When the rivers become silent, so will mankind.
By 2050, thousands of rivers and streams worldwide could pass a critical ecological threshold, new research shows.
There’s more fresh water hidden below Earth’s surface in underground aquifers than any other source besides the ice sheets. That groundwater plays a critical role for rivers worldwide, from the San Pedro to the Ganges, keeping them running even when droughts bring their waters low.
But in recent decades humans have pumped trillions of gallons out of those underground reservoirs. The result, says research published Wednesday in Nature, is a “slow desiccation” of thousands of river ecosystems worldwide. Already, somewhere between 15 and 21 percent of watersheds that experience groundwater extraction have slipped past a critical ecological threshold, the authors say—and by 2050, that number could skyrocket to somewhere between 40 and 79 percent.
That means hundreds of rivers and streams around the world would become so water-stressed that their flora and…
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A thought provoking piece. Thank you for sharing it.
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You’re welcome, thanks Sarah.
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Another bellwether, a dying canary in the coal mine. Although natural conditions will influence the schedule for a cataclysmic tip to no return, the end result is the same. We skip merrily to our demise.
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Thanks for commenting, Daniel. What should make people wake up, if they had the wherewithal and the guts to do it, is the number of “canaries” that are dying in the number of diverse “coal mines” globally. Extinction or extermination, that’s semantics. Either way it was a choice and both, the 1% elites and their 99% slaves operated in collusion to destroy the planet. The 1% wanted all the power and set up a Ponzi scheme called banking to get it; the 99% chose to mill about waiting for handouts, oinking at the various troughs while dreaming, not of the day of slaughter which is their “karma” but of the day they too would be members of the 1%. One group just as stupid as the other. The 1% have no use for their riches and power and will die of mindless boredom. The 99% should sense that if all were elites there would be no elites; if all were rich no one would be and the world would be turned into a moonscape all the sooner.
This world was abandoned into the hands of an all powerful, morally deficient genetically modified organism. It wasn’t deliberate, it was simple expediency. A few of “us” evolved enough mentally to be able to look back and “see” what happened but there is nothing we can do to change what was set in motion by that expedient move. The makers escaped after ensuring that they wiped out most of the knowledge of their technology from the minds of their Frankensteinian clones. They also ensured that the planet was enclosed in radiation belts to prevent the creatures from escaping and surviving their passage. With the last of the makers gone, Earth became a dying prison planet.
The biggest hurdle for an Earthian, should it even want to understand itself and its world, Daniel, is that it HAS NO LONG TERM OR MEANINGFUL PURPOSE. Life exists purposefully. It doesn’t propagate mindlessly. Life isn’t a cancer but mankind is, the worst kind of predator imaginable.
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Thanks, S’T.
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