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South America's second-largest river retreats to lowest levels in 77 years
- edumucelli 5y agoThe interactivity of the article is really nice!
- throwaway888abc 5y agoSad new with nice story telling. Wish there would be more articles in this format around. Santa, less ads and more of this creativity/innovations for 22.
- mkl 5y agoTry it on mobile and you might change your mind. I persisted because I was quite interested, but was tempted to give up immediately with how hard it was to read.
- throwaway888abc 5y agoFair point. I didn't. To downvoters: Doesn't mean that EVERY article has to be like this. Just saying to for occasion magazine type consumption this is really nice to me.
- sergers 5y agoHow did the water level increase since 1944? For it to now reduce to that same level Was it man made intervention?
- trhway 5y agogoogling brings Brazil Parana state - located on that river - as having highest rate of deforestation there and then this: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/04/world/americas/drought-argentina-parana-river.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/04/world/americas/drought-ar... "Experts say deforestation in the Amazon, along with rain patterns altered by a warming planet, are helping fuel the drought. Much of the humidity that turns into the rain that feeds tributaries of the Paraná originates in the Amazon rainforest, where trees release water vapor in a process scientists call “flying rivers.” Rampant deforestation has disrupted this flow of humidity, weakening the streams that feed the larger rivers in the basin"
- farmerstan 5y agoWhat caused the drought in 1944?
- trhway 5y agoi just googled Russian Volga river and it had dramatic level decrease during 193x into 194x as a result of the 193x drought - similar to the Dust Bowl in the US. NASA has some explanation for the Dust Bowl https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2004/0319dustbowl.html https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2004/0319... Looking into various photos, movies, etc. of 193x it looks to me like it was kind of "sunny" compare to for example very bleak 198x, and it is not surprising - the mid 194x was the warm peak of the 80 years cycle while the 198x were the cold peak (thus for example hit to USSR agriculture in those years which combined with the low oil of the 198x brought the USSR down (and the conditions due to the low peak of the 190x - also pretty bleak years - were a major factor causing the first Russian Revolution in 1905)). The cycle-wise we seems to be coming to the next warm peak which on top of the global warming promises very hot temperatures and droughts for the next decade and even lower water levels for the rivers and the lakes.
- brabel 5y agoThe Amazon starts around 1,600 km north of the Parana River. Can it affect the river flow so strongly from that distance?
- protastus 5y agoYes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_river https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_river
- trhway 5y agohttps://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alain-Chambrier/publication/273678149/figure/fig2/AS:614126632046596@1523430607036/Map-of-South-America-with-two-principal-river-basins-Amazon-and-Parana-Rivers.png https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alain-Chambrier/publica... It seems plausible that Amazon rainforest will affect the North tributaries. And the Parana state with its deforestation is about midway of the river.
- wsc981 5y agoWhen looking at the bottom of the article, it seemed the river was quite full in 2019 and in 2021 seems suddenly most of the river is gone. Is it really fair to blame global warming for this 2 year massive change? I find that hard to believe. At the bottom of the article it's stated: > “It is a twice in a century event,” said Sierra, who is an advisor to the Buenos Aires grains exchange, adding that a long-term weather cycle had converged with a double hit from the La Niña phenomenon which lowers precipitation. So perhaps next year the river could be up at 2019 levels again?
- mysterydip 5y agoIf warming is causing ice to melt, shouldn't rivers be higher rather than lower?
- diego_moita 5y ago> When looking at the bottom of the article, Yeah, when you cut out what you don't want to read you'll draw just the conclusions you want to have. If you were to read the whole article you'd understand that it refers to several causes compounding and working together, deforestation and global warming are not the only ones. But most people just like to read the convenient parts.
- foerbert 5y agoI've got nothing to say about what the actual cause is, but I see many lines of thought go this direction and don't think they are credible. Not everything is a simple linear effect. There are all kinds of interactions that do not have a simple linear correlation between the amount of cause and the degree of effect. Climate and the effects on various things we care about are particularly complex and full of these sorts of interactions. There is no inherent reason to doubt global warming is a plausible cause for something just because it took place (relatively) suddenly. Is global warming the cause in this specific instance? I have no idea. But discounting the idea just because the river didn't slowly get lower over the past decade or two is not reasonable.
- pvaldes 5y agoSo... If you remove the trees... the water will disappear? Who could have predicted that? Thanks again, Captain Chainsaw. You are a f*ing genius.
- GrumpyNl 5y agoI love the article and behaviour, but why not just a next button, very hard interface.
- woliveirajr 5y agoI remember those articles, about European rivers being so low that it was possible to see inscriptions from 1300, 1400. Which, of course, means that centuries ago those rivers were low too, in a period that climate change wasn't a thing and the Amazon forest wasn't even known.
- bigbillheck 5y agoLots of people knew about the Amazon rainforest in 1300, they just weren't in Europe at the time.
- pwned1 5y agoWhy does the rainfall chart start in 1992? And the images at the bottom show the river in flood stage in 2019 and then "normal" in 2020. It gives a very misleading impression.
- Mikeb85 5y agoSo 77 years ago it was this low... Yet the whole article is coming up with a million justifications for how we 'caused' an outlier event that's happened before.
- bulatb 5y agoAlice's car has been on the car lot only twice in its life: once when she bought it, and today when it was repossessed. How could its location now have anything to do with the systemic economic problems that caused her job to disappear, since it's been there before?