A Drowning World: Kenya's Quiet Slide Underwater (theguardian.com) 100
Kenya's great lakes are flooding, in a devastating and long-ignored environmental disaster that is displacing hundreds of thousands of people. From a report: One of the first scientists to realise that something was wrong with the lakes was a geologist named Simon Onywere. He came to the topic by accident. Between 2010 and 2013 he had been studying Lake Baringo, Kenya's fourth-largest lake by volume. The bones of residents of the area around the lake weaken uncommonly fast, and Onywere was investigating whether this may be linked to high fluoride levels in the water. Then, in early 2013, while he was meeting with residents of Marigat, a town near the lake, one old man stood up. "Prof," he said. "We don't care about the fluoride. What we want to know is how the water has entered our schools."
Curious to know what the man was talking about, Onywere visited the local Salabani primary school. There, he found the lake lapping through the grounds of the school. Nonplussed, he took out his map. He looked at the location of the lake and the location of the school, and wondered how the lake had moved 2km without it becoming news. Onywere rushed back to Nairobi, where he and his colleagues at several Kenyan universities studied recent satellite images of the lake. The images showed that the lake had, in the past year, flooded the area around it. Then Onywere searched for images of some of the lakes nearby: Lakes Bogoria, Naivasha and Nakuru. All of these had flooded. As he extended his search, he saw that Lake Victoria, Africa's largest lake, had flooded, too. So had Lake Turkana, the largest desert lake in the world.
Curious to know what the man was talking about, Onywere visited the local Salabani primary school. There, he found the lake lapping through the grounds of the school. Nonplussed, he took out his map. He looked at the location of the lake and the location of the school, and wondered how the lake had moved 2km without it becoming news. Onywere rushed back to Nairobi, where he and his colleagues at several Kenyan universities studied recent satellite images of the lake. The images showed that the lake had, in the past year, flooded the area around it. Then Onywere searched for images of some of the lakes nearby: Lakes Bogoria, Naivasha and Nakuru. All of these had flooded. As he extended his search, he saw that Lake Victoria, Africa's largest lake, had flooded, too. So had Lake Turkana, the largest desert lake in the world.
Re:So what's this all about? (Score:4, Informative)
A more informative article here:
https://earthobservatory.nasa.... [nasa.gov]
After the expansion of Nalubaale dam and a drought in the mid-2000s drew water levels down to unusually low levels, many communities moved homes and infrastructure closer to the shore. With steadily rising water levels since 2007—and the especially sharp increase in 2020—many communities are now vulnerable to floods.
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if you would bother to look at the linked article, you see that the water level is beyond restoration, it is higher than it was since they started measuring in 1992 (which was before the dam ). The 'dip' of the dam was restored in just a few years.
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I'm on slashdot, so obviously I know very little, and all problems look simple to me, but...
A lake is essentially a buffer between an input and an output - water flows in at one end, it fills up a bit, and water flows out the other end. Surely, if the water level goes up by (say) 1M, then there must, somewhere, be a raging torrent of water 1M tall coming out of the lake? If not, then why not? Is there some obstruction that wasn't there before?
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I'm on slashdot, so obviously I know very little, and all problems look simple to me
hmmm
Surely, if the water level goes up by (say) 1M, then there must, somewhere, be a raging torrent of water 1M tall coming out of the lake?
Not all lakes drain to the sea...
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Water levels in Lake Titicaca in Peru can rise and fall dramatically. The house my wife grew up in was normally 3-4 blocks from the shoreline, but in 1987 the water had completely flooded the house on the corner of her block. It had risen gradually over several years and showed no sign of going down. Then there was an earthquake in Deseguadero, on the border with Bolivia, which is where the lake's only outlet is. Now the water level is a good meter and a half lower than she ever saw it before. My specu
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An obvious solution is to build houses on skids or wheels so they can be moved as the shoreline shifts.
Another solution is houseboats.
If Africans need any more advice on how to manage their continent, I am available.
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A more informative article here:
https://earthobservatory.nasa.... [nasa.gov]
After the expansion of Nalubaale dam and a drought in the mid-2000s drew water levels down to unusually low levels, many communities moved homes and infrastructure closer to the shore. With steadily rising water levels since 2007—and the especially sharp increase in 2020—many communities are now vulnerable to floods.
