Missouri river at risk of drying to mere trickle

[lovuian]

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=634667

Missouri river at risk of drying to mere trickle
The longest river in America has been so badly affected by drought it could be unnavigable by next year
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
01 May 2005


Two hundred years after its source was discovered, the giant Missouri river is drying up. The longest river in the United States, long nicknamed the Big Muddy, is becoming the Big Empty.

Six consecutive years of drought have cut its flow by a third, crippling agriculture, denuding reservoirs and endangering shipping. By next year the giant river - described by the author Mark Twain as "too thick to drink and too thin to plough" - is expected to become unnavigable. And scientists fear that this may be only the start, as global warming takes hold of the American West, causing droughts that could last decades.

When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark struggled up the river's 2,540-mile length to reach its source, in the Rocky Mountains in Montana in 1805, they were awed by its power. Lewis wrote - with better observation than spelling - that the three tributaries that meet to form the Missouri "all run with great valocity and thow out large bodies of water".

Not now. Thirty-nine of Montana's 52 rivers arelisted as "very dry" because of the drought. The governor of Montana, Brian Schweitzer, has said that this year is expected to be even more arid than the past six years. More than 60 miles of the giant Oahe reservoir on the Missouri, 231 miles long, have dried up, with just a narrow channel where there was once a lake that was up to five miles wide. Boat ramps, meanwhile, have been left stranded a mile or so from the nearest water.

Hydroelectric power from the dams on the river has been cut by a third, and riverside coal and nuclear plants are running out of cooling water, threatening power cuts and blackouts. Farmers are having to do without water to irrigate their crops. Shipping is also beginning to shrink. The largest barge operator has not run a vessel up the river for two years because the water level is so low, and though some traffic continues, officials say it will probably have to cease altogether next year if the drought does not break.

The situation has become so grave that Governor Schweitzer has asked the Pentagon to bring home some of the state's 1,500 National Guard troops from Iraq so that they will be ready to fight fires in Montana's tinder-dry forests
more...

We are bringing back our trooops to finally take care of their own desperate country!!!

[Geo55]

1. Shades of the sh*tstorm to come.

http://www.billingsgazette.com/index.php?id=1&display=rednews/2005/04/26/build/state/75-missouri-levels.inc

[lovuian]

3. Great article Where is the Big Media??? Kyota No signy!!!

Farmers who voted for Bush should be frickin kicking themselves in the Butts!!!

[Geo55]

5. None of them have a clue....

The "dust bowl" era was horrendous.

[lovuian]

6. Ya Gen great comparison Dust Bowl & Depression

kinda History repeating itself!!!

[Eloriel]

7. what caused the dust bowl?

anyone know? I've seen many photos of the era, and I know that farming and the erosion of topsoil contributed, but was it severe drought or what -- anyone?

[grasswire]

8. overplanting?

Here's some info from an education web site:

Decades earlier, farmers had come to the bountiful Plains in droves. They had plowed up the prairie grasses and shrubs. Year after year, they had planted millions of acres of crops. And each year the land had yielded bushel upon bushel. The soil was a rich, dark chocolate color. The climate was moderate, ideal for wheat and other grain crops. It was like farming the Garden of Eden.

3 Now, suddenly, Eden was dying. A hundred million acres of land in the heart of America were no longer growing anything. Parts of five states were black where they should have been golden with ripening wheat. The drought went on and on. Wise growing practices were not yet widely known, so the land was overused and open to erosion. In the hot sun, the soil baked and crumbled into a fine dust.

4 In 1932, the dust storms started. Raging winds blew across the dry land, gathering up topsoil. The clouds of dust boiled and rolled through the sky, depositing dirt everywhere. People thought the storms were a freak of nature. Surely they would soon end. But year after year, conditions worsened. There were fourteen dust storms in 1932. In 1933, there were thirty-eight. A reporter traveling through the region dubbed it the Dust Bowl.

5 People living in the path of the storms tried desperately to keep from being buried in dust. Wet sheets were hung over doors. Damp towels were pressed around windows. Still, the dust invaded. Furniture, bedding, food—everything was covered with dust. Dirt piled itself in drifts against fences and buildings. Homes were buried up to the windowsills.

6 Food could rarely be eaten without grit in one's teeth. Clothes hung out to dry would be wrenched from the clothesline and pounded stiff with dirt. When the black storms blew, people covered their faces with wet cloths. Still, it was hard to breathe. Many people developed "dust pneumonia." Children and the elderly often died from respiratory problems.

7 Year after year, the black blizzards came. The worst storm of all roared across the Plains on April 14, 1935. On the terrible day that came to be known as "Black Sunday," Dust Bowl residents had arisen to clear blue skies. They set about doing chores and getting ready for church, thankful for a dustless day.

