40 Fun Facts About Droughts

Which name is given to the carved river rocks in Central Europe that only surface when a drought drops the water?

Hunger stones were carved during past droughts to warn later generations that famine follows low water. One in the Elbe at Děčín tells whoever can read it to weep.

In which country do droughts expose the Dolmen of Guadalperal, a 5,000-year-old monument drowned by a reservoir?

Spain flooded the monument in 1963 when it filled the Valdecañas reservoir on the Tagus. Its likeness to a famous English ring of stones earned it the nickname the Spanish Stonehenge.

Which South African city came close to Day Zero, the day its taps would be shut off, in a 2018 drought?

Cape Town would have been the first major city in the world to run dry. Residents were limited to 50 litres a day each, and winter rain refilled the dams before the deadline came.

Which African fish survives droughts by burrowing into mud and sleeping for months inside a cocoon of dried mucus?

Lungfish can breathe air, so they outlast a dried-up pond that kills other fish. Their line is older than the dinosaurs, with fossils reaching back more than 400 million years.

Which novelist's brother discovered that silver iodide could seed clouds, a rainmaking tool still tried in droughts?

Kurt Vonnegut later gave the crystal structure of ice a starring role in his novel Cat's Cradle. His brother Bernard found the compound at his desk in 1946, by looking through a basic chemistry text.

Which 2014 science-fiction film used real interviews with Dust Bowl survivors to portray its dying, dust-choked Earth?

Interstellar director Christopher Nolan asked Ken Burns for clips from his 2012 documentary on the 1930s storms. The witnesses on screen are describing the real thing.

Which California city hired rainmaker Charles Hatfield to fill a reservoir, then saw floods destroy its bridges?

San Diego got far more than it asked for from a man who called himself a moisture accelerator. Hatfield had sold sewing machines, and he went back to it during the Depression.

Which insects swarmed England in their billions during the 1976 drought after the aphids they feed on died off?

Ladybugs, or ladybirds as the British call them, were put at 23.65 billion along England's southern and eastern coasts that July. A warm spring had first let the aphids boom.

Which reservoir behind Hoover Dam shrank so far in a 2022 drought that a body in a barrel emerged?

Lake Mead was then at its lowest level since it first filled in the 1930s. The barrel may have been stuck in the mud since the late 1970s or early 1980s.

Which desert, where some weather stations have never recorded rain, does NASA use to test Mars instruments?

Atacama soil is so dry and lifeless that it stands in for the Martian surface. It is the driest non-polar desert in the world, yet ocean fog keeps a few cacti alive.

Which John Steinbeck novel follows the Joads, a family driven from Oklahoma by drought, on the road to California?

The Grapes of Wrath borrowed closely from field notes taken by Sanora Babb, a writer working for the Farm Security Administration. It came out in 1939, while the dust was still blowing.

Which name was given to April 14, 1935, when a huge wall of dust rolled across the Dust Bowl states?

Black Sunday began clear, warm and still, which is why so many people were caught outdoors. A news story about the storm gave the Dust Bowl its name.

Which president ordered a belt of more than 200 million trees planted across the Great Plains to tame the Dust Bowl?

Roosevelt's Great Plains Shelterbelt ran in a band from the Canadian border into Texas. The rows of trees broke the wind and held soil and moisture in place.

Which African tree endures droughts by storing up to 120,000 litres of water inside its swollen trunk?

Baobab trees can live for more than 2,000 years, but their trick has limits: many of Africa's oldest and largest began dying early this century, likely from drought and heat.

Which seasonal wind pattern, when it fails, is the usual cause of drought and poor harvests across India?

Monsoon winds bring India most of its yearly rain in one season, from June to September, so a weak one leaves crops and reservoirs short for the whole year.

Which US national park saw more than a third of its land burn during the severe drought summer of 1988?

Yellowstone's fires burned for months, and thousands of firefighters and soldiers could not put them out. Rain and snow on September 11 finally calmed them.

Which biblical prophet warned King Ahab of a years-long drought, then hid by a brook where ravens fed him?

Elijah saw the drought end, in the biblical account, only after he faced 450 prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel and prayed there for rain.

Which shipping shortcut cut its daily crossings from 36 ships to 22 in 2023 when drought lowered Gatun Lake?

Panama Canal locks are fed by rain, not the sea: each passing ship uses millions of litres of fresh water drawn from the artificial lake at the route's summit.

Which nut, grown mostly in drought-prone California, needs roughly a gallon of water to produce a single kernel?

Almonds are thirsty enough that California's dry years have pushed some growers out of the business, cutting supply and raising prices. The state grows about 80 percent of the world's crop.

Which US city's water utility coined the word xeriscaping in 1981 for gardens designed to need little watering?

Denver Water planner Nancy Leavitt built the word from the Greek for dry. The utility has since tried a new name, partly because the word sounds so much like zeroscaping.

Which trees' growth rings showed that the Roanoke colonists of 1587 arrived during an extreme drought?

