22 ms·

Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks

127 points by tomohawk 4y ago

bombcar 4y ago
Hmm, the St Croix is low but not lower than historical lows from years past: https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?gage=stlm5&wfo=mpx https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?gage=stlm5&wf... (The St Croix is 1% of the total discharge of the Mississippi.)
- InitialLastName 4y ago
  It annoys me to no end (in a tiny way) that there are two St Croix rivers along borders in the US.
citilife 4y ago
Current level: 10.52 ft. forecast has it at 7ft by end of October. Record lows: Low Water Records for Ohio River at Cairo (1) -1.00 ft on 12/24/1871 (2) 0.30 ft on 12/30/1876 (3) 1.10 ft on 01/01/1877 (4) 2.00 ft on 12/31/1887 (5) 2.50 ft on 10/20/1897 (6) 2.90 ft on 11/21/1901 (7) 4.93 ft on 07/12/1988 (8) 5.80 ft on 12/31/1963 (9) 6.87 ft on 08/28/2006 (10) 7.10 ft on 01/17/1981 (11) 7.15 ft on 08/29/2012 (12) 7.20 ft on 08/08/2005 (13) 8.52 ft on 09/11/2000 (14) 8.72 ft on 09/19/2005 (15) 8.72 ft on 07/25/2012 (16) 9.10 ft on 02/12/2000 (17) 11.33 ft on 06/30/2012 (18) 11.63 ft on 10/16/2006 (19) 13.10 ft on 05/19/2000 https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/water.php?wfo=pah&gage=ciri2 https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/water.php?wfo=pah&gage=ciri2
- deathanatos 4y ago
  Since I wondered how a river can have a negative depth: > A river's stage at a point (a gauge reading) is not an absolute measure of the depth of the water in the channel, rather it is a depth with respect to an historical Datum level. In summary, when a river gauge reads zero or in the negative numbers - it does not mean that the river has gone totally dry or is running below ground. It means that the gauge is reading at or below the agreed-upon zero level. > Silt may deposit in the river channel over time (filling the channel up), or the channel bottom may be scoured out to a deeper level by strong currents. > Still, the gauge zero datum levels are not changed to keep continuity. https://www.weather.gov/ctp/NegativeRiverStages https://www.weather.gov/ctp/NegativeRiverStages So, these aren't depth, and apparently aren't even comparable.
  - avidphantasm 4y ago
    And depending on sediment transport dynamics for a particular reach of the river, the depth could be higher or lower at a given stage (i.e., height above datum) today than at the same stage in the past.
edmcnulty101 4y ago
How can the article not mention that it ebbs and flows? They're making it alarmist sounding when it's just the natural state of the river.
- avidphantasm 4y ago
  Probably trying to drum up support for getting money from Congress for dredging key sections.
- o_1 4y ago
  Thirsty? light a fire, then people come with water.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Complex systems tend to fishtail when they're about to collapse. Peak output can go up while averages are declining.
  - edmcnulty101 4y ago
    This isnt excessively outside the deviation, see the quantitative. comment in this thread.
DavidPeiffer 4y ago
If you ever have a chance, I highly recommend going near a port and watching operations. I used to live near the Mississippi River in Iowa, and it was always impressive to see the barge traffic and think about the sheer volume of product moving. South of St. Louis, the barge tows can be up to 45 barges. Visiting Savanah, Georgia and watching the ships come and go was also impressive. There's a bridge that was built in 1953, replaced in 1991, and is in consideration for replacement again because the ships keep getting larger. I'll also recommend the Containers podcast, an 8 part series discussing global trade and why the ships keep getting bigger. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/containers/id1209559177 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/containers/id120955917...
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  The most impressive of the Panama Canal related expansion works was the project by PANYNJ in New York to raise the roadway of an existing arch bridge from within, and without interrupting traffic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayonne_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayonne_Bridge
  - bombcar 4y ago
    This kind of gives the lie to the "The US can't build anything anymore" - we do build things but we have all sorts of restrictions we wouldn't have operated under a hundred years ago. Back then we would have just built a whole new bridge somewhere nearby and then probably detonated the old one.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      Nobody says that the US literally cant build anything anymore. The sentiment, backed by data, is that it is vastly more expensive and slower to build than in the past. This makes it hard to justify attempting a project at all. This analysis [1] shows that building tunnels in the US costs 10X more than in Norway, and 3X the average for the countries studied. Obviously, this means that with the same government budget, you get 10% the infrastructure than a country like Norway. However, this also means the return on investment needs to be 10X higher to justify starting the project at all! This trend holds true for most types of building projects in the US. https://projectdelivery.enotrans.org/international/ https://projectdelivery.enotrans.org/international/
jollyllama 4y ago
Wasn't it just flooding?
- hinkley 4y ago
  Reduction in system capacity simultaneously decreases average throughput and decreases the ability to handle peak throughput.
status200 4y ago
It will be interesting to see how food waste statistics are influenced by these supply chain and inflation woes, as well as our interest in mono-cropping soy and corn.
hinkley 4y ago
If you ever have a friend or family member who is trying to get around wetland conservation laws, they are contributing to the shrinking of our river systems. Water retention capacity in upper watersheds directly contribute to average river flow, which is very easy to show by the behavior of streams. Deserts are self-reinforcing systems where the heat pushes clouds up or away from them. Wet, cool forests draw in more precipitation in. We don't really understand the processes yet, but we do know it's not a zero sum game of delaying (or 'stealing') water versus total system flow. This is most easily demonstrated for watersheds on the windward sides of mountains, due to snow pack, but forests and microbes both fiddle around with cloud cover in general. As for restoring watersheds, we systematically removed the engineers that created the lush river systems of the US and Canada, namely the beaver, which once numbered at somewhere between 60 and 300 million animals in North America. We blame long term changes in rain patterns for the reduced river flow, but I strongly suspect that is the '3 Whys' trap of the Five Whys Process.