8 Then, about mid afternoon, the air suddenly cooled. Birds of all kinds darted frantically across the sky. Behind them, a monstrous black cloud roiled and churned. It swept at great speed across the landscape. People ran to get home before the storm hit.

9 Those caught out on the road had to seek any shelter they could find. An Oklahoma woman was nearly lost in the dense, dusty fog. Leaving her stalled car, she had tried to walk to her home less than a mile away. She was blinded in the thick haze and wandered off the road. Her husband searched for her, driving back and forth in the area where she had left her car. Finally, the lights of his truck, barely glimmering through the darkness, guided her to safety.

http://www.edhelper.com/ReadingComprehension_35_165.html

[Geo55]

10. global warming, anyone?

LUBBOCK, Texas (AP) — Will-Allen Jameson still remembers the sound the huge, rolling wall of dust made before it reached her family's West Texas ranch.
"You could kind of hear a faint roar, and it would get real quiet," the 76-year-old Plainview woman said as she described one of the many dust storms she witnessed as a youngster. "Birds were alarmed. They could sense something was coming up."

It was the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s, a time when drought choked the Great Plains stretching across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico and Colorado. Soil from America's breadbasket filled the skies. Sometimes a single dust storm lingered for days.

The storms were the result of drought and poor agricultural practices. Grasslands, which held soil in place, had been plowed and replanted with wheat. With rain, the crop was abundant. But when drought struck in the 1930s, farmers continued to plow and plant. With no ground cover remaining, the winds whipped the soil skyward.

Now, more than 70 years later, a NASA scientist studying moisture and air patterns in the atmosphere believes he may have stumbled upon why the drought occurred in the first place.

Siegfried Schubert, a meteorologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and h is colleagues wrote in a study published last month in Science magazine that slight changes in the surface temperatures of two oceans created atmospheric conditions that caused the Dust Bowl from 1931 to 1939.

"The 1930s drought was the major climatic event in the nation's history," Schubert said. "Just beginning to understand what occurred is really critical to understanding future droughts and the links to global climate change issues we're experiencing today."

In the 1930s, tropical Pacific Ocean temperatures were cooler than normal and tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures were warmer than normal, producing weakened low-level, east-to-west winds across the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. (Related: Details, animated graphics)

The variation in sea surface temperatures was only a few tenths of a degree Celsius.

These winds normally blow to the west over the Gulf of Mexico before turning toward the north, northward, the humid air that feeds rain storms over the Great Plains. The weakened winds in the 1930s also carried less moisture, allowing the Great Plains to dry up.

For the next nine years, yellow-brown dust blew on the southern plains; walls of black dust rolled across the northern plains. Breathing became a chore. Children donned dust masks to go and from school and wet sheets were used to try to stop dust from getting into homes. Farmers looked on in despair as crops blew away.

Schubert said his study was aimed at evaluating an atmospheric circulation model NASA devised using satellite observations.

He and his colleagues used data taken from ship records to create starting atmospheric conditions for the model. They then let the model run on its own and used only observed monthly global sea surface temperatures.

"Right now what we need to do is find out what caused those sea surface temperatures," Schubert said. "We need to understand the whole system, the ocean and the atmospheric."

John M. Wallace, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle and one of those who reviewed the study for Science, called the findings invaluable — the first to make a convincing case between rainfall on the Great Plains and the sea surface temperatures in the tropics.

"It doesn't make any exceptional claims, but it just identifies one of the factors that can influence the summer rainfall over the southern United States," Wallace said. "Their paper is really quite modest in claiming what this will give us. It won't enable us to say, 'This is going to be a drought year.' But it will enable us to get a feeling for the odds, the probabilities.

"Anything that can get a leg up on what's coming next summer is going to be useful."

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

11. A large part of it stemmed from something incredibly simple

They neglected to create windbreaks before they tilled the land-- a line of trees along the edge of the field would have been sufficient to slow the winds and reduce the erosion. With too-large tracts of uninterrupted flatlands and freshly turned topsoil, the result was inevitable.

Although there were other factors, changing this one thing could have been enough to change the course of history.

[area51]

9. dust bowl

This is what I found @ a university website:

"Poor agricultural practices and years of sustained drought caused the Dust Bowl. Plains grasslands had been deeply plowed and planted to wheat. During the years when there was adequate rainfall, the land produced bountiful crops. But as the droughts of the early 1930s deepened, the farmers kept plowing and planting and nothing would grow. The ground cover that held the soil in place was gone. The Plains winds whipped across the fields raising billowing clouds of dust to the skys. The skys could darken for days, and even the most well sealed homes could have a thick layer of dust on furniture. In some places the dust would drift like snow, covering farmsteads."

source: http://www.usd.edu/anth/epa/dust.html

[Wilber_Stool]

24. That's right

The only solution those bible thumpers see is praying to God for salvation. You just can't convince them there is a rational solution.