Thanks for posting this. I didn't read the slashdot article in detail, but it seems to focus on the "woe is us, mother nature is flooding us out of house and home" aspect, without mentioning the humans moved into a flood plain during the dry years...
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I did read TFA, and while there's a lot of woe, there's also:
plate tectonics contributed a little but can't explain the rapidity of lake level rise;
recent excessive rainfall plus deforestation explains a lot;
government officials didn't pay any attention until after the UN noticed and considered giving aid;
natural habitats are being inundated by flooding, endag
African Rift Valley: Future New Ocean (Score:2)
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It's really not clear that that is the causative factor. Tectonic plates tend to spread very slowly.
That a new dam was built a few years ago and things dried out for awhile seems more causally connected. It's probably possible to figure out why they stopped drying out and reverted to the prior state (if that's what happened).
Re: African Rift Valley: Future New Ocean (Score:2)
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I can accept that the reason isn't obvious. I thought even the summary strongly implied that. But this doesn't mean it can't be figured out. It *does* seem pretty clear that it hasn't been figured out yet, but that's a different assertion.
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It's really not clear that that is the causative factor. Tectonic plates tend to spread very slowly.
Agreed, I was just pointing out that the eventual fate of that entire area is that it will become flooded at some point in the future so it literally is a drowning world and will indeed slide underwater due to entirely natural processes. However, while this process may happen on geological timescales as the land drops it can presumably affect drainage patterns far more rapidly so perhaps it is not worth entirely ruling out as the current cause?
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Well. People being stupid. High-water marks are marks were water went in the past and likely will go again ion the future. Not that this type of stupidity is limited to Africa. For example Germany has flooding in some place time and again because people seem to not understand that a past flood predicts a future one.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Just like the IMPORTANT news my mother tells me about...For example I had this one last night...
She stopped to talk whilst out walking to the shopping centre to some random man who she has never meet before, and he told her that he had met some other random man who had a budgerigar and did not own a car, however if he did have a car he would have to pay to park his car in the shopping centre complex.
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lol, did you try clicking the link in the summary?
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I think you missed the point being made here.
Looks like the mods did too, or they just like sob-stories to wallpaper their safe-spaces with.
Bigger lake is good (Score:2)
The Russians enviro-fucked the Aral Sea, so to make up for that clusterfuck environmental disaster, it is good we have lakes at least somewhere in the world that are growing instead of depleted into an environmental catastrophe.
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To be more precise:
1. The soviets.
2. Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. They are neither Russian, nor Russianish.
Back on the subject, this is bad news in another way. All Great African lakes have gas-hydrate on the bottom and or gas saturated lower levels. Any large change in the lake level may de-stabilize that and cause a gas release which may kill up to half a million (in a worst case scenario).
Re: Bigger lake is good (Score:2)
Oh get real, it was not Turkmenistan .. it was the Soviets who done it. And who set Soviet policy if not mostly Russians. It is called Central Planning.
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Oh get real, it was not Turkmenistan .. it was the Soviets who done it. And who set Soviet policy if not mostly Russians. It is called Central Planning.
The design and the project management is by this guy [wikipedia.org].
He is actually German-Swiss, born to German swiss parents working for the Russian empire, then going back to Germany where he started his career as a home tutor to Siemens family in Germany before moving to Russia before WW1.
Next time do your homework before going off on a racist rant regardless of how fashionable is racism with Russians as a target.
Re: Bigger lake is good (Score:1)
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I don't read Russian, so I had to feed your site about "this guy" through a translator. Which I recommend others do, since your account put a different slant on things than the article. What agenda you would like to pursue by doing so, is still unknown.
For one, the translation states that Tsinzerling was
"Born in St. Petersburg on August 31, 1884 in a family of Russified emigrants from French-speaking Switzerland."
It also states
"From early youth he worked for hire, including in 1904-1905 in Germany as a home teacher in the family of the famous businessman Siemens."
