As the city of Las Vegas grows, Lake Mead, its water supply, shrinks. In the mid-1980s, the Vegas metropolitan area was home to 438,000 people, and today that population has ballooned to upwards of 2.2 million. Consequently, the lake’s water level has dropped from 1,225 feet in July 1983 to 1,059 feet in May 2022 — the lowest since it first began to fill in 1935.