When the Rivers Run Dry by Pearce

Ref: Fred Pearce (2018). When the River Runs Dry. Beacon Press.

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Summary­

• As laudable as it is to take a shower rather than a bath, buy a low-flush toilet, and turn off the faucet while brushing our teeth, we shouldn’t get hold of the idea that regular domestic water use is what is really emptying the world’s rivers. Manufacturing the goods that we fill our homes with consumes a certain amount, but that’s not the real story either. It is only when we add in the water needed to grow what we eat and drink that the numbers really begin to soar.

• Major water issues include salt and silt accumulation and the eroding power of artificial water channels.

• Six countries with half of the world’s total renewable freshwater supply on their territory—Brazil, Russia, Canada, Indonesia, China, and Colombia.

• Water is the ultimate renewable resource. We may pollute it, irrigate crops with it, and flush it down our toilets. We may even encourage it to evaporate by leaving it around in large reservoirs in the hot sun, but we never destroy it. Inevitably, it will return, purged and fresh.

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Earth’s Water

• Seawater: 97%.

• Freshwater: 3% (28T acre-feet).

  • Frozen in Ice Caps & Glaciers: ~20T acre-feet.

  • Liquid: ~9.7T acre-feet.

    • Subsurface (Aquifers): ~9.5T acre-feet (vast majority). 

    • Surface (Lakes, Rivers): ~162B acre-feet.

      • Lakes: ~71B acre-feet.

      • Soils/Permafrost: ~71B acre-feet.

      • Atmospheric: ~10.5B acre-feet.

      • Swamps/Wetlands: ~9B acre-feet.

      • Rivers: ~1.6B acre-feet.

      • Living Organisms: 800M acre-feet.

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Blue Revolution (Potential Water Solutions)

• Ethos based on managing the water cycle for maximum ecological and social benefit.  

• Water sharing treaties as a forum for resolving transnational water disputes.

• Bring green-revolution crops in line with hydrological realities.

• Maintain Aquifers (Fossil water) as a backup reserve.

• Water Recycling to include our sewage for both nutrients and irrigation benefits.

• Increased water efficiency everywhere from the toilet cistern to the fields.

• Ensure conservation flows in rivers and wetlands to maintain fisheries, protect against floods and drought, dilute pollution, deliver free irrigation on floodplains, water valuable tourist sites, and more.

• Provide water funds that pay landowners to refrain from farming and offers grants to cattle raisers to replace their old herds with higher-quality cattle that produce more milk on less land.

• Tradable Water allotments: Allocate districts/farms along rivers a fixed proportion of water flow. In wet years they get more water, and in dry years less. The environment also gets a share. The rights can be traded, and with a finite amount of water available, most users are incentivized to strive for efficiency.

• Smart valves and sensors that control water pressure throughout the system and automatically “listen” for leaks.

• Rainwater harvesting.

• Keep water insides its basin of origin; limit external diversion projects.

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Desalinization (desal)

• Today, global desal capacity is ~70,000 acre-feet a day—roughly 1% of global domestic water supply.

• Distillation: Heating of seawater and collection of evaporate freshwater; most of the worlds desal production.

• Reverse Osmosis (RO): Desal in which water is forced repeatedly through a membrane that filters out the larger salt molecules and lets clean water through.

  • Israel: Claims to desalinate for around $2.50 per 1000 gal at its RO plants.

  • Even the most efficient RO plants require ~16KWh of electricity for every 1000 gal of water they produce. And the energy needed to pump the water uphill from the coast can easily double that.

• One problem is what to do with the salt extracted from the seawater which emerges as concentrated brine. Most plants dump it back into the sea. But this salty wastewater also contains the products of corrosion during the desal process, as well as chemicals added to reduce both the corrosion and the buildup of scale in the plants, and is damaging for marine wildlife.

• Saudi Arabia: Has virtually no rain and no rivers or surface lakes of any kind. It has spent $10B on desal to fill its faucets. Powering the works reportedly consumes around a quarter of the country’s oil.

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Water Treatment

• Many cities spend billions of dollars on plumbing to rush floodwaters off streets and into oceans. Then they spend billions more transporting more water from distant hills to keep the faucets flowing.

• Most industrialized countries connect every building to sewer networks that run down every street. They strive to attach those sewer networks to treatment works that remove solids and other potentially dangerous contaminants before discharging the partially cleaned effluent into the nearest river.

• Only around one-tenth of urban sewage is treated. Most of the remainder is dumped directly into the natural environment, usually into rivers, where it turns thousands of miles of waterways into lifeless open sewers and creates dead zones that now cover 10,000 mi2 of ocean.

• Israel: Today, >80% of urban effluent is captured, cleaned up, and sent to irrigate farms. It is the country’s default source of irrigation water. Neighboring Jordan recovers 60%.

• Orange County, CA: Pours treated sewage into rocks beneath the county. There, the geology filters it before the county pumps the water up again to fill the faucets of >2M residents.

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Waste Recycling

• In a typical year, your body will relieve itself of some 130 gal of urine and 110 lbs of feces. That is sufficient to fertilize plants that would produce almost 500 lbs of cereals.  Our misuse of human excrement must count as one of the modern world’s worst, but least discussed, resource failures. We refuse to see that the stinking, lumpy pathogen-rich effluent pouring from sewer pipes and festering in latrines is not waste: it is free water for irrigation or other uses, and rich in N, P, and lots of other things that growing plants need.

• Farmers don’t always pour the sewage straight onto their land. Typically, they put it into drying pits. That kills pathogens and concentrates nutrients. It also means the dry effluent can be dug into the soil more easily. But during the dry season, when plants need extra water, the farmers will pour the still-liquid sewage into channels beside their crops. It is then providing irrigation as well as nutrients.

• As much as half the water in a typical Western home is used for flushing.

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Rainwater Harvesting

• Rainwater Harvesting works on rooftops or on agricultural terraces, by diverting flash floods into ponds, by blocking gullies, or by putting low earth embankments across hillsides or around individual plants.

• Ideally, we each have 4 concrete water catchments of up to 1,000 ft2 to fill cisterns; one for drinking water for a normal year, one for a drought year, and two for irrigating crops.

• Bermuda: New houses are required by law to include equipment for collecting rainwater from their roofs.

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Cloud Seeding

• Cloud Condensation Nuclei (particles in the air) provide a necessary nucleus around which water vapor can coalesce into raindrops. Nature does this mostly with tiny salt crystals from sea spray. The idea of artificial seeding is to encourage the process by spraying billions of tiny particles, usually AgI crystals, into clouds.

• Cloud seeding may prevent hail formation, damp forest fires, disperse fog, and even lower summer temperatures.

• China: Claims that cloud seeding typically raises rainfall from clouds by 15% and producing some 40,000 acre-feet of water a year—adding a couple of percent to overall water supplies.

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Atmospheric Water Harvesting

• Hilltop location are key, because as air rises it cools. Cold air holds less moisture, so the rising air creates water droplets that form clouds or fog. At night, as the hill air cools further, more water condenses and dew forms.

• It’s possible to create a pond that captures the maximum moisture by providing as cool a surface as possible on which dew can condense. They can be accomplished by putting straw beneath the clay and stones on top. The straw insulates the clay, allowing it to cool more than the soil beneath at night. The stones, which shed heat quickly at night, lower the temperature further. Once a successful dew pond is created, it would, in effect, generate its own water from the air.

• Lanzarote, Canary Islands: Local farmers use a mulch of volcanic gravel that condenses atmospheric moisture.

  • The black pumice-like stones shade the soil from the glare of the sun, reducing evaporation and keeping the soils damp. They are also porous and trap moisture by capturing nighttime dew. The stones, picon, cut water loss from parched fields by around 75%. Like sponges, the picon soaks up the water, and the surrounding crops receive a delicate, gentle watering.

  • Farmers grew prickly pears for the cochineal insects that infested them. The insects are deep crimson inside, and the islanders scraped up the insects with a spoon and dried and ground them, before selling the vivid crimson remains as a dye. Cochineal harvesting was big business in Lanzarote in the nineteenth century, before the advent of synthetic dyes.

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Iceberg Harvesting

• According to private-sector promoters of iceberg harvesting projects, an Antarctic iceberg that began its journey with 20B gal of frozen water might, on arrival in the Persian Gulf, still have a twentieth of its former volume, yielding enough water for a million people’s domestic use for five years.

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Rediscovering Old Stream Channels

• The Persians spread the secrets of qanats (stream channels) along the Silk Road to Afghanistan and China, where qanats are called karez; through Arabia, where they are aflaj; and along the north coast of Africa, where locals call them foggara.

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Water Policy Lessons

• Lining Irrigation Channels: Reduces the amount of water reaching aquifers (Rio Conchos in N. Mexico).

• Subsidized conversion to ‘efficient’ sprinkler irrigation: Results in increased groundwater loss (Ogallala of W. Kansas).

• River Channeling: Separating rivers from their floodplains only increases flow during major floods. The more the government raises banks to try and protect against floods, the worse the problem can get.