- DavidPeiffer 4y ago
  Not only affecting the shrinking of the river systems, but also degrading the quality of the water. I live in Iowa, home of 3.15 million people and 24 million pigs. Tile in the fields and a complete lack of buffer between fields and streams sends massive amounts of fertilizer into the waterways and ultimately down the Mississippi. ~85% of the land in the state is dedicated to farming in one way or another, and the amount of manure which can be spread per acre is based on crop production per acre formulas from the 1970's. Breeding work has increased corn yield by about 65%, allowing that much more manure to be spread. I recently found this podcast which talks about water issues around the state, produced by University of Iowa professors. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-all-want-clean-h2o/id1590059366 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-all-want-clean-h2o/...
- dsfyu404ed 4y ago
  >If you ever have a friend or family member who is trying to get around wetland conservation laws, they are contributing to the shrinking of our river systems. If you ever read/hear a statement like this you can safely ignore it because nobody with any second or even third hand exposure to the true vastness of the scope of wetland conservation laws would say such a thing. Somebody's little construction project to replace their 25x30 cabin on a lake in the woods with one that's 24x32 isn't material in this context no matter how hard people may dishonestly try to imply otherwise. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of cases of "skirting conservation laws" are cases of people who want to do a nearly like for like replacement of some existing thing that didn't need permission when it was done 40-140yr ago and don't want to pay some guy with a license thousands of dollars for the privilege of a stamped drawing.
ravedave5 4y ago
This article has no details on causes. Minnesota has had a dry summer, and the driest September on record. Most streams/rivers in central/south MN are low. https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/river_levels/index.html https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/river_levels/index.html
- bombcar 4y ago
  The flow of the Mississippi after leaving Minnesota is no where near the lowest recorded: https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=arx&gage=lnsi4&prob_type=stage&source=hydrograph https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=arx&gage=... Low Water Records for Mississippi River at Lansing (1) 3.39 ft on 03/13/1938 (2) 4.19 ft on 01/23/1944 (3) 6.09 ft on 11/27/1942 (4) 6.34 ft on 02/04/1943 (5) 6.58 ft on 01/17/1945 (6) 6.76 ft on 08/14/1941 (7) 6.92 ft on 10/28/1940 (8) 6.94 ft on 01/27/1957 Currently at 8ft.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Typo? Should that read "is now where", "is not where", or ... ?
    - bombcar 4y ago
      It should have been nowhere.
      - dredmorbius 4y ago
        Thanks.
- Kon-Peki 4y ago
  However, this is talking about river levels at Cairo, Illinois (pronounced "Cay-Roe", BTW) which is on the Ohio River right before it dumps into the Mississippi. The Ohio provides the majority of the water in the lower Mississippi, so it is definitely concerning.
DavidPeiffer 4y ago
For anyone curious about water levels around their region, the US Geological Service monitors water levels in real time across thousands of stations. I had a great discussion with a couple USGS data scientists at the RStudio conference in July. Their remote monitoring stations report the data to their servers typically in 15 minute intervals. If you're worried about the water level at a particular location, they have a service which allows you to get alerts if it exceeds a certain level. They're in the middle of redoing many of their online tools, so it's a mix of legacy and modern looking web development. They get their funding from contracts with other federal agencies or private businesses, not directly from the government. For example, a company may have a permit that they can pull 100,000 cubic feet of water from a stream per day, but that the stream level must not go below 5 feet. USGS would add monitoring after the draw point and provide that data to the client (and public) at the client's expense. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/rt https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/rt
- bombcar 4y ago
  Also if you're interested in the flood level of a river near you, put the alerts on the areas upstream as you can often get advance warning.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  That's a great site. I usually start from water.weather.gov but I don't remember why. It's cool how much data U.S. governments collect. You can get everything from water flow and depth to the price and quality of wholesale lettuce. Tidbit from your water gage link: parts of central Florida are still under record-high floods, days after the hurricane. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/02296750/#parameterCode=00065&startDT=2007-10-01&endDT=2022-10-01 https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/02296750/#par...
  - jonwachob91 4y ago
    Water levels along waterways (such as the one you linked) will continue to rise maybe another week+ as water drains into the waterways. It takes time for "high" lands to drain their water, and all that water drains into waterways (such as the one you linked). iirc, after Irma a few years ago, it took almost 2 weeks for waterways to begin receding to normal levels.
b06timmer 4y ago
Am in New Orleans and folks are talking about an in-river levee to keep the salt water from intruding into the river from the Gulf of Mexico, because of the low river levels. I know there are water restrictions in most of the USA but I never thought it would hit the Mississippi river.
raydiatian 4y ago
8bitsrule 4y ago
In the meantime, the drainage basin on the other (Agassiz) side of the continental divide from the Mississippi headwaters has been experiencing very high levels. (Following long-term flooding this spring.) Manitoba reports: "Inflows were the highest-ever recorded and due to exceptional precipitation across southern Manitoba and Northwest Ontario this spring, especially in the Winnipeg River and Red River watersheds." - https://www.hydro.mb.ca/corporate/facilities/water_levels/ https://www.hydro.mb.ca/corporate/facilities/water_levels/ FWIW, historically, the lands up there haven't been 'improved' very much.
Slava_Propanei 4y ago
rogo007 4y ago
.
rogo007 4y ago
Send this article to the desertSun.com

