rivers
This brochure draws attention to the problems of rivers in California.
The majority of California’s freshwater comes from the Sierra Nevada, falling in winter as a thick blanket of snow that slowly melts in spring, delivering enormous quantities of fresh, clean water to fill the state’s rivers and reservoirs in support of its cities, industry and agriculture. As the Earth’s climate warms up, more of this water will fall as rain rather than snow...
The Yaluzangbu River, the largest river on the Tibetan Plateau, becomes the Brahmaputra when it flows into India. New fieldwork and map analysis show that the fluvial landforms and landform evolution of the river are controlled by the tectonic structures of the southern plateau. The history of the Yaluzangbu River since the Eocene is established here based on geomorphological and tectonic...
A study of high-elevation catchments in the San Miguel River Basin of southwest Colorado was conducted during the summer of 1997 to develop a scientifically based tool for water resources management. The authors mapped landscape types and associated water quality parameters with those types, enabling sensitivity assessment at the landscape unit scale, thus addressing catchment heterogeneity....
In the winter of 1911, a massive earthquake-induced landslide in the Pamir Mountains of eastern Tajikistan completely blocked the valley of the Bartang (Murgab) River, a headwater tributary to the Amu Darya River basin. A lake began to grow behind this natural dam and has now reached a length of 60 km. In a worst-case scenario that assumes collapse of the dam, a catastrophic outburst flood...
Analysis of seasonal water discharge and sediment load data for major tributaries of the Upper Yangtze indicates significant changes from 1957 to 1987. Discrimination between land use–induced and climatic variation–induced changes was attempted using the systematic shift in the seasonal sediment load relative to the seasonal water flow. Available evidence suggests that most of...
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