5+ day, 41+ min ago   (745+ words) WorldAtlas According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's 2012 National Lakes Assessment, an estimated 48% of the roughly 111,119 lakes across the lower 48 states are reservoirs, meaning water impounded behind a dam rather than a basin that filled on its own. So when you…...

5+ day, 20+ hour ago   (1442+ words) WorldAtlas Alaska records more large earthquakes than the other 49 states combined, and the interior census area that leads this list is slightly larger than the state of Montana. One terminology note first: Alaska has no counties, so this list uses…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (1159+ words) WorldAtlas The white "bathtub ring" around Lake Mead has become one of the most alarming images in America, a ghostly line of bleached rock showing exactly how much water the country's largest reservoir has surrendered to drought. It is a…...

1+ week, 6+ day ago   (771+ words) WorldAtlas Straddling the desert border between Nevada and Arizona, Lake Mead is the cornerstone reservoir of the American Southwest. Holding the single largest storage capacity in the United States, it supplies essential drinking water, agricultural irrigation, and hydroelectric energy to…...

2+ week, 16+ hour ago   (869+ words) WorldAtlas For years, the story of American water has been one long drought headline: Lake Mead hitting record lows, Lake Powell circling the drain, bathtub rings and cracked lakebeds everywhere you look. But that is only half the picture. Across…...

2+ week, 5+ day ago   (416+ words) Montana completes an extraordinary Missouri River sweep of the top three. Fort Peck Lake held 12.683 million acre-feet on August 21, 2026, at an elevation of 2,223.33 ft. The project's upper storage capacity reaches about 18.46 million acre-feet. The reservoir runs roughly 134 miles across northeastern…...

2+ week, 6+ day ago   (909+ words) WorldAtlas Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir in the United States, has been shrinking for years. In August 2026, it reached a new record low of about 3,520 feet, roughly 22 percent of capacity and some 180 feet below its full level. That sinking waterline…...

3+ week, 4+ day ago   (951+ words) WorldAtlas The Great Salt Lake has been shrinking, reaching a record low in late 2022, exposing about 1,000 square miles of dry, dusty lakebed and dropping to roughly six feet below the level considered healthy by scientists. By summer 2026, after a particularly…...

3+ week, 5+ day ago   (710+ words) WorldAtlas A single mountain lion can range across hundreds of square miles of backcountry. One young male tracked by biologists covered more than 1,500 miles, wandering from the Black Hills of South Dakota all the way to Connecticut. Territories that large,…...