[KansDem]

37. "So long, it's been good to know you..."

With apologies to Woody Guthrie, this is all I can remember of his song and I'm sure I got some lyrics wrong:

I’ve sung this song,
And I’ll sing it again.
It’s a song that I know,
About the wide, windy plain.

In a month called April,
A county called Gray.
Here’s what the people there,
They have been sayin’

“So long, it’s been good to know you.”
“So long, it’s been good to know you.”
“So long, it’s been good to know you.”
That dirty ol’ dust is a getting’ my home.
And I got to be movin’ along.

The dust storm hit, and it hit us like thunder,
It covered us over and it covered us under,
It blocked out the traffic and block out the sun.
Oh, how the people there they all did run.

“So long, it’s been good to know you.”
“So long, it’s been good to know you.”
“So long, it’s been good to know you.”
That dirty ol’ dust is a getting’ my home.
And I got to be movin’ along.

[LiberalFighter]

21. Not a problem... gw*dipshit will find water for them

[tblue37]

28. Why?

After all, it's Clinton's fault. Everything is Clinton's fault. Always. Didn't you get the memo?

[TheFarseer]

2. They'll just blame farmers

and try to screw them over some how.

[barb162]

4. I had no idea..thanks for the info

[unhappycamper]

12. Droughts killing entire civilizations is nothing new.

A really good read on the subject: Collapse by Jared Diamond.

[Moderator]

13. kick to combine

[T_i_B]

14. Missouri river at risk of drying to mere trickle

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=634667

Two hundred years after its source was discovered, the giant Missouri river is drying up. The longest river in the United States, long nicknamed the Big Muddy, is becoming the Big Empty.

Six consecutive years of drought have cut its flow by a third, crippling agriculture, denuding reservoirs and endangering shipping. By next year the giant river - described by the author Mark Twain as "too thick to drink and too thin to plough" - is expected to become unnavigable. And scientists fear that this may be only the start, as global warming takes hold of the American West, causing droughts that could last decades.

When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark struggled up the river's 2,540-mile length to reach its source, in the Rocky Mountains in Montana in 1805, they were awed by its power. Lewis wrote - with better observation than spelling - that the three tributaries that meet to form the Missouri "all run with great valocity and thow out large bodies of water".

Not now. Thirty-nine of Montana's 52 rivers arelisted as "very dry" because of the drought. The governor of Montana, Brian Schweitzer, has said that this year is expected to be even more arid than the past six years. More than 60 miles of the giant Oahe reservoir on the Missouri, 231 miles long, have dried up, with just a narrow channel where there was once a lake that was up to five miles wide. Boat ramps, meanwhile, have been left stranded a mile or so from the nearest water.

[cornermouse]

15. I wonder what effect that will have on the Mississippi?

[donsu]

18. I posted an article on this about a mo. ago & it said the Miss. river

would be and now is affected by the low water. if itwater continues to go lower, barge traffic on the Miss. will have to stop in some places.

[reprobate]

22. And that would be a kick in the head for the economy.

With all the shipping on the Mississippi, any interuption would cause a severe slowing of the economy.

Gosh, when you combine Bush with climate change, it's a formula for true national disaster.

[markus]

16. Can a replay of the Dirty 30s be far behind?

This was the upper prairie's name for the Dustbowl drought of the early 20th century.

As a New Orlenian now living in North Dakota, I too wonder what will happen when the Mississippi loses one of its major tributaries.

[hatrack]

17. "Endangering shipping"? What shipping?

The barge terminal at Omaha closed down three years ago, and no one even noticed that it had closed for about a month. The entire Missouri River last year did about $3 million in total shipping and barge traffic on the river has been declining since the late 1970s.

This drought is just the last shovelful on the grave of the barge business, which has been evaporating for the past ten years. It's already a dead industry on the Missouri - it just hasn't fallen over yet.

[catmandu57]

19. The Missouri river is no more than a polluted drainage ditch

I know, I live just minutes away from it. I've fished in it, swam in it, and watched the decline.
I've watched our noble farmers pollute the tributary creeks with empty pestiside jugs with no more thought than if they were throwing an empty can out of their pickemup truck window.
You can sit on the banks and wait for weeks for a barge to come along, the corp of engineers have destroyed this river for questionable commerce and farmers, it's no more than a straightened out drainage ditch.

