How can the article not mention that it ebbs and flows? They're making it alarmist sounding when it's just the natural state of the river.
Probably trying to drum up support for getting money from Congress for dredging key sections.
Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks
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Re: Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks
#12How can the article not mention that it ebbs and flows? They're making it alarmist sounding when it's just the natural state of the river.
Thirsty? light a fire, then people come with water.
Re: Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks
#13This article has no details on causes. Minnesota has had a dry summer, and the driest September on record. Most streams/rivers in central/south MN are low. https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/river_levels/index.html
Re: Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks
#14If you ever have a chance, I highly recommend going near a port and watching operations. I used to live near the Mississippi River in Iowa, and it was always impressive to see the barge traffic and think about the sheer volume of product moving. South of St. Louis, the barge tows can be up to 45 barges. Visiting Savanah, Georgia and watching the ships come and go was also impressive. There's a bridge that was built i…
The most impressive of the Panama Canal related expansion works was the project by PANYNJ in New York to raise the roadway of an existing arch bridge from within, and without interrupting traffic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayonne_Bridge
Re: Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks
#15If you ever have a friend or family member who is trying to get around wetland conservation laws, they are contributing to the shrinking of our river systems. Water retention capacity in upper watersheds directly contribute to average river flow, which is very easy to show by the behavior of streams. Deserts are self-reinforcing systems where the heat pushes clouds up or away from them. Wet, cool forests draw in more…
Not only affecting the shrinking of the river systems, but also degrading the quality of the water.
I live in Iowa, home of 3.15 million people and 24 million pigs. Tile in the fields and a complete lack of buffer between fields and streams sends massive amounts of fertilizer into the waterways and ultimately down the Mississippi. ~85% of the land in the state is dedicated to farming in one way or another, and the amount of manure which can be spread per acre is based on crop production per acre formulas from the 1970's. Breeding work has increased corn yield by about 65%, allowing that much more manure to be spread.
I recently found this podcast which talks about water issues around the state, produced by University of Iowa professors.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/we-all-want-clean-h2o/...
Re: Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks
#16If you ever have a friend or family member who is trying to get around wetland conservation laws, they are contributing to the shrinking of our river systems. Water retention capacity in upper watersheds directly contribute to average river flow, which is very easy to show by the behavior of streams. Deserts are self-reinforcing systems where the heat pushes clouds up or away from them. Wet, cool forests draw in more…
>If you ever have a friend or family member who is trying to get around wetland conservation laws, they are contributing to the shrinking of our river systems.
If you ever read/hear a statement like this you can safely ignore it because nobody with any second or even third hand exposure to the true vastness of the scope of wetland conservation laws would say such a thing.
Somebody's little construction project to replace their 25x30 cabin on a lake in the woods with one that's 24x32 isn't material in this context no matter how hard people may dishonestly try to imply otherwise. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of cases of "skirting conservation laws" are cases of people who want to do a nearly like for like replacement of some existing thing that didn't need permission when it was done 40-140yr ago and don't want to pay some guy with a license thousands of dollars for the privilege of a stamped drawing.
Re: Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks
#17If you ever have a friend or family member who is trying to get around wetland conservation laws, they are contributing to the shrinking of our river systems. Water retention capacity in upper watersheds directly contribute to average river flow, which is very easy to show by the behavior of streams. Deserts are self-reinforcing systems where the heat pushes clouds up or away from them. Wet, cool forests draw in more…
It's painful how widespread this notion of 'nature steals precious water' is, and how quickly the practical implications of such a mindset leads to further destruction.
The municipality where I live have an annual cycle of doing things like:
* Scraping away every fallen leaf to be burned
* Removing all twigs, branches and dead wood
* Burning or spraying down all weeds
* Cutting the grass, even in places no one walks
* Aggressively cutting down bushes
Next year they spend hundreds of thousands trying to replant and reseed, only to lose it again in the words of 'maintenance'.
Meanwhile, our smaller community decided to do the complete opposite:
* Faux-compost everything (grass cuttings, leaves, twigs, weeds) by literally just throwing it into a pile and forgetting about it
* Mulch everything with said compost
* Let (non-invasive) weeds take over areas that were previously barren
* Not trim down bushes before winter
We're doing 1/10th of the work as our neighboring communities, and we're getting as good if not better results.
I wish more people approached gardening/landscaping with this water-harvesting, nature mimicking way. It's cheap, takes extremely little resources and demonstrates how incredibly strong an ecosystem can be if you just work with it rather than against it, even on a small scale.
Re: Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks
#18If you ever have a friend or family member who is trying to get around wetland conservation laws, they are contributing to the shrinking of our river systems. Water retention capacity in upper watersheds directly contribute to average river flow, which is very easy to show by the behavior of streams. Deserts are self-reinforcing systems where the heat pushes clouds up or away from them. Wet, cool forests draw in more…
It's painful how widespread this notion of 'nature steals precious water' is, and how quickly the practical implications of such a mindset leads to further destruction. The municipality where I live have an annual cycle of doing things like: * Scraping away every fallen leaf to be burned * Removing all twigs, branches and dead wood * Burning or spraying down all weeds * Cutting the grass, even in places no one walks…
The absolute amount of effort we spend fighting nature instead of just guiding and living with it is frightening.
Re: Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks
#19If you ever have a friend or family member who is trying to get around wetland conservation laws, they are contributing to the shrinking of our river systems. Water retention capacity in upper watersheds directly contribute to average river flow, which is very easy to show by the behavior of streams. Deserts are self-reinforcing systems where the heat pushes clouds up or away from them. Wet, cool forests draw in more…
It's painful how widespread this notion of 'nature steals precious water' is, and how quickly the practical implications of such a mindset leads to further destruction. The municipality where I live have an annual cycle of doing things like: * Scraping away every fallen leaf to be burned * Removing all twigs, branches and dead wood * Burning or spraying down all weeds * Cutting the grass, even in places no one walks…
No post body was provided.
Re: Shrinking Mississippi River Puts American Farm Trade at Risks
#20For anyone curious about water levels around their region, the US Geological Service monitors water levels in real time across thousands of stations. I had a great discussion with a couple USGS data scientists at the RStudio conference in July.
Their remote monitoring stations report the data to their servers typically in 15 minute intervals.
If you're worried about the water level at a particular location, they have a service which allows you to get alerts if it exceeds a certain level. They're in the middle of redoing many of their online tools, so it's a mix of legacy and modern looking web development.
They get their funding from contracts with other federal agencies or private businesses, not directly from the government. For example, a company may have a permit that they can pull 100,000 cubic feet of water from a stream per day, but that the stream level must not go below 5 feet. USGS would add monitoring after the draw point and provide that data to the client (and public) at the client's expense.