3000 Years of Messing with the Yellow River

[Randy W]

from the Smithsonianmag

 

Humans Have Been Messing With China's Yellow River for 3,000 Years When humans try to tame nature things rarely go according to plan

 

http://thumbs.media.smithsonianmag.com//filer/b7/cd/b7cdb728-7d77-428e-964a-0ccad6f1d674/river.jpg__800x600_q85_crop.jpg

 

By 2,000 years ago, they report, the river had been altered so much that it hardly resembled the natural system of 1,000 years before. "It's easy to see the trap they fell into: building levees causes sediments to accumulate in the river bed, raising the river higher, and making it more vulnerable to flooding, which requires you to build the levee higher, which causes the sediments to accumulate, and the process repeats itself," the researchers say in a statement. "The Yellow River has been an engineered river — entirely unnatural — for quite a long time."

 

The river, however, was far from tame. A massive flood around AD 14 cost the lives of approximately 9.5 million people, the researchers say, and seemed to have marked the beginning of the end for the Western Han Dynasty. Devastating Yellow River floods continued to be the norm throughout Chinese history, and today, massive dams and dykes occur along the river to try to contain it.

 

 

 

http://www.chinahighlights.com/image/map/yellowriver/yellow-river-map.jpg

[tsap seui]

Hey, no sediment in the water ...no reason to name it "Yellow River".

 

The Mekong River is orange (at least in Cambodia) from all the sediment it carries. I dunno, does Mekong translate into "orange"?

 

tsap seui

Jes' wonderin'

[danb]

It is strange and interesting that some of great rivers of China sometimes now run dry on its run to the ocean.

 

http://on.aol.com/video/yellow-river-drying-up-in-china-481387885

 

Danb