Climate change steals river

Overnight a river in Northern Canada disappeared. A glacier had retreated and allowed the water upstream to sneak out via a different path. The water now ends up in the Pacific 1300 km away from the Bering sea where it used to emerge.

Credit: Jim Best/University of Illinois

You might think this event has happened every time glaciers retreated in the last 30 million years, but you would be wrong. Really, this is due to coal-fired power stations.

In a report published on Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, Dr. Shugar and his colleagues provide a detailed analysis of how an atmosphere warmed by fossil-fuel emissions has led to the river’s dramatic disappearance.

“To me, it’s kind of a metaphor for what can happen with sudden change induced by climate,” said John Clague, who holds a chair in natural hazard research at Simon Fraser University and was a co-author on the report.

Let’s play River-trivia — all the other times the world warmed, the river rerouted more slowly because:

ice doesn’t always melt when things warm. water sometimes flows uphill.

How do we know it’s different this time?

The conclusion relies on a […]