Flooding along the Mississippi River Last week, I wrote a post for the Scientific American Guest Blog on “Levees and the Illusion of Flood Control,” about the ways that while levees around individual communities may be good, the systematic leveeing of entire waterways is a bad long-term strategy. On Friday, …
Cross-posted at Highly Allochthonous In case other events have crowded it out of your news feed, there’s record-breaking flooding going on in the Mississippi River basin. Snowmelt in the headwaters, combined with weeks of heavy rains in the middle reaches of the river basin, have pushed the system to its …
Cross posted at Highly Allochthonous Fargo, North Dakota is coming out of its 3rd snowiest winter since 1885. Snow continued to fall into late March, and daytime temperatures have only been above freezing for few weeks. At night, it’s still below freezing, though starting tomorrow night the forecast calls for …
The geology, geography, and climate of the Red River Valley make major floods an inevitability.
Cross-posted at Highly Allochthonous On Friday 11 March 2011, when the fault ruptured off of the Japanese coast in a M9.0 earthquake, it caused a sudden vertical movement of the seafloor, displacing the water above it and transferring energy to the ocean. As the water returned to place (thanks, gravity!), …
A Geophysical Research Letters paper concludes the 2010 Pakistan floods were predictable, but not predicted. Other reporting suggests they were predicted, but the warning was ignored. Either way, things should have been done differently.
Flooding updates from New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil.
Steep hillslopes with loose sediment are at risk from debris flows triggered by heavy rain or rapid snowmelt. As water is added to the hillslope, surface runoff or positive pore water pressure catastrophically destabilizes a portion of the slope. I decided to undertake my own research and investigate the possibilities for an edible analog for debris flows.
Cross-posted at Highly Allochthonous Here in Charlotte we had a hot summer. We barely escaped the dubious distinction of hottest summer on record, with an average temperature of 81.1° F (27.3 ° C) between 1 June and 31 August. The record had been set in 1993, when Charlotte recorded an …
For the past two weeks, unusually heavy monsoon rains have deluged Pakistan, resulting in flooding and landslides. Pakistan is heavily populated all along the Indus River valley, so this is a slow-moving disaster of epic proportions. The latest news reports estimate that flooding has displaced 14 million people – more …