[confludemocrat]

29. The upper Missouri has virtually no ag runoff

The agriculture prior to the confluence with the Yellowstone (which my user name is based on) is dryland--non-irrigated that is. It remains a thing of beauty even though the Ft Peck reservoir backs it up and inundates its primal floodplain and the former great falls of the Missouri.

Ft Peck lake is very very down, computer projections of a continuing drought reveal almost a pre-damming landscape. But the irrigated ag further down is increasing from previously very little until mid-South Dakota to now greater irrigation right after the confluence.

The consequences of this must be faced. Greater amounts of irrigated agriculture with its consequent runoff of, for example herbicides and insecticides, is from an attempt to save the agriculture in this part of the country by bringing more of this land here under sprinkler irrigation.

The drought here should bring these changes into sharp focus. Droughts in the Northern Plains can last a long--more than a decade (see the book "Badlands" by Jonathan Raban). So, these two factors may be on a collision course.

[Terran]

36. Not where I live

Jefferson City, MO. I live about three blocks from the river. I have swum in it, never fished but I know people who do. It's not polluted here, or anywhere that I've heard in Missouri. Navigation and artifical changes to the river's flow are the biggest problems.

[sleipnir]

20. NOT Global Warming. This happens all the time (on a geo. scale!)

The West is known to go through periods of drought. It's part of the planet's life cycle out there. There is evidence that much worse droughts have occurred in the last 2000 years. The last "Big One", in the 1500's, drought/dustbowl covered most of North America, stretching all the way to the East Coast.

This is cyclical, just like the tides and the moon. It's a bitch because droughts cost money and cause suffering, but this is hardly cause for panic. The effects might be somewhat enlarged by a global warming trend, but we really don't have that data.

To prove some points, here's a nice graphic from NOAA about tree rings and drought cycles. And check out this link.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/drought/drght_500years.html

I'm getting a little sick of these people who want to blame everything that seems to be going wrong with the environment on Global Warming. It reminds me of the fundies who blame Satan for each time they have an evil thought. It's becoming a knee-jerk reaction here at DU, instead of trying to understand the history and cycles of our planet, we just rush to the nearest media-fed machine of propaganda, which is currently Global Warming.

I'm not saying that Global Warming doesn't exist or cause some problems. Simply that Global Warming isn't the root of each problem we face, some of these, like drought are extraordinarily natural and we just need to face the reality that we can't control our planet, despite what we might think.

[stevedeshazer]

23. I agree, drought is cyclical

I also am concerned about global warming, but even without it, North America and especially the West are screwed water-wise.

This has a lot less to do with GW than the simple fact that the West is busily sucking heavily-subsidized, non-renewable water from aquifers and drying up rivers at the same time.

Las Vegas uses most of its water supply to irrigate fucking golf courses in a place that gets less precipitation than almost anywhere in North America.

Los Angeles and its surroundings have concentrated 20 million people and major agricultural areas by diverting water from hundreds of miles away. Much of the farmland there is too salty to support crops anymore, and will be for centuries.

This madness is not sustainable.

The fight over oil will be mild in comparison to what's coming when we run out of fresh water.

[customerserviceguy]

38. Besides the drought cycles

there are weather pattern variations, too. Here in Utah, we're getting all the rain we used to get when I lived in Washington State. Some credit me with bringing it along, but I had no part in that! We're seeing record snowpacks, and the local farmers are quite happy. Back in the Pacific Northwest, the ski operators are singing the blues.

Add weather fluctuations to the drought cycle, and you've got problems, that's for sure.

[Gregorian]

25. CO2 concentration is the evidence that proves it.

There may be swings in temperatures, but not in carbon dioxide concentrations. Those have been stable for thousands of years. Until now. We can't burn millions of barrels of oil each year, and expect to have the planet unaltered. I'm a skeptic of just about everything. Including global warming. But it's one of those things that I would rather avoid, than prove right. The later is irreversibly too late.

[sandnsea]

33. Poor water usage

We have to confront it. Already had water confrontations on the Klamath. The drought doesn't help, but there's more going on than just drought.

[DS1]

26. Oh no, something's about to kick "The Heartland" in the balls

I think we should have some faith-based policy enacted immediately.

Like a rain dance.

[daleo]

27. Larger tent revival meetings and more holy rainmakers are needed. n/t

[MountainLaurel]

31. Thanks Daleo

:spray:

You oughta be president!

[daleo]

32. Thanks. I fear someday this may be an actual campaign platform. n/t

[MountainLaurel]

35. Faith-based meteorology and environmental planning

I don't see it as entirely out of the realm of possibility with these people. After all, they're already engaging in faith-based medicine (no birth control pills for you!), psychiatry (just keep praying those heroin cravings away), and geology (the world is only 6,000 years old).

[chlamor]

30. kick

[kymar57]

34. KIck n/t