9 ms·
Receding glacier causes Canadian river to vanish in four days
- OliverJones 10y agoThere's another possibility of the event this author calls "river piracy." The Mississippi river is chronically at risk of being grabbed by the Atchafalaya River. John McPhee wrote about this in 1987. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/02/23/atchafalaya http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/02/23/atchafalaya
- nickbauman 10y agoLoved that piece. It's part of a collection: The Control of Nature. Made me realize all the more that the life on planet earth isn't all about us and our little schemes.
- nostrademons 10y agoThe Salton Sea is also an example. Its current incarnation was formed through accidental diversion of the Colorado River through an irrigation canal, and its continued existence is sustained through agricultural runoff from diverted Colorado River water. The Colorado River no longer reaches the Gulf of Baja in most years. http://www.water.ca.gov/saltonsea/documents/history.cfm http://www.water.ca.gov/saltonsea/documents/history.cfm
- dragonwriter 10y ago> The Colorado River no longer reaches the Gulf of Baja in most years. As your source gets correct, the body of water in question is the Gulf of California, not the "Gulf of Baja".
- narrowrail 10y agoO/T: The Baja peninsula is great for camping except June-Aug, and I've spent ~15 weeks along [what we called] the Sea of Cortez. So, I went to wikipedia and apparently, it's gotten somewhat political. I can see both sides, but for other folks who like to lurk talk pages (the first thread is a discussion about what to call this body of water): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gulf_of_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gulf_of_California
- cjensen 10y agoIf you check out Google Maps, you'll see that the Colorado does in fact reach the Gulf of California. Not an impressive amount, but some. Enough that water clarity in the north part of the gulf is significantly worse than the south (a few feet versus tens of feet).
- burntrelish1273 10y agoFor a second, I was thinking sand piracy. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/indias-illegal-sand-mining-fuels-boom-ravages-rivers/2012/05/19/gIQA3HzdaU_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/indias-ill...
- Almaviva 10y ago"The calculations put chance of the piracy having occured due to natural variability at 0.5%. “So it’s 99.5% that it occurred due to warming over the industrial era,” said Best." We need to train children in school to understand what statistical confidence means, so that we stop saying wrong things like this.
- acover 10y agoWhy is it wrong? If you reject the null hypothesis with a 99.5% chance it is not a type 1 error.
- Para2016 10y agoYou can't say it's 99.5% due to global warming alone though. You can say 0.5% occurring by random chance but you can't just ascribe everything to one causal factor. Could be multi-factorial.
- interurban 10y agoWhile the exact language in the quote is perhaps implying something, it only directly says the that the cause is warming during the industrial era. It doesn't provide any direct information about causal factors.
- Para2016 10y agoIn the article: "So it’s 99.5% that it occurred due to warming over the industrial era," said Best. I don't have a problem with them saying for example - "We believe that the river changed due to warming over the industrial era" I don't really have a problem with anything they conclude to be honest, I was just answering another guy's question. Shitty of HN users to give me negative points over it. I feel like I'm on Reddit again.
- acover 10y agoThat is possible. However in the abstract the author states "Based on satellite image analysis and a signal-to-noise ratio as a metric of glacier retreat, we conclude that this instance of river piracy was due to post-industrial climate change."
- douche 10y agoThis kind of thing has happened several times in China in recorded history with the Yellow River, to the point where sometimes the river has flowed into the ocean north of the Shandong peninsula and sometimes south of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_River#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_River#History
- jonknee 10y agoRivers re-route themselves frequently, the difference is cause (sediment for the Yellow River, melting glacier for the Slims).
- mannykannot 10y agoThe re-routing of rivers within their deltas, due to sediment deposition, is how deltas get to be delta-shaped. The thwarted (at least for now) capture of the Mississippi by the Atchafalaya, mentioned on another comment, would have been another example of this.
- lostlogin 10y agoThe Amazon is another example of having flow reversal - presumably things got very damp as water levels sorted themselves out.
- necessity 10y agoBooo it's the ghost of global warming! Always threatening, never happening.
- unknown2374 10y agoAre you serious right now? Global warming isn't just a moment in history, it's a process that has been happening over the years, with rising sea levels and land sinking in a lot of countries. I guess you are just one of those people who fail to acknowledge it unless it's your own home slowly getting submerged under water.
- 0xfeba 10y agoTell that to the (Rep.) Mayor of Miami and the engineers there who are fighting on-going sea-level rise. http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/miami-beachs-400-million-sea-level-rise-plan-is-unprecedented-but-not-everyone-is-sold-8398989 http://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/miami-beachs-400-million-s...
- derrickdirge 10y agoAnd here I thought this was a prime example of it 'happening'.
- erikpukinskis 10y agoThat's how a lot of historical events happen. They loom, they threaten, they simmer, and then they happen. Sure, the writing on the wall is just words, but sometimes it's still worth a read.
- komali2 10y agoWhy do you believe this?
- komali2 10y agoShame, it was flagged and removed. It was a comment that was highly sarcastic and critical of climate change, but I'd say no more sarcastic than any other comment we might find on here. Perhaps we could have benefited from learning why people continue to falsely believe climate change isn't real.