Why you would single out that short period, while he also had many other exploits all around the world, including
"worked for several years in the USA as a worker, technician, engineer at various irrigation facilities, including a very complex one in the Colorado River Delta"
leaves one guessing... Are you a Germanophobe at the same time as chastis
Re: Bigger lake is good (Score:1)
Re: Bigger lake is good (Score:1)
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When you actually read that article, you find in fact quote the opposite, and in particular...
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exactly! just like america had no responsibility at all for our space rocket program since we got a german dude to do the design and project management.
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"Next time do your homework"
If you bothered to take your own advice you'd know he was Russian by birth & education & in 1924, predicted the eventual depletion of the Aral Sea.
Or put more succinctly: "holy fuck, you're stupid"
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For the people there it is obviously an environmental catastrophe. ...
Considering that the lakes are filled by melting glaciers around Kilimancharo
Re: Bigger lake is good (Score:2)
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Sure, and the rain comes out of thin air?
Or do we have new streams of clouds coming from the oceans going deep into Africa?
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Sure, and the rain comes out of thin air?
Stupid question.
Or do we have new streams of clouds coming from the oceans going deep into Africa?
Good question.
oh well (Score:2)
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Doubt it, the rift opening will happen on geological time scales, not human life scales. It is important to have a sense of proportion.
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Hence the need for the Total Perspective Vortex (tm).
I, for one, would love to put the big orange one, and p00tin in there and see what happens.
The rain fall in Africa is changing location (Score:2)
Mind control (Score:2)
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I thought fluoridated water was part of the mind-control conspiracy. If this is naturally occurring, who is trying to control these people?
The Illuminati, using a Major league Baseball Satellite that has Jewish Space Lasers on it.
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All part of the electropositive conspiracy.
Dammit! no one was supposed to know that yet!
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You write for the SyFy channel? Well, you oughta.
ps - that is intended as a compliment, full slashdot mode.
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You write for the SyFy channel? Well, you oughta.
ps - that is intended as a compliment, full slashdot mode.
I should. Come up with stranger and stranger ideas, and see where they cut me off.
Much muddled thinking (Score:2, Insightful)
A rudimentary knowledge of science informs us that the world is constantly changing. About 4 billion years ago it was molten rock - quite inhospitable to life. Then for a long time there was virtually no oxygen in the atmosphere. Eventually the temperature fell to something like what it is now, and the atmosphere stabilised with about 20% oxygen, which supports our kind of life.
However ice ages have regularly alternated with steamily hot conditions. For most of the Earth's history it has had no ice caps at
Re: Much muddled thinking (Score:2)
"what they really mean is their own survival and the maintenance of the way of life that they enjoy"
Well duh, nobody pretends this isn't the case. (And you ignore that we'd also like if other life survives as well, both because we like it, and we need it.) Your surfing analogy is noted, except we now know the waves are getting too big to ride, and we're the ones causing them. The rest of your post ... Yawn.
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So people who rant about our duty to the environment are being hypocritical: what they really mean is their own survival and the maintenance of the way of life that they enjoy.
There's nothing hypocritical about that. Our duty to the environment is because otherwise it won't support us. The presence or absence of mystical claptrap thinking doesn't change that. If we don't care for it, it won't be here for us.
Instead of fretting about the inevitability of change, it's high time we accepted it and went with the punches.
What you're willfully ignoring for the sake of your argument is that it's perfectly possible for systems to achieve relative stasis. The periods you're talking about were wild because the planet hadn't reached that point. In order to get to a stable condition, it had to pass t
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A rudimentary knowledge of science informs us that the world is constantly changing. About 4 billion years ago it was molten rock - quite inhospitable to life. Then for a long time there was virtually no oxygen in the atmosphere.
You might enjoy this Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/Hist... [youtube.com]
Designed for intelligent but not necessarily deeply involved in the particular science people, the series' best attribute is tying things together and treating the viewer as intelligent.
Side note, Youtube has taken over intelligent video presentation as network and cable Television slides further into programming for the stupid.
Re:Much muddled thinking (Score:4, Insightful)
So you're saying that these changes should be slow relative to human timescales. The fact that they're not points to something else. Otherwise, we would have decades if not generations to adjust to changes.