127 points by tomohawk 4y ago

Hmm, the St Croix is low but not lower than historical lows from years past: https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?gage=stlm5&wfo=mpx https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?gage=stlm5&wf... (The St Croix is 1% of the total discharge of the Mississippi.)

InitialLastName 4y ago
It annoys me to no end (in a tiny way) that there are two St Croix rivers along borders in the US.

citilife 4y ago

Current level: 10.52 ft. forecast has it at 7ft by end of October. Record lows: Low Water Records for Ohio River at Cairo (1) -1.00 ft on 12/24/1871 (2) 0.30 ft on 12/30/1876 (3) 1.10 ft on 01/01/1877 (4) 2.00 ft on 12/31/1887 (5) 2.50 ft on 10/20/1897 (6) 2.90 ft on 11/21/1901 (7) 4.93 ft on 07/12/1988 (8) 5.80 ft on 12/31/1963 (9) 6.87 ft on 08/28/2006 (10) 7.10 ft on 01/17/1981 (11) 7.15 ft on 08/29/2012 (12) 7.20 ft on 08/08/2005 (13) 8.52 ft on 09/11/2000 (14) 8.72 ft on 09/19/2005 (15) 8.72 ft on 07/25/2012 (16) 9.10 ft on 02/12/2000 (17) 11.33 ft on 06/30/2012 (18) 11.63 ft on 10/16/2006 (19) 13.10 ft on 05/19/2000 https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/water.php?wfo=pah&gage=ciri2 https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/water.php?wfo=pah&gage=ciri2

deathanatos 4y ago
Since I wondered how a river can have a negative depth: > A river's stage at a point (a gauge reading) is not an absolute measure of the depth of the water in the channel, rather it is a depth with respect to an historical Datum level. In summary, when a river gauge reads zero or in the negative numbers - it does not mean that the river has gone totally dry or is running below ground. It means that the gauge is reading at or below the agreed-upon zero level. > Silt may deposit in the river channel over time (filling the channel up), or the channel bottom may be scoured out to a deeper level by strong currents. > Still, the gauge zero datum levels are not changed to keep continuity. https://www.weather.gov/ctp/NegativeRiverStages https://www.weather.gov/ctp/NegativeRiverStages So, these aren't depth, and apparently aren't even comparable.
- avidphantasm 4y ago
  And depending on sediment transport dynamics for a particular reach of the river, the depth could be higher or lower at a given stage (i.e., height above datum) today than at the same stage in the past.