• River Barriers: Barriers may protect some stretches from floods, but they raise river levels higher everywhere else. Somewhere, the river will inevitably burst its banks, flooding homes and streets. The flood will be fiercer than it would otherwise have been. Without action to curb counterproductive flood defenses, the EEA report predicted a fivefold increase in flood damage by 2050.

  • There is mounting evidence that the embankments that seal off these polders from the wider delta may make things worse. They are constricting incoming tides. This funneling effect amplifies the tidal range and pushes tides farther inland, making them much higher than before in places such as Khulna. As a result, extremes in tidal water levels are more prominent in inland areas compared to those near the sea.

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Water Use

• Human societies globally consume ~8.7B acre-feet of water annually from rivers and aquifers.

• The average human drinks ~.5 gal water per day. Including water for washing and flushing the toilet, we use ~40 gal daily. Typical per capita water use in suburban Australia is about 90 gal, in the US, 100 gal.

• Las Vegas: Since 2000, it has increased its population by 34% while cutting its water use by 26%. Half of the city’s water is used for landscaping.

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Irrigation

• Flood Irrigation: Traditional agricultural irrigation technique in which water is indiscriminately poured on the ground, some reaches the crop root while most does not. It either evaporates in the sun or seeps underground. The result has often been waterlogged soils, a buildup of salt, and growing water shortages.

• Central Pivot Irrigation: Agricultural irrigation technique in which crops fields are doused with a fine spray of water from a central pivot sprinkler. The technique is expensive and loses a lot of water to evaporation.

• Drip Irrigation: Water is pumped down pipes under pressure and sent into side pipes from which sophisticated “drippers” deliver water to roots. Systems may include flow meters, pressure gauges, and even soil-moisture measurement to optimize delivery and keep losses to a minimum. Drip irrigation technology has been slow to take off as the kits are costly and most farmers get their water at heavily subsidized prices.

  • Jordan: Drip irrigation has reduced water use on farms by a third while raising yields.

  • Israel: Farmers have increased water productivity fivefold, through a mixture of drip irrigation and the recycling of treated urban wastewater onto their fields.

• Food & Water Use

  • 1lb Rice: ~250-650 gal.

  • 1lb Wheat: 130 gal.

  • 1lb Potatoes: 65 gal.

  • 1lb Cheese (Cheddar, Brie, Camembert): 650 gal.

  • 1 lb Sugar: 400 gal.

  • 1lb Coffee: 2650 gal.

• US Crop subsidies amount to some $1B/yr, keeping farmers irrigating crops that they would not otherwise grow.

• Central Turkey: Lakes have halved their surface area between 2003 and 2010. Irrigators have entirely emptied Lake Aksehir, and the country’s largest freshwater lake, Lake Beysehir, could go the same way by 2040.

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Salt Poisoning

• The total area impacted by salt poisoning has grown from ~100M acres in the early 1990s to 150M acres today. Every day, 5,000 acres of agricultural soil become unusable because of salt damage.

• Salt comes from farmers irrigating fields. The salt is in the water. It dissolves from rocks as rivers flow from mountains. In the rivers, the concentrations of salt are tiny. The problem is that it concentrates in irrigated fields, because when the water is drained away, evaporates, or is incorporated into crops, most of the salt stays behind. It accumulates in the soil and eventually, in the worst cases, a bright white crust forms on the surface of irrigated fields, which become toxic and infertile, turning fields to salty desert.

• Waterlogging: Brings salts in the soil to the surface, where they form a crust after each harvest. The only practical way of removing the salt is to apply more water each spring to wash the salt.

• Farmers are stuck on a treadmill, applying more water to grow their crops, which poisons the soils with ever more salt, which can be removed only with yet more water. In many areas more water is now used for flushing salt from soils than for irrigation itself.

• Aral Sea, Uzbekistan: Salt is everywhere in Karakalpakstan. It comes on the wind, down the irrigation canals, and through the pipes carrying drinking water from reservoirs; it is in the vegetables the Karakalpaks grow in their gardens and the fish and birds they catch out on the delta; it is left behind on the soil surface by the irrigation process. Salt destroys the perilous productivity of the land, uses up precious water in flushing it out of soils, creates poverty, and ultimately kills the people themselves. Salt has turned Karakalpakstan into a nation of anemics. Among the 800K women in the tiny republic, 97% suffer from anemia, 5x the rate in the early 1980s, 3x that elsewhere in Uzbekistan, and among the highest rates in the world. Average life expectancy is just 51 years.

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Evaporation

• A typical reservoir in India loses 5’ per year, 6’ in the American West, 10’ in the parched Australian outback.

• The evaporative loss in a reservoir depends on the ratio between surface area exposed to the sun and the reservoir’s capacity, coupled with the amount of time the water spends in the reservoir.

• Preventing Evaporation

  • Placing an ultrathin layer of organic molecules across the surface of reservoirs can reduce evaporation by up to a third (on larger reservoirs, wind might break the protective layer). Meanwhile, the ecological effects of cutting off the exchange of gases such as O and CO2 between air and water remain largely unknown.

  • Covering the surface of reservoirs in hot, sunny areas where evaporation rates are highest with solar panels will produce energy while decreasing evaporative loss.

    • India: In 2016, announced plans for a 600 MW floating photovoltaic system on the Koyna Reservoir in Maharashtra.

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—Rivers—

• Most of the water we use around the world today comes from Rivers. The three rivers with the biggest flows—the Amazon, the Congo, and the Orinoco—all pass through often-inhospitable jungle for most of their journey from headwaters to the sea. Those three rivers alone carry almost a quarter of the water we have to survive on. Two more of the top ten—the Lena and the Yenisei, in Siberia—run mostly through Arctic wastes. Take out these and we are left with around 7B acre-feet of river water for our annual needs, or about 1 acre-foot per person on the planet, of which we already extract approaching half.

• The glaciers of the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau feed seven of the greatest rivers in Asia—the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Salween, Irrawaddy, Mekong, and Yangtze.

• More than 40% of the world’s people, in 148 countries, live in 263 river basins that straddle international borders.

• Two-thirds of transboundary river basins have no treaties for sharing their water.

• Botswana: 94% reliant on water from the Limpopo out of South Africa, and the Okavango, which flows from Angola and Namibia, draining into the Okavango wetland, where tourists contribute a tenth of Botswana’s GDP.

• Alps: Have lost a quarter of their ice, with the melting contributing to unprecedented floods in central Europe. But soon, as the glaciers disappear, summer flow may decline by up to 40%.

• Poland: In the previous five years, some 10,000 miles of rural streams, a fifth of all the country’s rivers, have been “improved” by engineers: culverted, dredged, straightened, fitted with concrete banks, cleared of vegetation, and diverted.

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Amazon River (South America, L: 6440 km)

• The Amazon River basin has 15% of the world’s runoff but only .4% of the world’s population.

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Amu Darya River (aka Oxus, Central Asia, L: 2620km)

• Headwaters: Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush.

• Diversions

  • Karakum Canal: The largest irrigation canal in the world, diverts ~20-30M acre-feet of water annually from the Amu Darya 800 miles into Turkmenistan to water huge areas of cotton fields.

  • Soviet engineers diverted most of the Amu Darya’s flow (~90M acre-feet/yr) to irrigate cotton fields in the desert.

• Aral Sea

  • Until the 1960s, the Aral Sea covered an area the size of Belgium and the Netherlands combined, containing 1B acre-feet of water. Today, the sea is broken into two hypersaline pools containing less than a tenth as much water as before.

  • Under Stalin, the region’s farms were turned into Moscow-run collectives, growing cotton for the textile mills of European Russia. An ever-growing network of irrigation canals supplied water to billions of cotton bushes planted each spring on millions of acres of fields. Nations of nomads, cowboys, and orchard tenders were turned into a near-slave society of cotton pickers. By 1960, the canals were removing a staggering 32M acre-feet of water from the rivers. Between 1965 and 1980, the area of irrigated land more than doubled, and water abstraction tripled. Almost every citizen was drafted to pick cotton from the searing summer, when temperatures could reach 120 F, until November, when frost froze the fingers. Prisons, mental asylums, and schools were emptied, factories and offices were shut, and herds of animals were abandoned for the duration. Nobody was excused: not nursing mothers, not students, not doctors, not their patients. Many American clothes companies have banned use of Uzbek cotton, because of the near-slave-labor conditions.

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Bafing River (Mali, L: 565 km)

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Manantali Dam/Lake Crano: Construction ended the seasonal flood on which millions of farmers depend.

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Chenab River (Indus Tributary, India/Pakistan, L: 960 km)

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Baglihar Barrage: 525’ high.

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Colorado River (USA, Length: 1450 miles)

• Drains a twelfth of the CONUS; lifeblood of seven US States.

• Almost all water leaves the river several times to irrigate fields and returns via drains. At each step, it both loses volume, through evaporation, and picks up salt. Annual Crop losses from salt is estimated at $330M.

• Salinity at Headwaters in CO: 50ppm, Salinity at Hoover Dam in NV: 700ppm.

