidly for irrigation, only to flow off into streams and rivers that supply the saltwater of the oceans.
"Moisture lost to evaporation and drought, plus runoff from pumped groundwater, now outpaces the melting of glaciers and the ice sheets of either Antarctica or Greenland as the largest contributor of water to the oceans," writes Lustgarten in ProPublica.
This water transfer has connected once-separate arid regions, shown by 22 years of observational data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment [GRACE] satellites. In just one decade, from 2014-2024, it has resulted in the formation of “mega-drying” regions that stretch across entire continents.
See the graphics in ProPublica's "The Drying Planet" to understand how
Today, throughout Texas and up through the southern High Plains, the Ogallala aquifer has been over-consumed by agriculture (since the 1940s), and the once vast glacial underground water is in danger of depletion. Where land west of the 100th meridian is as arid as desert, with less than 20" annually of reliable rainfall, the Ogallala aquifer has made it fertile for crops and herds. Now 22 years of research from the GRACE satellites highlights the conseqences.
The American Dust Bowl's origins were similarly decades in coming, and caused the mass migration of over 2.5 million U.S. residents of the Plains states in the Dirty Thirties (1930-1940), when farm fields affected by inadequate land-use management and poor farming practices, coupled with drought, became uninhabitable.
In a mythical town named Hartless in the Texas Panhandle where nobody knows how to fix air you can't breathe, one tenacious girl vows to stake her claim and face what's Unspoken.
Unspoken, the first book in The Dust Series, is new historical fiction featuring strong Texas women who face the worst the Great Depression, drought, the Dust Bowl, and world war can throw at them, yet persevere.
The U.S. does not have a nationwide policy regulating groundwater use. And without a revolutionary groundwater management act, akin to the 1935 Soil Conservation Act (enacted after the fearsome Black Sunday blizzard walloped Texas and the southern Plains states, to assist in recovery of barren Dust Bowl lands), it's not a leap for an author to plot for a dystopian waterless future. Which could end up being another novel in The Dust Series.
Read the entire ProPublica report HERE
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