Is the Mississippi River Drying Up From Drought?

The Mississippi River is the latest body of water in North America to be hit by ongoing drought.

The second-longest river in the United States, the Mississippi flows 2,350 miles from Lake Itasca, Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. As the water levels continue to recede, Tower Rock, an island in the middle of the Mississippi River, has become accessible by foot for the first time in living memory, CNN reported.

People are able to walk to the island when water levels are below 1.5 feet at the Chester, Illinois, river gauge, according to the Missouri Department of Conservation. Levels have now dropped to around zero.

The island is usually only accessible by boat due to it being surrounded by water. Missouri resident Jeff Miget told CNN that people can walk to the island now without getting their feet wet or muddy.

It is not the first incident to occur recently that points to the river's receding water levels. The sunken remains of a 19th-century trading ship were discovered in Baton Rouge, Louisiana recently, as the water levels drop.

Baton Rouge resident Patrick Ford told local news station WBRZ on October 10: "I was out here looking and realized the rest of the shore had washed away, and there was an entire ship there."

The Mississippi River is just the latest body of water to be hit by drought in the U.S.

Shipwrecks and even bodies are being uncovered at Lake Mead, the rapidly evaporating reservoir that stretches across Nevada and Arizona. Lake Mead is the biggest man-made reservoir in North America, yet the ongoing drought in the western United States is escalating it toward dead pool level.

Experts are also growing concerned about the Great Salt Lake in Utah, as its water levels are the lowest they've ever been.

Is the Mississippi river drying up from drought?

Louisiana state climatologist Barry D. Keim told Newsweek that there will always be some water in the Mississippi river.

"It would take one hell of a drought, probably for decades, to totally dry up the Mississippi River. That's just not going to happen," he said.

Keim said that states such as Kansas and Oklahoma are in extreme or exceptional drought, though.

"These states in their entirety drain into the Mississippi River. So I mean, the sort of simple answer [as to why water levels are receding] is it's been damn dry," he explained.

While it is difficult to know exactly why, Keim said there has been "a lot of high pressure" moving through the region.

"The easiest way I could probably simplify this is when we're in the summer and the atmosphere heats up, and then all energy propagates its way into the higher parts of the atmosphere, so we get a very warm upper atmosphere through the summer. As we start to transition into the fall, the surface temperatures start to cool off a little bit," Keim said.

"The upper atmosphere is still relatively warm because there's a lag—it takes time for the surface, all the energy to work its way up [into the] atmosphere. And as a result, the upper atmosphere is still relatively warm.

"And with that, when you have cooler surface temperatures and warm upper atmosphere temperatures, it creates what we call a very stable atmosphere. There isn't much overturning, and it's very difficult to get the needed uplift to create rainfall."

The situation with parts of the Mississippi River is not the same as Lake Mead, and others reaching a dead pool due to drought.

In fact, Keim said that the river has produced above normal water flow in recent years.

"We're just having weird little anomaly right now that this is, this is really a one-year issue," he said. "Whereby, you know, recent years I mean, we've had record flows on the Mississippi River, and having too much water in the river has really been a bigger problem."