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> the world is constantly changing
They haven't stopped making frozen pudding pops, have they?
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Because the human time scale is so extremely short, we tend to assume - and at any rate prefer - that everything should remain just as we like it. Usually that means the way it has been since we were children.
You make good points, but it seems the is-ought fallacy cuts both ways. It's true that just because the climate was a certain way when I was 12 doesn't mean that it ought to be maintained that way. And, at the same time, just because the climate has seen extreme variations over geologic time that doesn't mean that it ought be allowed to vary that way.
The real question to ask is what sort of global garden do we want to cultivate? Clearly, this is subjective and opinions will vary. Many will want one t
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> Most of what is written and said about the environment (and especially "the planet") is hopelessly confused. We don't need to save the planet, as Earth is basically an oblate spheroid composed mainly of iron (32.1%), oxygen (30.1%), silicon (15.1%), magnesium (13.9%), sulphur (2.9%), nickel (1.8%), calcium (1.5%), and aluminum (1.4%) with mass about 6 billion trillion tons.
https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c?t... [youtu.be]
Population growth (Score:4, Informative)
In 1950 Kenya had a population of 6 million. Today it has a population of around 55 million and in 30 years the population will be around 100 million. That is the real problem. Not minor changes to lake water levels.
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If water levels keep rising exponentially, this problem will solve itself.
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0. drowning is not a tolerable method of population management.
1. If not drowning, then migration? Where to?
I expect better from 6-digits, but then I fail also...
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Apparently i really have to tell people it was a joke...
This is how some used to think, and would sacrifice things to "the gods" to make the water/other natural things stop doing their thing.
Also, That xkcd... [xkcd.com]
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Yes you do. Mostly because it was on no level funny.
Neither of us is XKCD. I'm at peace with that.
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Apparently people don't get a joke...
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In 1950 Kenya had a population of 6 million. Today it has a population of around 55 million and in 30 years the population will be around 100 million. That is the real problem. Not minor changes to lake water levels.
Careful - the "Malthus was wrong once, therefore he will always be wrong!" people will now be triggered.
Apparently, the earth can carry an infinite number of people.
Another group who will be triggered is that somehow, people will collectively decide to stop reproducing. So far, I'm not seeing much other than a few outliers. https://www.census.gov/popcloc... [census.gov]
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In the most developed countries, population growth rates are slowing. Few of them are negative, but the downward trend seems to correlate with wealth (not money). Criticizing developing countries for their population growth is hypocritical because they are in a different stage. It seems to happen naturally when people's needs are met.
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In the most developed countries, population growth rates are slowing. Few of them are negative, but the downward trend seems to correlate with wealth (not money). Criticizing developing countries for their population growth is hypocritical because they are in a different stage. It seems to happen naturally when people's needs are met.
Sure their fertility rate will decrease due to the development of the country. But not because their needs are met. But you can look up the factors yourself. That said governments do have a wide array of options available to reduce population growth. And in doing so they can improve the economic outlook of the population.
My post is btw. not a critique of Kenya but rather an observation. When your population grows by a couple of million people per year the displacement of some thousands per year due to risin
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In the most developed countries, population growth rates are slowing. Few of them are negative, but the downward trend seems to correlate with wealth (not money). Criticizing developing countries for their population growth is hypocritical because they are in a different stage. It seems to happen naturally when people's needs are met.
Sure their fertility rate will decrease due to the development of the country. But not because their needs are met. But you can look up the factors yourself. That said governments do have a wide array of options available to reduce population growth. And in doing so they can improve the economic outlook of the population.
My post is btw. not a critique of Kenya but rather an observation. When your population grows by a couple of million people per year the displacement of some thousands per year due to rising water levels is a second order concern both economically and ecologically.
People can get touchy when reality bitchslaps them. If we dare to criticize a country that is adding more people than they can support, a person is mean and the race card will even be pulled out at times.
At present, we actually can feed the world. But as humanitarian as that is, after all the food is eaten, after all the vaccines are given and more and more survive to reproduce, and then more food is needed - suddenly...