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Hoover Dam/Lake Mead: Filled in the 1930’s and holds two years of CO River flow.

  • Glen Canyon Dam/Lake Powell: Named after John Wesley Powell, a one-armed Civil War hero who in 1869 made the first boat journey by a white man down the river. A tenth of the flow of the Colorado River evaporates from Lake Powell alone.

• Climate Change

  • The Scripps Institution of Oceanography estimates that reservoir levels in the CO River will fall by a third, as declining rainfall and rising evaporation combine to reduce moisture by up to 40% across the S. & W. USA

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Columbia River (Pacific NW, L: 2000 km)

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Grand Coulee Dam: Provided the huge amounts of power needed downstream at Hanford to manufacture Pu for the first atomic bombs.

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Congo River (DRC, L: 4700 km)

• In 2002, a Congo River sharing agreement was signed for water extraction from one of the Congo’s major arms, the river Ubangi, in Palambo. The water would be poured into a pipeline and diverted over low hills into the nearby headwaters of the river Chari, from where it would flow downstream to Lake Chad 1,500 miles to the north. The $7B project would transfer 2.8M acre-feet per year and would be “an opportunity to rebuild the ecosystem, rehabilitate the lake, reconstitute its biodiversity, and safeguard its people. Half a decade on, with millions of refugees fleeing the dried-up lake region, they were still talking.

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Inga I Dam: Built in the 1970s and largely moribund.

  • Inga II Dam: Built in the 1980s and largely moribund. Both Inga I and II were victims of the DRC’s wrecked economy and long-running civil war.

  • Inga III Dam/Inga Grand Reservoir: Budgeted at $14B, could generate ~11.5GW.  

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Danube River (Europe, Length: 2850km)

• Runs W to E from Germany’s Black Forest to its delta on the Black Sea. The Danube is the most international river in the world, with a catchment that includes 19 countries.

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Euphrates River (Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Length: 2800km, Discharge: 356 m3/s)

• The Euphrates flows out of Turkey, through NE Syria and along the length of Iraq, before reaching the Mesopotamian marshes, a region of reed beds and waterways where the river enters the Persian Gulf. With the Tigris, the Euphrates water a region long known as the Fertile Crescent, which sustained ancient Mesopotamian civilizations for thousands of years.

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Tabqa Dam (Iraq): World’s largest earth dam, built by Russia. The reservoir is a major source of water and electricity for 5M people, including Syria’s largest city, Aleppo. It irrigates 400sqmi of farmland.

  • Fallujah Dam (Iraq): Diverts water for massive irrigation projects that feed the Iraqi people.

  • Hadith Dam (Iraq): Iraq’s second largest dam; regulates river flow for the whole of Iraq, providing water for irrigation and generating a third of the country’s electricity, including Baghdad.

  • Mosul Dam (Iraq): Iraq’s largest (4th largest in the Middle East); 370’ high and barricades the river just after it leaves Turkey, ~40km upstream from Mosul.

  • Ataturk Dam (Turkey): Cut Euphrates river flow into Iraq by a fifth and eliminated the spring floods.

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Ganges River (S. Asia, L: 2525 km)

• High As levels come from rocks of the Himalayan Mountains, which erode the toxic metal, washing it downstream, where it accumulates in the thick muds of the rivers’ floodplains and deltas. There it stayed undisturbed, until humans over the past 50 years began to sink boreholes into the mud and pump up the water through tube wells for drinking.

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Helmand River (Asia, L: 1150 km)

• Flows from the Hindu Kush into three lakes before entering the Hamoun Wetlands.

• Hamoun Wetland: Iran/Afghanistan, A: 3885 km2.

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Indus River (Southern Asia, L: 3180 km)

• Pakistan: Receives most of its water from Indus Tributaries in the Kashmir region.

• Due to Climate Change, the Indus is expected to lose 38% of its flow, 58% in drought years.

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Tarbela Dam: Tarbela’s Reservoir displaced more than 90K people.

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Jordan River (Israel, Palestine, Jordan, L: 251 km)

• Jordan: Little of the water in the river reaches the country named after it.

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Lancang River (China, L: 2139 km)

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Nuozhadu Dam (China)

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Meckong River (Asia, Length: 4506 km)

• The Meckong winds for 4506 km out of the ice fields of E. Tibet and through a long series of deep gorges in the mountains of S. China before tumbling down rapids to flood the rainforests of Laos and Cambodia and into the sea through its delta in Vietnam.

• ~60M people eat or draw their income directly from the river.

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Xiaowan Dam (China)

  • Zangmu Dam (China)

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Niger (aka Zaire) River (West/Central Africa, L: 4100 km)

• The Niger flows through 9 nations across the arid Sahel region of West Africa.

• The Niger Delta covers 1.6% of Mali at its largest, however provides pasture for a third of the country’s cattle, delivers 8% of its GDP, and sustains 2M people, 14% of the population.

• From climate change, Scripps predicts that the Niger faces losing a third of its water. Inland seas, lakes, and wetlands will be at special risk, because most climate models expect continental interiors to suffer the biggest losses of rainfall and the highest increases in temperature and evaporation.

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Markala Barrage: Threatens the Niger Delta by diverting water for irrigating thirsty crops like rice and cotton in giant state-sanctioned farms.

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Nile River (Africa, L: 6759 km- words largest with a 1.2M sqmi drainage basin)

• The Nile is the only source of water for ~40M Egyptian farmers irrigating their crops.

• A 2017 study predicts the Nile could see an average increase of 10% this century. But the IPCC has reported that different model projections for the Nile flow later this century range from 30% more to 78% less.

• Egypt: Heavily dependent on the Nile for electricity from the Aswan High Dam and irrigation of its desert farms.

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Aswan High (Hydroelectric) Dam/Lake Nasser: Subject to the harsh Saharan sunlight, Lake Nasser, the second largest artificial lake in the world, loses up to 13M acre-feet of water to evaporation in a typical year, nearly a fifth of the average annual flow into the reservoir, and up to 40% in dry years. The Lake water spreads for 500 km along the flat Nubian Desert, flooding the famous ancient Abu Simbel temples and much else. The Aswan displaced 120K people.

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White Nile (Nile Tributary, Central Africa, L: 3700 km)

• The White Nile rises in the highlands of central Africa, flows into Lake Victoria and then Northwards into S. Sudan and Sudan, where it joins the Blue Nile at Khartoum.

• Sudd Wetland: S. Sudan, A: 57K km2

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Blue Nile (Ethiopia, Sudan, L: 1450 km)

• The Blue Nile rises in the highlands of Ethiopia, flows into Lake Tana before continuing on through W. Ethiopia into Sudan and merging with the White Nile at Khartoum.

• Ethiopians suffer perennially from drought and famine, even though 84% of the flow of the Nile River begins within the country’s borders.

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD)/Grand Ethiopian Reservoir: The $5B GERD will be the world’s 8th largest hydroelectric dam, flooding some 1684 km2 of forest and bush. The dam has huge political significance for the country and is part of a larger social movement against poverty.

    • Electrical Generation: ~6GW for 1% of the time; Outside experts believe it will rarely have enough water to use all that generating power (on average: 3GW; double Ethiopia’s electricity-generating capacity).

    • Egypt has two reasons for concern: The first is short-term, what happens while the reservoir behind the dam is being filled? The reservoir will have the capacity to hold back more than a year’s flow of the Blue Nile. That represents two-thirds of the river’s total flow into Egypt. The second is that, by changing the natural flow of the river from a short monsoon burst into a year-round discharge through the turbines, the dam will allow Sudan to substantially increase the amount of water that it takes out of the river for irrigation.

    • The evaporation rates in the reservoir behind the GERD in the mountains of Ethiopia will be much less than farther downstream, because the climate is cooler and cloudier, and a reservoir in a steep valley will have a much smaller surface area. If the two countries could reach an agreement under which Lake Nasser was partly emptied and Ethiopia held water in the GERD on behalf of Egypt, then several million acre-feet of water could be saved.

  • Roseires Dam (Sudan)

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Omo River (Kenya, Ethiopia. L: 800km)

• Lake Turkana: The largest desert lake in the world. Water level in the lake depends on the balance between inflow from the Omo and evaporation from the lake’s surface. The unrelenting Kenyan sun takes 8’/yr from the lake. In the first two years after Gibe III’s gates closed, the five-foot drop in lake levels caused the shoreline to retreat by more than a mile. Fish catches collapsed.

  • Ethiopia: Heavy diversions of the Omo are slowly destroying Kenya’s Lake Turkana.

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Gibe III Dam (H: 797’): The latest and biggest of five planned Dams on the Omo to capture and distribute flow though hydroelectric turbines and irrigation ditches. Its reservoir will eventually be 160 km long.

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Parana River (S. America, L: 4880 km)

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Itaipu Dam: Delivers 12.6GW energy supplying São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

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Rio Grande River (US, Mexico, L: 3034 km)

• The Rio is the water source for more than 9M people. Most of its water is taken to grow two of the thirstiest crops in the world, cotton and alfalfa.