Bald cypress trees in the region gave a record running from 1185 to 1984, and 1587 turned out to be the worst growing season in all 800 years.

Which civilization abandoned cities such as Tikal and Copán during a drought called the worst in 7,000 years?

Maya cities in the southern lowlands emptied in the 8th and 9th centuries. Mud cores from Yucatán lakes point to a dry spell of some 200 years, though scholars still argue over how much it mattered.

Which climate pattern tends to deepen droughts in California and the US Southwest while soaking eastern Australia?

La Niña is a cooling of the tropical Pacific, the opposite phase to its better-known sibling. A sudden switch to it in 2010 ended Australia's Millennium Drought with record rain.

Which animal did Indigenous Australians dig out of desert burrows and gently squeeze for a drink of fresh water?

A frog is right: the water-holding frog fills its bladder and skin pockets, seals itself in a mucus cocoon and can wait underground for up to five years until rain returns.

Which 1974 Jack Nicholson film has a detective uncover a plot to dump Los Angeles water during a drought?

Chinatown drew on the real California water wars, in which Los Angeles secured the water rights of the distant Owens Valley and left its farms to dry out.

Which river fell so low in Europe's 2022 drought that dozens of German warships sunk in 1944 reappeared?

Danube water had hidden the wrecks since the fleet was sunk to block the route to Soviet forces. A European Commission researcher called 2022 the continent's worst year in 500.

Which folk singer left Texas with the Dust Bowl migrants and earned the nickname the Dust Bowl Troubadour?

Woody Guthrie turned what he saw on the road to California into the 1940 album Dust Bowl Ballads. He had grown up in Okemah, Oklahoma.

Which nickname stuck to families fleeing the Dust Bowl for California, even those from Kansas, Texas or Arkansas?

Okies was shorthand for Oklahomans, but it came to cover anyone who had lost everything on the Plains. By 2007 about an eighth of California's population had that heritage.

Which photographer documented Dust Bowl migrants for the government and took the 1936 portrait Migrant Mother?

Dorothea Lange found the family by chance, after passing a sign for a pea pickers' camp on a cold, rainy drive home. Her subject, Florence Owens Thompson, was named only decades later.

Which profession did A. E. Douglass follow before he founded tree-ring dating, a key tool for tracing ancient droughts?

Astronomer Douglass went looking for the sunspot cycle in wood: he reasoned that changes in the sun would shift the weather, and that trees would record it.

Which river's reservoir in Iraq dropped in a drought to reveal Kemune, a Bronze Age city some 3,400 years old?

Tigris water covers the site whenever the Mosul Dam reservoir is full, so archaeologists rushed in for rescue digs in early 2022. The palace there dates from the Mitanni Empire.

Which African lake, bordered by four countries, shrank by about 90 percent in the droughts of the 1960s to 1990s?

Chad is also the name of one of the four countries on its shore, with Nigeria, Niger and Cameroon. Fishing there almost stopped in the dry years and resumed only in the mid-1990s.

Which semi-arid belt south of the Sahara suffered a drought and famine that killed 100,000 people from the late 1960s?

Sahel rains kept dwindling from the 1960s, and the famine left 750,000 people dependent on food aid across a belt that runs from the Atlantic to the Red Sea.

Which vast aquifer beneath eight Great Plains states turned drought-prone Dust Bowl land into irrigated farm country?

Ogallala water is being pumped out far faster than rain can refill it. Once drained, it would take more than 6,000 years to replenish naturally.

Which Arabic word names the towering wall of dust that thunderstorm downdrafts drive across drought-parched land?

Haboob comes from an Arabic root meaning wind or blow. The wall can stretch 100 km wide and several kilometres high, and in extreme droughts it can rise from farmland.

Which empire, builder of Angkor Wat, was weakened when severe droughts and floods wrecked its vast waterworks?

Khmer kings ran their rice fields on a huge system of reservoirs and channels. Heavy rains followed by a severe dry spell damaged it, and people may have drifted away to the south.

Which Mesopotamian empire, first to unite the region's city-states, may have fallen to a megadrought 4,200 years ago?

Akkadian farmland in the north was abandoned around 2170 BC as refugees poured south. Soon afterwards the Gutians came down from the Zagros Mountains and destroyed the capital.

Which word does the US Drought Monitor attach to D4, the most intense of its drought categories?

Exceptional sits one step above Extreme on the weekly map, which is updated every Thursday. The lowest label, D0 or Abnormally Dry, does not count as a drought at all.

Which type of drought, slow to appear, means that reservoirs, lakes and groundwater have fallen below normal?

Hydrological drought lags behind the weather because it involves stored water that is used but not refilled. A simple shortage of rain or snow usually comes first.

Which Chilean port city is often called the driest city on Earth, averaging under a millimetre of rain a year?

Arica averages just 0.76 mm of precipitation a year at its airport weather station. Chileans still call it the city of eternal spring for its mild weather.