by Yanuar Heru Prakosa

Created on: April 06, 2009

Drought is one of the most frightening disaster. The cities in California State have taste the misery brought by this disaster. On the other part of the world, Argentina suffer the same thing. Is there really a connection between this two events? To answer the question we must go back to basic knowledge about drought. Drought is a term to explain the condition where the amount of water supply in a region is decreasing significantly. When the water supply run dry the region will experience negative side effects like lack of fresh water to consume and the death of some vegetation around the area. This condition will result suffering to the people and will cost large amount of money to fix the problem.

What may cause the drought? Basically, a drought is triggered by lack of amount of water in the clouds. Lack of vaporization from the land to the cloud will result lack of rain because the water vapor fail to gather in sufficient amount to create rain. How does such problem can occur in a region? Some reason may cause lack of vaporization from the land to the sky. One of the factor the vaporization of water is the ability of the soil to adsorb and store water supply. When land cannot adsorb water the land become dry it will lose it's ability to store water supply. When the water supply in the land is low the vaporization process will not bring sufficient water amount to form a cloud. Without a cloud then it will not be a rain drops. That kind of situation will result a drought.

Enough with the basic theory and now let us go to the reality. Both California and Argentina have suffer from drought. This drought in both place triggered by the same cause as mentioned above. The soil in both places have lose it's ability to store water supply. Why this kind of situation occurs? For California, the development of the state of California have consume most of the open land available. When lands are use to develop buildings it means the vegetation around the land will have to be removed in order a building can be make. The removal of this vegetation will decrease the soil ability to store water supply. When a vegetation removed from a open land the water contained inside the land cannot be absorbed by the plants. The land use the vegetation to store water and prevent the water to flow straight through the soil pores to the open sea. If you remove too many vegetation it will significantly decrease the soil ability to store water.

However, the Argentina case is slightly different.

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