- LeifCarrotson 10y agoI think you meant to put this comment in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14131759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14131759
- sctb 10y agoWe detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14132125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14132125 and marked it off-topic.
- inetknght 10y agoI'm thinking you're commenting on the wrong article ;) Did you mean -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14131759 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14131759
- strictnein 10y agoReading IDF as Israel Defense Force made that even more confusing.
- kensai 10y agoGuys, I seriously do not know wtf happened. I never opened this "Receding glacier" thread. I was commenting on the Intel thread and my comment somehow ended up here. I got aware of it because of all these negative points which came quite unexpected. Could it have been a glitch in the database?
- sctb 10y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14132125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14132125 and marked it off-topic.
- sandworm101 10y agoLol "immense" river 150m wide. Ok guardian readers, that may be an immense and scary river in the UK but canadians reserve words like immense for far larger things. At 15km this river may well be the largest thing ever seen by a brit, but canada has something like 50 rivers over 350 miles long. This is a glacial stream by the standards of The North, a part of canada bigger than all western europe. My local dog beach has a river 150m wide.
- bearcobra 10y ago>At 15km this river may well be the largest thing ever seen by a brit The Thames is 346 km long, so probably not.
- mattmanser 10y agoOne writer describes 15km as immense and suddenly all Guardian readers are idiots? For reference, the Thames is 350km long.
- sandworm101 10y agoIdiots no, but given how UK publications so often describe geographical features one is left with the impression that the UK is sized like legoland. This is not a large river and, given the climate change aspect to the story, to desribe it as such is dishonest.
- komali2 10y agoHrm, I'd hate to say it like this but it's not always the length that matters. Did you read the bit about the volume of water that the pirating river increased by?
- wnevets 10y agoare you really gatekeeping size of rivers on hackernews?
- uiri 10y agoThe River Thames is wider than 150m inside of London. The London Bridge is over 250m long[1]. It is rather wide given its proximity to its headwaters but not on an absolute scale, even by British standards. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Bridge
- titojankowski 10y agoSweet, so what should we build to change this? Giant carbon-sucking machines, cube-sats pointed at glaciers? (planet labs is doing cool stuff in this space, including a project to count every tree on Earth every day). Solutions welcome!
- ocschwar 10y agoTrain tracks in place of highways, for starters. Windmills and panels everywhere.
- titojankowski 10y agoYea totally! Does Hyperloop count as train tracks? I wonder what upcoming inventions in windmills look like...
- ocschwar 10y agoMet a guy who was trying to sell a setup to plasma-fy the air along the edges of turbine wings to squeeze a bit more efficiency. There's room for improvement still.
- titojankowski 10y agoWow crazy, I don't understand plasma-fy tho...some device on the edge of the windmill blade would change the nature of the air to reduce friction?
- ocschwar 10y agoYes. Not necessarily reduce it, but change the profile around the blade to get more out of the wind.
- flukus 10y ago> Yea totally! Does Hyperloop count as train tracks? Not until it exists.
- niftich 10y agoI was just looking at the Alsek valley on Google Earth the other day. It's (obviously) a water-level route from behind the mountains to the coast, and abuts the drainage divide with the Yukon. The entire Alsek-Tatshenshini-Kaskawulsh-Dezadeash system's upper reaches occur in glacier-scoured valleys so ice damming or stream undercutting could greatly change the direction rivers flow. The northwest-southeast trench that includes Kluane Lake and continues beyond Haines Junction is the Shakwak Trench [4], created by the Denali fault. Here's a map of the article's glacier and the surrounding area: http://i.imgur.com/tL84Bd0.jpg http://i.imgur.com/tL84Bd0.jpg (edited from the park map [1]) A different scan from a 1985 topo map: http://i.imgur.com/cVmWLlP.jpg http://i.imgur.com/cVmWLlP.jpg (cropped from [2]) Meanwhile, 90 kilometers downriver (south) along the Kaskawulsh->Alsek, the west-to-east Lowell Glacier used to squish the north-to-south Alsek River against the far valley wall, damming it and causing a lake to extend upstream [3]-- the last time this happened was around 1850; the source estimates it'd take a year of being dammed for lake to extend up the Dezadeash to Haines Junction. [1] http://www.pc.gc.ca/en/pn-np/yt/kluane/visit/~/media/088B38E3A3D14CECA4035A16E0CEB0B7.ashx http://www.pc.gc.ca/en/pn-np/yt/kluane/visit/~/media/088B38E... [2] http://www.canmaps.com/topo/nts250/med/115b.htm http://www.canmaps.com/topo/nts250/med/115b.htm [3] http://www.geology.gov.yk.ca/lowell_glacier.html http://www.geology.gov.yk.ca/lowell_glacier.html [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Yukon#Physical_geography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Yukon#Physical_ge...
- Mz 10y agoOne problem with the way this is framed: Rivers have historically meandered. They didn't have a set path. The modern expectation that rivers have a set path is one we tend to try to actively enforce. Elsewhere in comments here, someone noted that the Salton Sea is similar. But if you read Salt Dreams, Native Americans had oral history suggesting that there had been a lake there previously. Geological records agree with the oral history.