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Elephant Butte: Evaporation takes a meter of water per year (~130,000 acre-feet).

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Senegal River (Yobe Tributary, W. Africa, L: 1086 km)

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Manatali Dam: Eliminated floods that had provided free irrigation for half a million farmers.

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Tonle Sap River (Mekong Tributary, Cambodia, L: 120 km)

• Tonle Sap Lake (aka Great Lake)

  • During the monsoon, the Tonle Sap flows back upstream some 200 km into the Tonle Sap Lake, flooding surrounding forests, and swallowing a fifth of the Mekong’s flow, making it the largest body of freshwater in SE Asia and generating vast ecosystems of submerged forest with billions of fish fry. When the flow abates, the fish from the Great Lake migrate back into the main river and then for hundreds of miles up and down the Mekong—filling the nets that feed tens of millions of people.

  • ~50% of the 160M tons of silt that flow down the Mekong end up in the flooded forest of the Great Lake fertilizing vegetation and feeding fish. China’s planned dam projects will trap 94-98% of the sediment load.

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Senegal River (W. Africa, L: 1086 km)

• Dams & Irrigation schemes on the Senegal River have destroyed 90% of the fisheries in the river’s delta and caused the loss of up to 600K acres of seasonally flooded land, where farmers planted crops as the waters receded, pastoralists grazed their animals, and forests and wildlife flourished.

• Mauritania: Gets ~90% of its water from the Senegal River coming out of Guinea and Mali.

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Tana River (Kenya, L: 1000 km)

• The Tana River rises in the Aberdare Mountains providing Nairobi with ~95% of its water while generating half of Kenya’s electricity.

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Tigris River (Asia, L: 1901 km)

• Tigris/Euphrates River Delta

  • The delta marshes are widely held to be the origin of the biblical story of the Garden of Eden.

  • Home of the Ma’dan people, the “Marsh Arabs” and the biblically important Fertile Crescent.

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Uatuma River (Amazon Tributary, Brazil, L: 660 km)

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Balbina Dam/Reservoir (H: 150’):  100 miles N. of Manaus. Its reservoir floods an area of forest 40x the size of Manhattan; much of it < 5m deep. The dams turbines generate only 250 MW.

    • The reservoir floods ~ a soccer field to deliver enough power to run an AC unit in Manaus.

    • The methane the reservoir produces has 4x the greenhouse effect of a coal-fired power station, all due to emissions from the slow rotting of organic matter in the reservoir. It takes up to 500 years for a tree to rot in a stagnant Amazon reservoir.

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Volta River (W. Africa, L: 1500km)

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Akosombo Dam (Ghana): Holds back a larger surface area of water than any other dam, ~4,000 sqmi. A typical evaporation rate of >2m/yr means that when the reservoir is full, it loses 15M acre-feet a year.

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Yangtze River (China, L: 6300 km)

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Three Gorges Dam: The world’s most powerful hydroelectric dam with a 644 km long reservoir and a generating capacity of 22 GW. The concrete wall is 1.2 miles wide and contains 3.1M m3 of concrete.

    • Already the reservoir is filling with silt brought down from the river’s headwaters in Tibet and deposited in the slow-moving waters behind the dam. In little more than a decade, banks up to 200 feet high have formed. The lack of sediment in the river downstream threatens a delta where some 50M people live, including the inhabitants of the megacity of Shanghai. With little sediment to maintain it, the delta is being eroded by the sea.

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Yarlung Tsangpo River (S. Asia, L: 2840 km)

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • China would like to construct two giant hydroelectric plants in the Tsangpo canyon. Each could deliver roughly twice as much power as the Three Gorges Dam on the river Yangtze. The Motuo Dam would deliver 38 GW, and the Daduqia 42 GW.

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Yellow River

• Originates on the Loess Plateau (a region 5x the size of Louisiana comprised of several hundred yards thick of loose sand), the source of 90% of the Yellow River’s salt. The river is the siltiest on Earth; every ton of water contains about 40kg of Salt.

• Flood Pulses: Used to flush silt to the sea. By 2015, engineers had successfully conducted nine flushes and removed more than 400M tons of silt. They had lowered the riverbed for the 1000 km from Xiaolangdi to the ocean by an average of 1.5m, doubling the channels capacity.

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Sanmenxia Dam/Sanmenxia Reservoir

  • Xiaolangdi Dam

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Yobe River (West Africa, L: 1200 km)

• Lake Chad

  • A shallow (rarely deeper than 4m) inland sea into which several major rivers drain. Its catchment stretches across 8 countries, from Algeria to Sudan. In good times, Lake Chad spreads across up to 10,000 mi2. With diminishing inflows, it has lost more than 90% of its surface area since the early 1970s. Once, four countries bordered the lake: Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon; now only the last two have banks on its shores or access to its waters.

  • Evaporation can remove >6’ of surface water each year; it needs constant supplies of water.

  • The result of Yobe dam building and irrigation diversion schemes was to deprive the river of water, to reduce its floodplain from more than 3,000 mi2 to less than 160 mi2, and to cut the flow into Lake Chad by 55%. Some 20K head of cattle had to move away. Fish yields fell by 90%. Output of the local varieties of sorghum and rice fell by 75%. Water tables fell, emptying wells and water holes. Elephants and lions in the adjacent Waza National Park fled one of their last refuges in Central and West Africa. A hundred thousand people who had depended on the floods for their livelihoods were left destitute.

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Yukon River (BC, Yukon, AK, L: 3190 km)

• The largest surviving wild river system in the world.

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Zambezi River (SE Africa, L: 2575 km)

• The Zambezi and its tributaries pass through nine countries in Southern Africa. Only a fifth of its average annual flow of more than 80M acre-feet is currently harnessed.

• Dams/Reservoirs

  • Kariba Dam (Hydroelectric) Dam on the Zambia- Zimbabwe border.

  • Cahora Bassa (Hydroelectric) Dam in Mozambique.

  • Batoka Gorge (Hydroelectric) Dam in Zambia: $6B Chinese Built dam that will flood 10 sqmi almost to the foot of Victoria Falls to power Cu mines and export into the emerging S. African power grid.

  • Mphanda Nkuwa (Hydroelectric) Dam in Mozambique: Prospective 1.5GW Hydroelectric Dam with funding from China.

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Zarrine River (Iran, L: 302 km)

• Lake Urmia (Iran): By 2016, irrigators had taken 80% of the water, which was until recently the world’s second-largest salt lake.

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Aquifers

• Under drought, aquifers lose their storage capacity and, without water, the porous honeycombs of rocks collapse under the weight of the rocks above.

• Menaka, Mali: Researchers found 80% of wells dysfunctional.

• N. Ghana: Researchers found 50% of wells dysfunctional.

• Israel: Their occupation of the West Bank gives it control of the mountain aquifers, and of the Golan Heights, which in turn gives it control of the Jordan River.

• India: Water wells were mostly installed with aid money from the British and other governments, from charities, and from UN agencies like UNICEF, which sunk the first 900,000 wells. The aim was to improve local health by reducing the heavy death toll from sewage-borne bacteria and diseases spread by contaminated surface waters. In the 1970s, these diseases were killing an estimated 250,000 people a year in Bangladesh.

• USA: A third of all irrigation water comes from underground.

• Saudi Arabia: In the 1980s, calculates aquifer reserves at around 500M acre-feet, enough to fill Lake Erie. But virtually none of it was being replaced by rainfall. The pumping was so intense that by the turn of the century, hydrologists estimate that only a fifth of that irreplaceable reserve remained.  

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• Guarani Aquifer (S. America; Size: 1M km2 w/ 49K km3)

• Lotikipi Basin Aquifer (Kenya, Size: Unk w/ ~197km3)

• North China Plain Aquifer (China)

  • In the 1960s, the water table was almost at the surface; now it is more than 100’ down. On average, water tables are falling by 1m a year (2015 study). In places around Beijing, 90% of the replenishable water is gone, and here and there the city is tapping water half a mile down in fossil aquifers that will never refill.

• Nubian Aquifer (NE Africa, Size: 2.6M km2 w/ ~150K km3)

  • When the coastal aquifers that its farmers had long relied on to grow their crops gave out, the country’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi, decided in the 1970s to drill into the giant Nubian aquifer.

  • The largest liquid freshwater source on earth with ~50B acre-feet of water in a series of basins whose only outlet had been oases in the desert. Most of the water got there during an era when the Sahara was a crocodile-infested swamp. That era ended abruptly seven thousand years ago. Africa could raise its GW irrigation from 5M acres to 100M acres without over-pumping.

·       Ogallala (High Plains) Aquifer (Size: 175K mi2 w/ ~3700 km3)

o   The Ogallala Aquifer (named for the Sioux Nation that once hunted buffalo across the plains) stretches beneath most of NB, SD, KA, OK, and TX, and parts of E. NM, CO, and WY.

o   In a good year, the High Plains can produce three-quarters of the wheat traded on the world market.

·       Punjab Aquifer (Pakistan, ~2467 km3)

o   The Punjab produces 90% of Pakistan’s wheat

o   Farmers are pumping 30% more than is recharged and the water table is plunging by up to 6’ per year.