A crop failure when all available food produced is needed, no margins, it could ge
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In the most developed countries, population growth rates are slowing. Few of them are negative, but the downward trend seems to correlate with wealth (not money). Criticizing developing countries for their population growth is hypocritical because they are in a different stage. It seems to happen naturally when people's needs are met.
And I was criticizing what? Not the third worlders, but the people who seem to believe that population increase is going to magically stop, and those who appear to believe that the earth can support an infinite number of people. I've heard all the stories, and that clock keeps going up. Perhaps the population clock is bogus?
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In 1950 Kenya had a population of 6 million. Today it has a population of around 55 million and in 30 years the population will be around 100 million. That is the real problem. Not minor changes to lake water levels.
So we should sacrifice 50 million people to the volcano gods? and the lake level will go back down?
Or do we need to drown them in the lake? Don't leave us hanging !
What is your point? Do you consider population growth to be irrelevant? And who is talking about killing people? You do realize that we have tools such as family planning help, education of girls, contraception and many others that can help reduce high population growth.
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The world is currently at peak baby. The world population is expected to continue to increase for 80 odd years as those babies live long happy lives. Malthus is not in play.
Kenya is a net exporter of food stuffs by value. The current density in Kenya is less than half of Germany's.
I for one think it's great the Kenyans are having lots of babies. Misanthropes and racists may, of course, feel differently.
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The world is currently at peak baby. The world population is expected to continue to increase for 80 odd years as those babies live long happy lives. Malthus is not in play.
Kenya is a net exporter of food stuffs by value. The current density in Kenya is less than half of Germany's.
I for one think it's great the Kenyans are having lots of babies. Misanthropes and racists may, of course, feel differently.
No Malthus is not in play. We agree on that. The info I found online shows Kenya to be a net importer of agricultural products. What is your source?
The arable land of Kenya is only 16% with half of that being of poor quality. Germany has around 34% arable land. So it hardly makes any sense to do the comparison you did.
I am neither a racist or misanthrope but I don’t believe that the current levels of fertility in Kenya and other less developed countries are good for neither the people in those countri
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Bingo. And if you're worried about too much water, siphon off more of it to irrigate crops to feed yourselves.
Also, a lot of lakes do that. Look at Devils Lake, North Dakota. 150 years ago it was a big lake. It slowly dried up to no more than a swampy spot. About 20 years ago it began growing and is now as big as it was in the 1800s, and ate a suburb that had grown up where the lake had receded.
Lakes in Australia do the same thing. Dry up, short memories think okay, now we can build there, lake comes back,
an objectively dumb article (Score:3)
Ok, I get it. The reporter wants to be Joseph Conrad, with long drawn out descriptions of hippos and crocodiles, laced heavily with personal nostalgia.
But the extremely long article essentially says: ..and then instead of actually trying to tease out the reality of "is this the way it was" (which seems pretty easily proved or not) or if this is maybe short sighted humans forgetting recent history in their rush to modernize and build pell-mell, we get more sobby narrative about houses being underwater.
- the lakes are rising
- lots of people are inconvenienced and displaced
- shitty, corrupt local governments are turning a blind eye
- some random people give some theories about why they're rising
- the only scientific source as to the cause basically says "yeah, this is the way it was 50 years ago pretty much"
- but no, the GEOLOGIST who is apparently complaining about this insists it's climate change (of course)
Even worse (Score:2)
Re: start digging canals and make food (Score:2)
Like New Orleans does?
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Increase the flow of the Nile a little? (Score:2)
This is almost certainly a political/economic decision to accumulate extra water.
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You're right, I read the mention of Lake Victoria and ignored the rest.
A major problem with Lake Victoria is that Uganda rather uses it as a variable height reservoir for their hydroelectrics and it isn't suited to it.
Archimedes warned you (Score:2, Flamebait)
Let this story be a warning to others about the ecological ravages of water displacement. It's too late to save Kenya, but does a similar horror await the people of the North American Great Lakes region? For the children of the future, spread this motto:
Think Before You Throw!
It is a rift valley. (Score:2)
It's like the climate... is changing... (Score:2)
Too much water in African desert (Score:2)
Despair!