edmcnulty101 4y ago

How can the article not mention that it ebbs and flows? They're making it alarmist sounding when it's just the natural state of the river.

avidphantasm 4y ago
Probably trying to drum up support for getting money from Congress for dredging key sections.
o_1 4y ago
Thirsty? light a fire, then people come with water.
hinkley 4y ago
Complex systems tend to fishtail when they're about to collapse. Peak output can go up while averages are declining.
- edmcnulty101 4y ago
  This isnt excessively outside the deviation, see the quantitative. comment in this thread.

DavidPeiffer 4y ago

If you ever have a chance, I highly recommend going near a port and watching operations. I used to live near the Mississippi River in Iowa, and it was always impressive to see the barge traffic and think about the sheer volume of product moving. South of St. Louis, the barge tows can be up to 45 barges. Visiting Savanah, Georgia and watching the ships come and go was also impressive. There's a bridge that was built in 1953, replaced in 1991, and is in consideration for replacement again because the ships keep getting larger. I'll also recommend the Containers podcast, an 8 part series discussing global trade and why the ships keep getting bigger. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/containers/id1209559177 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/containers/id120955917...

bobthepanda 4y ago
The most impressive of the Panama Canal related expansion works was the project by PANYNJ in New York to raise the roadway of an existing arch bridge from within, and without interrupting traffic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayonne_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayonne_Bridge
- bombcar 4y ago
  This kind of gives the lie to the "The US can't build anything anymore" - we do build things but we have all sorts of restrictions we wouldn't have operated under a hundred years ago. Back then we would have just built a whole new bridge somewhere nearby and then probably detonated the old one.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    Nobody says that the US literally cant build anything anymore. The sentiment, backed by data, is that it is vastly more expensive and slower to build than in the past. This makes it hard to justify attempting a project at all. This analysis [1] shows that building tunnels in the US costs 10X more than in Norway, and 3X the average for the countries studied. Obviously, this means that with the same government budget, you get 10% the infrastructure than a country like Norway. However, this also means the return on investment needs to be 10X higher to justify starting the project at all! This trend holds true for most types of building projects in the US. https://projectdelivery.enotrans.org/international/ https://projectdelivery.enotrans.org/international/

jollyllama 4y ago

Wasn't it just flooding?

hinkley 4y ago
Reduction in system capacity simultaneously decreases average throughput and decreases the ability to handle peak throughput.

status200 4y ago

It will be interesting to see how food waste statistics are influenced by these supply chain and inflation woes, as well as our interest in mono-cropping soy and corn.

hinkley 4y ago

If you ever have a friend or family member who is trying to get around wetland conservation laws, they are contributing to the shrinking of our river systems. Water retention capacity in upper watersheds directly contribute to average river flow, which is very easy to show by the behavior of streams. Deserts are self-reinforcing systems where the heat pushes clouds up or away from them. Wet, cool forests draw in more precipitation in. We don't really understand the processes yet, but we do know it's not a zero sum game of delaying (or 'stealing') water versus total system flow. This is most easily demonstrated for watersheds on the windward sides of mountains, due to snow pack, but forests and microbes both fiddle around with cloud cover in general. As for restoring watersheds, we systematically removed the engineers that created the lush river systems of the US and Canada, namely the beaver, which once numbered at somewhere between 60 and 300 million animals in North America. We blame long term changes in rain patterns for the reduced river flow, but I strongly suspect that is the '3 Whys' trap of the Five Whys Process.

DavidPeiffer 4y ago
Not only affecting the shrinking of the river systems, but also degrading the quality of the water. I live in Iowa, home of 3.15 million people and 24 million pigs. Tile in the fields and a complete lack of buffer between fields and streams sends massive amounts of fertilizer into the waterways and ultimately down the Mississippi. ~85% of the land in the state is dedicated to farming in one way or another, and the amount of manure which can be spread per acre is based on crop production per acre formulas from the 1970's. Breeding work has increased corn yield by about 65%, allowing that much more manure to be spread. I recently found this podcast which talks about water issues around the state, produced by University of Iowa professors. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-all-want-clean-h2o/id1590059366 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-all-want-clean-h2o/...
dsfyu404ed 4y ago
>If you ever have a friend or family member who is trying to get around wetland conservation laws, they are contributing to the shrinking of our river systems. If you ever read/hear a statement like this you can safely ignore it because nobody with any second or even third hand exposure to the true vastness of the scope of wetland conservation laws would say such a thing. Somebody's little construction project to replace their 25x30 cabin on a lake in the woods with one that's 24x32 isn't material in this context no matter how hard people may dishonestly try to imply otherwise. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of cases of "skirting conservation laws" are cases of people who want to do a nearly like for like replacement of some existing thing that didn't need permission when it was done 40-140yr ago and don't want to pay some guy with a license thousands of dollars for the privilege of a stamped drawing.