·       NW Sahara Aquifer System (aka NWSAS, Size: 1M km2 w/ ~18K km3)

·       Southwest Aquifer (AZ)

o   The SW Aquifer is Arizona’s only source of freshwater.

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Dams

• Around a fifth of the total global electricity comes from turbines on rivers.

• Modern environmentalists have come to see large dams as engines of environmental destruction.

• To fight climate change, hydroelectric-power generation is making a comeback in Europe. It is seen by some as the ideal method of generating low-C energy. Sweden already gets more than 40% of its power that way, Austria 60%, and Norway more than 90%. Countries in the Balkans now want to go the same way and are keen to make up for lost time. In 2016, there were more than 600 dams proposed ibetween Slovenia and Albania.

• China: Private Chinese companies are the world’s largest dam builders, with up to a half of all contracts.

• China: Dam managers routinely open their dam gates to let through the siltiest water, which is usually at the start of the monsoon season.

• Function of Dams

  • Hydroelectric Power Generation

    • Reservoirs need to be kept as full as possible to keep turbines operating.

  • Supplying Water for Irrigation Projects

  • Delivering water to the tap

  • Flood Prevention

    • Reservoirs need to be kept as empty as possible to catch flood waters.

• Are Dams Bad?

  • An Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) that recommends a dam not be built is virtually unheard of. The author would never be hired to write another.

  • Nearly all dam projects have huge cost overruns, billion-dollar corruption scandals, poor design and bogus hydrology leaving reservoirs empty, turbines never connected to national grids, and irrigation projects that never got built. Bank-financed dams, moreover, have caused the forced resettlement of millions of people.

  • Extensive cost overruns (~56% on average) with half producing significantly less power than promised; a quarter deliver less than half as much water to cities as claimed.

  • Provide far less irrigation water than intended with a quarter providing less than 35% as advertised.

  • Extensive Ecological Destruction including increased C emissions from organic matter rotting in reservoirs.

  • Encourages Desertification by desiccating wetlands and salting fields. A quarter of the world’s irrigated land, much of it watered by dams, has been damaged by salt and waterlogging.

  • Silt accumulation in reservoirs reduces storage capacity by more than half. ICOLD reckons the world’s reservoirs are losing storage capacity to silt at a rate of up to 1% a year. That is a loss of several tens of millions of acre-feet a year. By some estimates as much as a fifth of the silt traveling the world’s rivers ends up trapped behind dams.

  • Remove huge amounts of land for their reservoirs. All told, some 80M rural people have lost their homes and livelihoods to dam construction.

  • Silt shortages downstream reduces fertility of floodplains and causes erosion of riverbanks, coastal deltas, and even distant coastlines. Coastal lagoons are being washed away all along the W. African Coast.

  • Interrupt natural river flow, wrecking fisheries.

  • Blackhole for scarce development cash.

  • Typically worsen water scarcity problems downstream.

  • Implicated in many flood disasters, usually as a result of engineers opening floodgates to protect their dams.

  • Vrije U. Ted Veldkamp: Detailed month-by-month worldwide study, coauthored with hydrologists from seven nations, found that the winners were mostly upstream but that they were outnumbered by downstream losers. Some 23% of the world’s population was left with less water, compared to only 20% who have gained. Moreover, the worst downstream impacts of dams happened “in those months with the highest pressure on the available water resources”—the very months when dams are supposed to deliver their greatest benefits. In bad times, dams were making things worse.

  • Oxford U. geographer Atif Ansar: Found that most of the ~$2T spent on building large dams around the world in the past century has been a waste of money. As many as half had a negative economic return. And the bigger the dam, the worse the outcome. The money would almost always have been better spent elsewhere. Ansar analyzed 245 representative large dams—including 26 megadams more than 160m high. The problems range from engineering hubris and corruption to failures of project management, economic pitfalls like inflation and currency fluctuations, fraudulent science, unexpected geology—and political vacillation.

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Wetlands

• Wetlands are an in-between world. Sometimes wet and sometimes dry, sometimes land and sometimes water, sometimes saline and sometimes fresh, they change their character with the seasons. Next to rainforests, wetlands are the planet’s most productive ecosystems.

• Between 64-71% of Wetlands have vanished since 1900.

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Climate Change

• Extreme Weather: Climate change is making extreme weather more frequent, and that those extremes include exceptional rainfall and floods, as well as longer and more brutal droughts; megadroughts punctuated by occasional flashes of extreme wet weather.

• Megadroughts/Megastorms: Higher air temperatures will increase evaporation from the world’s oceans and allow the atmosphere to hold more water vapor. By later this century, there could well be 8-10% more water vapor in the atmosphere on an average day than there is today. This will almost certainly increase global rainfall, and make individual storms more intense. Though to complicate things, as climate change shifts the trajectories of rain-giving climate systems such as Atlantic cyclones, rainfall will be redistributed. Some places will get drier. Meanwhile, the higher temperatures will also mean soils dry out more quickly. So in some places, less of the rainfall may reach rivers. How this balance plays out is not easy to calculate. The rule of thumb seems to be that dry areas will become drier while wet areas will become wetter. Some places—maybe most—will experience both more droughts and more floods.

• Extreme Floods: Yukiko Hirabayashi of the U. of Tokyo. She looked for changes in risk of extreme floods—the once-in-a-hundred-year variety—based on combining eleven climate-model predictions of rainfall and estimates of the likely impacts on river flows. She found that, by the end of the century, there would likely be “a large increase in flood frequency in southeast Asia, peninsular India, eastern Africa and the northern half of the Andes.”

• Rising Sea Levels: Sea levels in the open ocean are rising by ~3cm a decade. But high tides in some areas such as Khulna and along the other river estuaries of southwestern Bangladesh are rising 5x faster.

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Environmental Agencies

• EcoPeace Middle East: https://ecopeaceme.org/

• European Environment Agency: https://www.eea.europa.eu/

• Global Water Policy Project: https://www.globalwaterpolicy.org/

• International Commission on Large Dams (ICOLD): https://www.icold-cigb.org/

• International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis: https://iiasa.ac.at/

• International Water Management Institute: https://www.iwmi.cgiar.org/

• International Hydropower Association: https://www.hydropower.org/

• Sinohydro (the world’s largest dam builder): https://www.cccme.cn/shop/cccme3132/introduction.aspx

• Swiss Federal Institute for Aquatic Science and Technology: http://www.eawag.ch/

• World Commission on Dams: https://www.irn.org/wcd/

• World Resources Institute (WRI): https://www.wri.org/

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Misc Quotes

“On a cool, still night, the air can be so saturated with moisture that even modest air movements, such as sound waves, can produce raindrops. In the mountains of Yunan in southern China, villagers have a tradition of yelling loudly in the hope that it will stimulate rain. The louder they shout, it is said, the more likely it is to rain. This gives interesting scientific credence to the African tradition of the rain dance.”

“In an era where recycling and “closing the loop” on key resources is the new normal, the days of “flush and forget” may have to come to an end.”

“China’s dams are the single greatest threat to the future of the river and its ecosystems. China is acting at the height of irresponsibility. . . . Its dams could sound the death knell for fisheries which provide food for over 60M people.”-UNEP.

‘Dams create water scarcity, especially for people living downstream. Almost a quarter of the global population experiences significant decreases in their water availability due to human interventions.’-Ted Veldkamp, Vrije U. Nl.

“As a rule, no stream or river needs more than one bend.”-German Engineer Tulla.

“The disappearance of the Aral Sea is greatest environmental disaster of the twentieth century.”-UN.  

‘It’s time, surely, to go out and preach the gospel of water conservation. But don’t buy one of those jokey T-shirts with slogans like save water, bathe with a friend. Good message, but you could fill roughly 25 bathtubs with the water it takes to grow the cotton needed to make the shirt.’

“On at least a third of the world’s fields today, it is water not land that is the binding constraint on production.”-UNFAO.

“When Donald Trump went to Washington, DC, his chosen metaphor for cleansing the political establishment was to “drain the swamp,” as if nobody could disagree that that was a good idea. How tragic.”

“The problem facing mankind is not a lack of fresh water, but a lack of efficient regimes for using the water that is available.”-Robert Ambroggi, American Hydrologist.

‘Syria had begun the water war by starting to dig a canal in the Golan Heights to divert the headwaters of the Jordan away from Israel. And that the Six-Day War really started on the day Israel decided to act against the diversion of the Jordan. . . . While the border disputes were of great significance, the matter of water diversion was a stark issue of life and death.-Ariel Sharon, 1960s.

“The 21st century should be the era of restoration in ecology.”-Edward O. Wilson.

“One school of thought holds that cities were largely born because these agrarian societies needed new kinds of social organizations to collect, distribute, and contain water on a large scale. They had to hire farmers or coerce slaves into digging and maintaining dikes and canals and watching for floods; and they needed to develop scientific skills like astronomy and mathematics to predict nature’s whims. It was the American historian Karl Wittfogel who coined the phrase “hydraulic civilizations” to describe societies that are organized primarily around the need to manage water.”

