The nonprofit Grand Canyon Trust says its new analysis of monitoring wells in the Grand Canyon region shows wells within a nearby uranium mine have unusually high arsenic levels compared to other groundwater sources in the area.

Pinyon Plain Mine representatives argue that the toxic metal is naturally occurring, not contamination from the mining operation.

Arizona recently raised an arsenic limit at one monitoring well at Pinyon Plain Mine, where scientists are still trying to understand how water moves underground.

From high in the hills around Las Vegas, tourist Choune Osterero gazes down at the line of chalky mineral deposits left on the rocks around Lake Mead as the level of America's largest reservoir has dropped over the last quarter of a century of drought.

As of August 5, the reservoir stood at 1,040.74 feet above sea level, just 0.16 feet (1.9 inches) above its record low of 1,040.58 feet, which was set in July 2022.

Lake Mead is inches away from dropping to a new record low as poor snowpack, years of overuse, a lack of cooperation among the seven basin states that use the Colorado River and even evaporation continue to drain the reservoir.

A LiveScience study says probably not. On the water side of the equation, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that Earth has about 1.4 billion gigatons of water, including that in oceans, ice caps, glaciers, lakes, rivers, groundwater and vapor.

Energy Fuels mines uranium-laden limestone found in the area around Red Butte in a process known as breccia pipe mining. David Kramer, a hydrogeologist at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, explained the process to a crowd of attendees at the summit.