As Lake Powell’s water level has dropped due to decades of drought, Glen Canyon is filling with green vegetation.

Many areas of the canyon that were flooded by the reservoir for decades have resurfaced and are now a center of flora and fauna.

Now, researchers have proposed keeping the canyon dry to allow the newly formed ecosystem to thrive, while others insist it should be filled to maintain the southwestern U.S.’s water supply.

Lake Powell is a man-made reservoir on the Colorado River on the border between Utah and Arizona. It was created in the 1960s by the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam, primarily for water storage, power generation, and recreation. Glen Canyon is the name of the canyon that was largely flooded by Lake Powell when the dam was built.

Lake Powell’s water levels have dropped significantly in recent years, largely due to a “megadrought” that has plagued the Colorado River basin for over 20 years and drastically reduced inflows into Lake Powell.

“This megadrought, or extended dry period, has been going on in the Southwest for about two decades now and has led to a real decline in our two major water reservoirs in the basin – Lake Mead and Lake Powell,” said Andrea K. Gerlak, a geography professor at the University of Arizona, previously Newsweek.

“Both reservoirs are at record low levels, raising fears that there will not be enough water for all the towns, farmers, tribes and businesses that were promised water and have built their economies around the water of the Colorado River.”

As of August 19, Lake Powell was 3,581.96 feet above sea level. Lake Powell has a water level of 3,700 feet and is currently about 38.8 percent full. It has a water level of 3,370 feet, below which water can no longer flow through the dam or generate hydroelectric power.

“Forty million people depend on the Colorado River, and if water doesn’t come through the Hoover Dam, that affects the water supply of 40 million people. And we’re talking about the cities in the Great West, the cities in the Southwest. We’re talking about farmers and we’re talking about tribes,” Robert Glennon, a water policy and law expert and professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, said previously Newsweek.

However, the declining water levels are apparently not all bad news: As the reservoir has receded over the decades, the falling water levels have exposed large swathes of previously flooded land, including parts of the original Glen Canyon, allowing a strange desert oasis to emerge, with native plant life.

“Nature has given us a second chance to reevaluate how we are going to deal with this place,” Seth Arens, a scientist with Western Water Assessment and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, told local news station KUNC.

“It turns out that nature is doing a pretty good job all on its own,” said Arens. “It’s recovering and creating thriving ecosystems.”

The native plants have attracted a wide variety of birds, lizards, mammals, amphibians and insects. Researchers and activists have said this is reason enough to keep the reservoir’s water levels as low as they are now, or even drain it completely and store the water elsewhere.

“If the old assumption was that we can store water in Glen Canyon because there’s nothing there, that assumption is wrong,” Eric Balken, director of the nonprofit Glen Canyon Institute, told KUNC. “There’s a lot here. Supplying water to this reservoir has serious ecological consequences, and we can no longer ignore that.”

In a 2023 report, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation described Glen Canyon as being overgrown with invasive plants as water levels drop, and stated that “any additional area of ​​exposed shoreline around Lake Powell has the potential to be invaded by invasive plant species such as tamarisk and Russian thistle,” KUNC reported.

“When I read that, I just thought, ‘Have these people ever been to Glen Canyon before?’ This place is a vibrant, thriving ecosystem,” Balken said.

A USBR spokeswoman told KUNC that “Reclamation’s considerations of vegetation impacts relate primarily to resources downstream of Glen Canyon Dam that are affected by the dam’s release,” with annual snowmelt likely having a greater impact on water levels than the water release from the USBR.

“Most releases, even on an annual basis, have negligible impacts on lake levels and vegetation,” she said.

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