‘Egypt would go to war to stop a dam on the Nile in Ethiopia.’-Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

‘Youths in the Lake Chad Basin are joining the Boko Haram terrorist groups because of lack of jobs and difficult economic conditions resulting from the drying up of the lake and extinction of its resources.’-Mana Boukary of the Lake Chad Basin Commission.

Ethiopia: Only 27% of the population has safe drinking water.

Gaza Strip, Palestine: The most water-starved political unit on earth, with ~37 gal of brackish underground water a day for each of the cities million plus inhabitants. Worse yet, the porous rocks that were once full of freshwater are being infiltrated by sewage from Gaza’s towns and refugee camps, and by seawater intrusion from the Med.

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Terminology

• Acre-foot: The amount of water it takes to cover an acre of land to a depth of a foot (~1K m3).

• Aflaj: A complex Arabian water-sharing system; mountain water tunnels that flow into villages, where it is accessed for drinking and domestic use; then it goes to the mosque and school and to communal bathing cubicles and a washing area, though soap is banned. Water from these sources all returns to the main channel and heads for the fields, where it is shared out among its owners.

• Amunas: Andean stream channels that captured water from rivers in the Andean mountains during the rainy season and channeled it downhill for 1,000’, to where it could infiltrate rocks that fed springs. Regularly recharged with water brought from the mountains, those springs increased their flow enough to maintain a number of local rivers through the deserts of lowland Peru during the dry season. They convey floodwaters from mountain rivers for storage beneath the land, ready to top up the rivers in the dry season.

• Boko Haram: An Islamist insurgency based in northern Nigeria.

• Closed Basins: Fully utilized rivers; the only water left for nature is often drainage from humanity’s last use.

• Closing the loop: Recycling of our sewage for both its nutrients and its irrigation benefits.

• Endorheic Lakes: Terminus Lakes; lacking an outflow.

• Flood Pulses: Used to flush silt from reservoirs to the sea.

• Fulani: The largest nomadic pastoral group in the world.

• Hydraulic Civilization: Societies organized primarily around the need to manage water; the combination of hydraulic agriculture, a hydraulic government, and a single-centered society; built on the paramount need to harness water resources for food and tame them to prevent destruction by floods.

• Iran Water Transfer Project: A 285-mile underground pipeline designed to take desalinated seawater from the Caspian Sea through the Alborz Mountains to arid heartlands such as Qom, Khorasan, and Isfahan.

• Qanats: Syrian Stream channels; researchers have mapped around 250 qanats. Often, abandoned qanats are the most viable new sources of water to supply refugees in conflicts.

• River Interlink Project (India): India’s River diversion scheme intended to build dozens of large dams and canals to link 14 northern rivers flowing out of the Himalayas to capture the great monsoon rivers of northern India and send their water south and west to parched lands where the droughts are worst and the underground water reserves are sinking fastest. It would pump their waters south along a thousand miles of aqueducts and tunnels and through three hundred reservoirs to fill a second network, linking the 17 major rivers of the country’s arid south, including the Godavari, the Krishna, and the Cauvery. The transfers would involve moving 38M acre-feet of water a year. That water could irrigate up to 85,000 acres of farmland and generate 34GW of electricity. With so many more rivers and links, the price tag would be 2-3x higher than China’s project, with official estimates ranging from $112-200B, or around 40% of the country’s GDP. Indian critics say that a third of the power promised from hydroelectric turbines to be installed as part of the scheme would be soaked up in pumping water around the network of canals and tunnels.

• Spring Tunnels: Ancient water-catching system throughout the Middle East.  

• South-North Water Transfer Project: A $60B project that diverts part of the Yangtze River Flow to replenish the Yellow River to supply tens of millions of people in N. China.  

• Tidal Amplification: The combined effect of funneling and global rise in sea levels results in a rise in delta high tide is common in estuaries and river deltas around the world. The more a government raises banks to try and protect against floods, the worse the problem becomes.

• Tragedy of the Commons: Everybody chases short-term wealth even at the cost of destroying their long-term collective future. Nobody can afford to miss out on the boom, because they will all share in the eventual bust.

  • “Yes, I’m worried that the water will disappear,” Chowdhury told me. “But what can I do? I have to live, and if I don’t pump it up, my neighbors will.”

  • We are all trying to make as much money as we can before the water runs out. If we stopped pumping just on this farm, it wouldn’t affect the outcome.”

• Untouchables (Dalits): The lowest of the Hindi Caste System; they are not allowed to drink water from village tube wells because of their low social status.

• Virtual Water:

  • The biggest net exporter of virtual water is the US. It sends abroad in traded goods around a third of all the water it withdraws from the natural environment. Much of that is in grains, either directly or via meat.

• Xerophytic: Plants adapted to desert conditions.

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Chronology

• 2017: ~100K flee their homes and take refuge on Sudan’s Sudd Islands (UN).-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.

• 2017: An analysis of ~10K wells worldwide shows that most of the world’s water is more than 200m underground; essentially non-renewable fossil water.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2017: A heavy snowfall throughout the Colorado River Basin relieves nearly a decade of drought in the US SW. By the following Spring, reservoirs were overflowing.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2017: New Zealand grants legal status to its third-longest river, the Whanganui, following a long-standing demand of the local Maori community, who regard the river as an ancestor.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2017: Thames Water, operating London’s sewer works, is fined £20M for routinely pumping thousands of acre-feet of raw sewage into the Thames from overloaded treatment works in Oxfordshire.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• Early, 2017: Indian courts grants legal status to the Ganges and its tributary the Yamuna, both sacred in Hindu;  humans can act as legal guardians for rivers and bring court action against polluters.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2016: Lake Mead water levels hit their lowest since the reservoir was filled in the 1930s.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2016: Israel’s Sorek Desal plant begins operating.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2016: Assassination of Environmentalist Berta Cáceres in Honduras.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• Dec, 2015: Lake Poopó, Bolivia’s second largest lake, dries up entirely due to diversion, drought induced climate change, and Andean glacial retreat.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 5 Dec, 2015: The Desmond Storm in the UK discharges a third more water than the previous maximum, causing $700M in damage. Before the end of December, two additional storms- Eva and Frank—strike the UK creating “extraordinary” hydrological conditions, in which many large river catchments record their highest-ever peak flows.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• Late, 2015: Chad declares a state of emergency in the Lake Chad Region after a Boko Haram suicide bomber kills many at a fish market in the refugee camp of Baga Sola.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2015: Ethiopia blocks flow of the Blue Nile River for construction of the GERD; the plan is to capture most of the river’s flow, passing the water through the dam’s turbines to generate hydroelectricity and then irrigating plantations of sugar and other thirsty crops that are being created in the remote bush.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2015: The Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism is established as a water sharing forum.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2015: The Nairobi Water Fund, the first water fund in Africa, is launched in Nairobi with the aim to protect the upper reaches of the Tana River. The fund is masterminded by TNC and has money from Coca-Cola, the Kenya Electricity Generating Company, and the local subsidiary of another global drink’s giant, Diageo, which brews Tusker beer in Nairobi. The fund’s declared prime purpose is to educate upland farmers in ways to reduce the soil erosion that is silting up reservoirs and making the river’s flow increasingly unreliable.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2015: The Monte Bello Dam on the Xingu River in Brazil is closed after a 30 yr court battle with the Juruna tribe, who lost their lands as the reservoir filled.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2015: Boko Haram massacres in Doron Baga, Nigeria force thousands to flee to refugee camps in Chad.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2015: India’s River Interlinking Project completes its first small phase, a canal joining the Godavari and Krishna Rivers in the east of the country.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2015: China’s ~$1B Zangmu Dam is completed as the first barrier on the Mekong River’s main stem near the country’s borders with Bhutan and India.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2015: The Machina Liberation Movement is formed in Mali as a jihadi organization comprised largely of Fulani pastoralists, who begin launching attacks on farmers in the delta.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1 Apr, 2015: No Snow (the first in recorded history) is measured at Phillips, CA in the Sierra Nevadas (5’ is typical).-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• Early, 2015: Ministers from Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia meet in Khartoum and agree to a deal for managing the GERD. Sudanese foreign minister Ali Karti called it “the beginning of a new page in relations between our three countries.” Days later, Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, made a first-ever speech to the Ethiopian parliament looking to “a future where all the classrooms in Ethiopia are lit and all the children of Egypt can drink from the River Nile.”-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• Aug, 2014: The main surviving E. Basin portion of the Aral Sea completely dries up.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• Apr, 2014: ISIS captures the Fallujah Dam near Baghdad, stopping all flow downstream and leaving nearby holy cities Karbala and Najaf without water.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• Mar, 2014: The first pulse flow on the Colorado River briefly replenishes the long-parched delta. A delta landscape where jaguars and beavers once roamed had not seen fresh river water since 1993.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2014: China’s Nuozhadu Dam is completed on the Mekong River.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• Oct, 2013: Iraq designates its first national park- the Central Marshes.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• Early, 2013: The Islamic State (IS) captures the Tabqa Damn in Northern Syria.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2013: DRC and South Africa agreed to harness Inga Falls, a massive series of rapids, where 34 acre-feet of water a second descends 315 feet in 9 miles just downstream of the capital Kinshasa.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2013: Extreme drought in the US SW.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2013: Ethiopia begins diverting Blue Nile River flow to begin construction of the GERD; tensions with Egypt rise.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2011: Construction of the Myitsone Dam in N. Myanmar is suspended by reform President Thein Sein after achin people are killed in protests against the dam.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2011: Syrian Civil War; in part due to empty irrigation canals and dried-up wells that leads to social discontent.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.   

