Vanishing Rivers

Vanishing Rivers 

As Homo sapiens evolved from hunter-gatherers into farmers, areas along rivers became attractive places to settle. Rivers serve as avenues for transportation and are sources of food, irrigation water, drinking water, power, recreation, and (unfortunately) waste disposal. Further, their floodplains provide particularly fertile soil for fields, replenished annually by seasonal floods. Considering the multitudinous resources that rivers provide, it’s no coincidence that ancient cultures developed in river valleys and on floodplains. Nevertheless, over time, humans have increasingly tended to abuse or overuse the Earth’s rivers. Here we note four pressing environmental issues pertaining to rivers.

• Pollution: The capacity of some rivers to carry pollutants has long been exceeded, transforming them into deadly cesspools. Pollutants include raw sewage and storm drainage from urban areas, spilled oil, toxic chemicals from industrial sites, floating garbage, excess fertilizer, and animal waste. Some pollutants directly poison aquatic life, some feed algae blooms that strip water of its oxygen, and some settle out to be buried along with sediments. 
• Dam Construction: In 1950, there were about 5,000 large (over 15 m high) dams worldwide, but today there are over 38,000. Damming rivers has both positive and negative results. Reservoirs provide irrigation water and hydroelectric power, and they trap some floodwaters and create popular recreation areas. But in some locations their construction destroys “wild rivers” (the whitewater streams of hilly and mountainous areas) and alters the ecosystem of a drainage network by forming barriers to migrating fish, by decreasing the nutrient supply to organisms downstream, by removing the source of sediment for the delta, and by eliminating seasonal floods that replenish nutrients in the landscape.

The Central Arizona Project canal shunts water from the Colorado River to Phoenix.

• Overuse of Water: Because of growing populations, our thirst for river water continues to increase, but the supply of water does not. The use of water has grown especially in response to the “green revolution” of the 1960s, during which huge new tracts of land came under irrigation. Today, 65% of the water taken out of rivers is used for agriculture, 25% for industry, and 9% for drinking.  As a result, in some places human activity consumes the entire volume of a river’s water, so that the channel contains little more than a saline trickle, if that, at its mouth. For example, except during unusually wet years, the Colorado River’s channel contains almost no water where it crosses the Mexican border, for huge pipes and canals carry the water instead to Phoenix and Los Angeles (figure above). 
• Effects of Urbanization and Agriculture on Streams: When it rains in a naturally vegetated region, or in an agricultural region, much of the water that falls from the sky either soaks into the ground or gets absorbed by plants. Some of the soil moisture or groundwater eventually seeps into a nearby stream, but the remainder flows elsewhere underground. As a result, the amount of water that reaches nearby streams after a storm is less than the total amount of precipitation, and a significant lag occurs between the time when the water falls and when the stream’s discharge increases. Urbanization changes both the volume of water reaching the stream and the length of the time lag, because when developers transform fields and forests into parking lots, roads, and buildings, a layer of impermeable concrete and asphalt prevents rainfall from infiltrating, and the amount of living biomass is smaller. Storm sewers and streets divert water directly to streams, so not only does the volume of water entering the streams increase, but also the rate at which the volume changes increases. 
• Although we tend to think of farmland as “vegetated land,” it actually has less plant cover than does natural grassland or forest. That’s because the land surface between the crop rows remains bare during the growing season, and after harvest, entire fields become a broad expanse of exposed soil. Sheetwash flowing across the unprotected land surface erodes and carries with it significant volumes of sediment. Thus, a river’s sediment load increases significantly when farms replace  forests nearby.

Credits: Stephen Marshak (Essentials of Geology)

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