Link to NPR story
Fascinating. Does deteriorating soil quality ever get mentioned in these stories? Rarely. The ability of our soil to handle drought and flooding is determined by its quality. Quality is the amount of pores in the soil which absorb moisture. Those pores are made by microbes living off of the organic matter in the soil. When that organic matter is gone, a soil can no longer hold the flood of water. That means plants die and ground cover dies out. The next drought, that soil tightens and hardens even more. It has lost its ability hold moisture which can help it get through the drought, so now the drought is really bad.
It kind of makes me think of one of those expanding spirals of crises, and with each event the crises seem to be as bad or worse than the previous ones.
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