• 2011: Ethiopia begins construction of the GERD on the Blue Nile without warning.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2011: Overthrow of Libyan President Muammar Ghaddafi.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.   

• 2010: The Entebbe Agreement is signed by Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Ethiopia (later Burundi) to disown the 1959 Nile Water Agreement and call for their rightful share of the Nile’s waters. Egypt and Sudan initially reject the call. Recently, Egypt has made overtures.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2009: Filling of Turkmenistan’s Golden Century Lake begins; funded by billions of dollars in revenues from the country’s natural gas fields. The idea is to collect all the drainage water flowing off the country’s immensely inefficient irrigated cotton fields and take it down a network of canals to the Karashor depression in the NW of the country. Once full, the Lake will cover around 750 mi2 and provide water to irrigate another 1,600 mi2 of fields—enough to grow an additional half a million tons of cotton. If its surface area ever gets as big as promised, the lake will lose up to 6M acre-feet of water a year to evaporation—almost a third of the water that Turkmenistan is currently entitled to take from the Amu Darya.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2009: Honduras Military coup.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2009: Israel’s Hadera Desal plant begins operating.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2009: Burmese Generals permit China to build the Myitsone Dam on the Irrawaddy inside N. Myanmar, (90% of the electricity from the 6 GW plant would go to China).-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2008: The Baglihar Barrage (Dam) is completed on the Chenab River in India.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2008: The Sichuan Quake in China kills ~70K people; likely the result of the weight of water in the Zipingpu reservoir on the Min Rirver, which activates a dormant fault lines. The reservoir began filling in 2007 and the following May, a 7.9-magnitude quake occurred 5 km downstream. In the aftermath, other researchers concluded that the quake had indeed been “triggered by the mass loading [of water] and increased pore pressure caused by the Zipingpu reservoir.”-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2008: Ecuador grants human- style natural rights to its rivers; the “right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate.”-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2007: Major drought in Northern Syria force a mass exodus of people heading for Syrian cities, where unrest leads to the growth of opposition to the Assad regime and ultimately the rise of Islamic State.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2007: CA, NV, and AZ agree to self-imposed reductions in CO river abstractions if water levels fall to an elevation of 1,075’ AMSL.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• Aug, 2005: Hurricane Katrina batters New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Storm surges penetrate deep into the Mississippi delta and because the Louisiana wetlands had mostly been drained, and levees raised to prevent water in the river escaping across the delta, the water surging inland from the Gulf had nowhere to go. Water levels rose finally breaching New Orleans’ levees, engulfing a city of half a million.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2005: Israel’s Ashkelon Desal plant begins operating.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2005: Failure of the 300m wide Shadikor Dam in Pakistan kills ~100 people.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2004-2005: Construction of Israel’s security fence, planned to keep suicide bombers out of its towns during the intifada between 2000 and 2005.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2004: Israeli aquifer water tables levels decrease filling the porous rock with seawater. To compensate, Israel began to sink wells farther inland, near the Yarkon and Taninim Springs, tapping the Western Aquifer beneath the West Bank.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2003: The Three Gorges Dam is completed creating a reservoir 644 km long stretching all the way back upstream to the new megacity of Chongqing. It flooded hundreds of cities and towns and inundated farmland, forcing the evacuation of around 2M people.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2000: The EU Water Framework Directive is passed requiring that all rivers be returned to a “good status.”-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• Late 1990s: High As levels are discovered in Bangladesh and India’s wells. Follow on As risk-mapping systems reveal the two most susceptible landscapes—delta regions with new river sediments, such as those on the Ganges and Red River; and alkaline inland drainage basins.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1999: The UN sets drinking-water targets in which countries promise to “halve, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water (from a baseline in 1990).”-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

  • The UN and UNICEF, which were jointly charged with monitoring progress on the target, decided instead on a proxy; ‘access to improved drinking water.’ They defined “improved” water as coming from a piped supply, a drilled well, collected rainwater, or a hand-dug well or spring “protected” from sewage contamination. Unimproved sources included rivers and open wells and water delivered by carts, all of which face obvious risks of contamination.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1999: Jaslyq Prison (aka UYA 64/71) in Uzbekistan opens as a detention facility following bombings in Tashkent.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1998: Farmers in the Maikal Hills of central India begin using Pepsee rolls to irrigate the fields using the rolls of plastic tubing to create conduits for distributing water to plants. As the water runs down the tubes, it drips through the perforations to water the plants. This startlingly successful exercise in lateral thinking has produced the first dirt-cheap method of providing drip irrigation for poor farmers.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• Oct, 1998: Hurricane Mitch strikes Central America killing ~10K; the most destructive storm in the W. Hemisphere in 200 years, dumping record amounts of rain onto steep hillsides already saturated by a month of storms. Landslides and flash floods turned small mountain streams into torrents.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1998: The Helmand River’s three lakes dry up for the first time in recorded history.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.   

• 1997: The Watercourses convention is adopted by the UN asking countries to sign up to a statement of principle that nations should ensure the “sustainable and equitable use of shared rivers.”-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1995: The Mekong River Commission is formed by Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand as a forum to consult on the Mekong’s future.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1995: Rhine River Levees fail during flooding inundating large parts of the Netherlands and forcing a quarter million Dutch to evacuate. The faster river dramatically increased river flow from the Alps (~200% at places). After heavy rains, the peak flow on the Rhine now coincided with peak flows in tributaries such as the Neckar as they met the main river with resulting flood surges downstream in Bonn and Koln, where peak flows were a third higher. 200-year floods were not expected every 60 years.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.

• 1993: Hussein’s Iraqi Baathist government practices Ecological Warfare against the Marsh Arabs, creating diversion schemes on the Tigris/Euphrates that drain the Marshes. By the Second Gulf War in 2003, >90% of the marshes had dried out. We all watched TV images of American forces crossing the desert of southern Iraq, intent on overthrowing Saddam. Few realized that, until a decade before, most of the land they crossed had been covered in lakes, reed beds, and waterways.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.

• 1993: The Oslo Accords are signed by Israel and Palestine as a temporary agreement on land and water sharing. They largely reflected the status quo, giving Israel control of 80% of the Western aquifer, including the whole of the western side.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.

• 1993: Flooding on the Mississippi raises water levels 50’ and submerges much of St. Louis. The river rose over more than 1000 km of levees. Nearly 500 counties featured in a presidential disaster declaration, and property damage was put at $12B.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1991: Completion of the Itaipu Hydroelectric Dam on the Parana River in Brazil which delivers 12.6GW energy supplying São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1991: Gadhafi’s Great Man- Made River, the world’s largest civil engineering project, delivers its first water. The project used some 5M tons of cement and 25M tons of aggregate, costing $27B.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1990: Introduction of Atmospheric Water harvesting by Canadian cloud physicist, Bob Schemenauer, to provide water for a small run-down fishing town on the edge of Chile’s Atacama Desert. Schemenauer erected 75 large sheets of plastic mesh suspended along a remote ridge above the town. Droplets in the fog coalesced on the mesh and drained into collecting bottles. Each sheet, measuring 400 ft2, took 40 gal of water a day. Andrew Parker of Oxford University rigged up a prototype fog-catching surface based on the beetle’s design, which captured five times more water than Schemenauer’s netting.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1988: The Karakum Canal is completed, diverting Amu Darya River water some 1450 km to Turkmenistan.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• Mid-1980s: Ma’dan (Marsh Arab) insurgency against Saddam Hussain’s Baathist Iraqi Government. Despite US backing, the rebellion fails, and Saddam engages in ecological warfare on the Ma’dan.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1984: A drought in Mali dries out 75% of the Niger delta forcing 1M people to flee.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1984: The Mosul Dam, the ‘world’s most dangerous’, is completed N. of Mosul, Iraq. The dam is built in a valley made of porous gypsum rocks. The water in its reservoir constantly dissolves the gypsum, creating sinkholes that threaten to undermine the dam itself. Iraqi engineers have been working around the clock, pouring tens of thousands of tons of cement into the holes beneath the dam to keep it from collapsing.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1979: Failure of the Machhu II Dam in Gujarat after river flow reaches 3x the dam’s spillway capacity. The water rushed downstream through the town of Morbi, one of the world’s great centers of ceramics production, killing 2000-25000 people.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1979: Cameroon’s Maga Dam is completed by a state-owned rice company to divert its headwaters in the Mandara Mountains to irrigate new paddy fields created on the floodplain.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• Aug, 1975: Failure of the 400’ high Banquiao Dam in Henan Province, China; the area was struck by a Typhoon swelling the Ru River. Shortly after midnight the upstream dam burst, emptying 97K acre-feet of water down the river. When the wall of water reached the Banqiao Dam, its operators were caught unawares. Their dam swiftly gave way, this time unleashing over 400K acre-feet of water, mud, and masonry that hurtled on farther downstream. The flood formed a wave 12km wide and 6.5m high. It traveled at more than 50kph, engulfing villages on the river banks along its path and crashing into the town of Huaibin with the force of a tsunami killing 26K People. Some quarter million more were killed in the ensuing chaos and famine.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1974: The Tiga Dam in Northern Nigeria is completed.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1973: Construction of the Central Arizona Project (CAP), the world’s largest and most expensive water-delivery system, begins; built by the Bureau of Reclamation, the CAP is capable of taking almost 1.6M acre-feet a year out of the CO River and pours it into a concrete canal 500 km long that zigzags across the desert to Phoenix and Tucson. The project cost $3.6B to build and another fortune to run, and it loses 7% of the flow to evaporation enroute.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1970s: Introduction of Reverse Osmosis (RO), which forces saltwater repeatedly through a membrane that filters out the larger salt molecules and lets clean water through.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1969: Invention of Drip Irrigation by Israeli Engineer, Simcha Blass, who files a patent for a narrow tube that could deliver water under pressure and drip it close to the roots of plants. Blass had retired to the Negev Desert in the early 1960s. when one day he noticed how a large tree grew in the desert because it was right next to a slowly dripping faucet.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1969: Gaddafi seizes power in Libya and spends his oil revenues on pumping and diversion of the Nubian Aquifer.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.   