ravedave5 4y ago

This article has no details on causes. Minnesota has had a dry summer, and the driest September on record. Most streams/rivers in central/south MN are low. https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/river_levels/index.html https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/river_levels/index.html

bombcar 4y ago
The flow of the Mississippi after leaving Minnesota is no where near the lowest recorded: https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=arx&gage=lnsi4&prob_type=stage&source=hydrograph https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=arx&gage=... Low Water Records for Mississippi River at Lansing (1) 3.39 ft on 03/13/1938 (2) 4.19 ft on 01/23/1944 (3) 6.09 ft on 11/27/1942 (4) 6.34 ft on 02/04/1943 (5) 6.58 ft on 01/17/1945 (6) 6.76 ft on 08/14/1941 (7) 6.92 ft on 10/28/1940 (8) 6.94 ft on 01/27/1957 Currently at 8ft.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Typo? Should that read "is now where", "is not where", or ... ?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    It should have been nowhere.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      Thanks.
Kon-Peki 4y ago
However, this is talking about river levels at Cairo, Illinois (pronounced "Cay-Roe", BTW) which is on the Ohio River right before it dumps into the Mississippi. The Ohio provides the majority of the water in the lower Mississippi, so it is definitely concerning.

DavidPeiffer 4y ago

For anyone curious about water levels around their region, the US Geological Service monitors water levels in real time across thousands of stations. I had a great discussion with a couple USGS data scientists at the RStudio conference in July. Their remote monitoring stations report the data to their servers typically in 15 minute intervals. If you're worried about the water level at a particular location, they have a service which allows you to get alerts if it exceeds a certain level. They're in the middle of redoing many of their online tools, so it's a mix of legacy and modern looking web development. They get their funding from contracts with other federal agencies or private businesses, not directly from the government. For example, a company may have a permit that they can pull 100,000 cubic feet of water from a stream per day, but that the stream level must not go below 5 feet. USGS would add monitoring after the draw point and provide that data to the client (and public) at the client's expense. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/rt https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/rt

bombcar 4y ago
Also if you're interested in the flood level of a river near you, put the alerts on the areas upstream as you can often get advance warning.
jeffbee 4y ago
That's a great site. I usually start from water.weather.gov but I don't remember why. It's cool how much data U.S. governments collect. You can get everything from water flow and depth to the price and quality of wholesale lettuce. Tidbit from your water gage link: parts of central Florida are still under record-high floods, days after the hurricane. https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/02296750/#parameterCode=00065&startDT=2007-10-01&endDT=2022-10-01 https://waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/02296750/#par...
- jonwachob91 4y ago
  Water levels along waterways (such as the one you linked) will continue to rise maybe another week+ as water drains into the waterways. It takes time for "high" lands to drain their water, and all that water drains into waterways (such as the one you linked). iirc, after Irma a few years ago, it took almost 2 weeks for waterways to begin receding to normal levels.

b06timmer 4y ago

Am in New Orleans and folks are talking about an in-river levee to keep the salt water from intruding into the river from the Gulf of Mexico, because of the low river levels. I know there are water restrictions in most of the USA but I never thought it would hit the Mississippi river.

raydiatian 4y ago

8bitsrule 4y ago

In the meantime, the drainage basin on the other (Agassiz) side of the continental divide from the Mississippi headwaters has been experiencing very high levels. (Following long-term flooding this spring.) Manitoba reports: "Inflows were the highest-ever recorded and due to exceptional precipitation across southern Manitoba and Northwest Ontario this spring, especially in the Winnipeg River and Red River watersheds." - https://www.hydro.mb.ca/corporate/facilities/water_levels/ https://www.hydro.mb.ca/corporate/facilities/water_levels/ FWIW, historically, the lands up there haven't been 'improved' very much.

Slava_Propanei 4y ago

rogo007 4y ago

Send this article to the desertSun.com