• 1967: Israel annexes the Jordan River, pumping it into the Israeli National Water Carrier.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1967: The Six Days War; Israel takes control of the West Bank.

• 1964: Israel begins taking water from the Jordan River; One day the Jordan poured out of the Golan Heights, into the Sea of Galilee, and on down the valley to the Dead Sea, as it had for millennia. The next day, a dam blocked its outflow from the Sea of Galilee, and a pumping station lifted the water into a 10-foot-wide pipe that delivered it the length of Israel. The pipe is known today as the National Water Carrier. It can carry more than 400K acre-feet a year and has for half a century been the major source of water for all of Israel.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1962: Yellow River Silt fills the Sanmenxia Reservoir to the brim with mud, increasingly elevating river flow. China endlessly builds dikes to keep the river on a single path.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1960s: The US secretly seeds clouds over Laos and North Vietnam to waterlog the trails of human donkeys carrying supplies to guerrillas during the monsoon.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1960s: Las Vegas emerges as a desert oasis.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1960: The Indus Waters Treaty is signed between India and Pakistan binding them to share the Indus flow, each taking water from three tributaries; the Chenab River, source of the Punjab- Pakistan breadbasket, went to Pakistan.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1960: China’s Sanmenxia Dam is completed on the Yellow River displacing 400K people.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1959: The Kariba Dam on the Zambezi is completed. Built by the British, it created what was at the time the largest artificial lake in the world, displacing 57K Batongan people from its floodplain.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1959: The Nile Water Agreement; drawn up by the Colonial British, allocates 45M acre-feet of the river’s annual flow to Egypt and 15M acre-feet to Sudan.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• Summer, 1952: Operation Cumulus, a UK secret military rainmaking experiment over southern England, may have triggered huge storms on Exmoor. A few hours after one spraying, storms set off landslides that killed 35 people in the Devon village of Lynmouth.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1952: The Sui-ho Hydroelectric complex in North Korea is destroyed by American Bombers, knocking out the country’s power supplies.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1943: Modern distillation technology is developed by the US Navy for operations on remote Pacific islands during WWII. Following that, large-scale distillation for public supply took off in the water-poor Gulf States, where they have plenty of oil to provide the large amounts of energy required.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1938: The All-American Canal is completed diverting water from the CO River to CA.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1935: The Hoover Dam is completed across Boulder Canyon, taller than a 60-story building, and bigger than the Great Pyramid of Egypt. Behind it is Lake Mead, holding 2x the CO Rivers annual flow.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.   

• 1926: Helmand River water sharing deal; brokered by the British, Afghanistan and Iran agree to split half the Helmand Rivers flow. The deal was renewed in 1973 and remains in force to this day.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1922: The Colorado River Pact is signed giving 7.5M acre-feet to the upper basin states of CO, UT, WY, NM, and another 7.5M acre-feet to the downstream states of CA, AZ, NV, with another 1.5M acre-feet to Mexico (totaling 16.5M acre-feet).-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1915: The Elephant Butte Dam and Reservoir on the Rio Grande is completed.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.

• 10 Feb, 1907: The CO resumes its old course south into Mexico and the Gulf of CA after Southern Pacific Railroad company spends 18 months dumping 6,000 railcar loads of rock, gravel, and clay into the desert to force the CO River back onto its old course.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1904: CO River Silt clogs the Rockwood Canals.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1902: Creation of the Salton Sea covering 600 mi2 after heavy CO River flow breaks the Rockwood Dams and begins pouring into Imperial Valley, creating an inland sea. Despite the accumulating toxins and occasional epidemics of disease among the fish, the Salton Sea became one of the world’s most productive lakes, home to an estimated two hundred million fish and home to 380 species of birds.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1901: Imperial Valley, CA; Charles Rockwood and his CA Development Company construct the Rockwood Dam, rickety wooden dam, and canal to divert some of the CO River’s flow, renaming the valley into which it flowed “Imperial Valley.” By 1905, ~14,000 people had staked out farms, dug irrigation canals, and planted 300,000 acres of fields. Traders moved in to service them sprouting new towns including Calexico, El Centro, and Brawley.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1882: The Mississippi River floods breaking its levees in 180 separate places.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1879: The US Army Corps of Engineers assume control of the Mississippi River from the Mississippi River Commission with the aim to prevent destructive floods by building levees.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1855: The Yellow River breaks its dikes creating another channel and entering the sea 600 miles farther N.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1850: The Swamp Land Acts is passed by the USG, handing ownership of unclaimed swamps to state governments. States were allowed to sell land to raise money for levee building. This brought to the Mississippi a land-drainage fever. Louisiana sold off a quarter of the state to farmers, who drained the swamps for plantations. In so doing, however, they undermined the effect of the levee construction that the sales were funding. For, in hydrological terms, the swamps were giant holding reservoirs for the river’s natural floods. They spread the river’s flow through the year, holding on to floodwaters during high flow and letting it seep back during low flow. Now barricaded off, they could do neither. The river floods grew higher, and the levees broke with increasing regularity.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1735: Flooding of New Orleans; French settlers build 45 miles of earthworks around the city.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1730-1735: A series of massive volcanic eruptions on Lanzarote in the Canary Islands.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1431: Collapse of the Khmer Civilization, following the sacking of its capital by the Siamese kingdom of Ayutthaya.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 910: Catastrophic drought strikes Meso-America (Tree Rings).-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.

• ~900: Collapse of the Mayan Civilization, possibly following several droughts-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 860: Catastrophic drought strikes Meso-America (Tree Rings).-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.

• 810: Catastrophic drought strikes Meso-America (Tree rings).-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.

• 800: Rise of the Khmer civilization in SE Asia; The Khmer reach their height under Hindu kings in the 12th and 13th centuries before crashing in the 15th century.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.

• 500 BCE: To reduce salt, the Persians begin reducing irrigation and planting weeds during the fallow season to keep the water table low. But they faced a new problem when the canals washed river silt into the irrigation systems. They solved it by employing thousands of slaves to dredge the waterways.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 1800 BCE: Desertification of the historic Fertile Crescent, potentially to long term salt accumulation in farmers fields, eventually poisoning soils and crops. Cuneiform tablets of 3800 years ago describe a farm system in its death throes, with “black fields becoming white” and “plants choked with salt.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 2600 BCE: The Umma-Girsu War is fought between the Sumerian states. Known as the world’s first recorded water, when the king of Umma in Sumer cut the banks of irrigation canals dug by his neighbor, the king of Girsu. But the kings of Girsu were not beaten. They dug a new canal to capture the waters of the Euphrates’ twin river, the Tigris.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.   

• 3500 BCE: Sumerians in the Fertile Crescent construct the first known large irrigation system using river water diverted from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers down long canals and erected earth defenses against the spring floods. Building on this agricultural prosperity, they began to construct great cities including Ur, Kish, and Uruk, where the first writing was produced and the first sciences developed.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 5000 BCE: Jericho is settled (the first known human settlement) on the W. Bank of the Jordan River. It covered barely 10 acres and had a thick defensive wall. Close by was a spring, recorded in the Bible as Elisha’s Spring. It was the reason for Jericho’s existence.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 5000 BCE: Desertification of the Sahara.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.  

• 8000 BCE: Close of the last ice age and retreat of the Ice Sheets.-Rivers Run Dry by Pearce.

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