Expect More Floods as Global Water Cycle Speeds Up
One of the largest signs of global warming, along with the glaciers melting and temperature rising, is that there is 20 percent more freshwater flowing into the world’s oceans than there was 10 years ago.
NASA and university researchers have found, by using satellite observations, that rivers and melting ice sheets delivered 18 percent more water to the oceans in 2006 than 1994. To put that into perspective that is like adding a whole
Even though more water in rivers means more water for agriculture and daily uses, this increase has a lot more negatives than positives, considering a good deal of water is going to the arctics, tropics, and is collected into huge storms which destroy many countries’ buildings and architectures. And it’s only the beginning, because events like the deadly floods of
Why is the water cycle speeding up? Sandra Postel, the director of the Independent Global Water Policy Project, says “As the atmosphere warms from the addition of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, it can hold more moisture. As a result, more water evaporates from the oceans, leading to thicker clouds that then dump more rainfall over the land. That heavier-than-normal rain can then produce massive flooding as it runs back toward the sea, where the cycle begins all over again.”
Scientists have expected this rapid cycle increases for some time, but for the first time they can use satellites to monitor this trend and are able to measure it.
Opinion: Like all of our other blogs, this topic is also very important and could potentially affect everyone’s life in some way. This fact specifically did not surprise me at all considering that you hear all the time about how the glaciers are melting and are adding a dangerous amount of water to the Earth. Unfortunately, this is one of those topics that is hard to blame one source for and is even harder to combat. But it also shows that since modern scientific research tells us that major floods and droughts are on the horizon, adapting to these changes is becoming just important as slowing them down.
1. Research one major contributor (other than millions of cars on the road) to global warming that is drastically increasing it.
2. How does this excess amount of water compare to the other topics about water shortage/scarcity?
3. What are two specific positives to this superfluous amount of water?
http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/2010/10/more-water-flooding-postel.html
The topic of global warming has been an issue for a while now. This is just adding to the fact that our World has many issues to it. I wish there was an easier solution to this deadly problem. The global warming affect could be felt even more in future years which could potentially affect our adulthood which is not good. #1-One contributor besides cars could be factories. Factories release gas all day long while operating and the gas gets into the air and pollutes it.#2-They compare because they are both causing problems. Too less water to drink you can die, too much water and it causes global warming and could ruin our air quality and water quality. #3-One positive is that we are getting more fresh water which could possibly turn into drinking water and another positive is that it is a glaring problem that maybe would be easier to find a solution to.
ReplyDeleteHere is a site expanding on this topic:
http://www.koshland-science-museum.org/exhibitgcc/causes03.jsp
I'm pretty sure that everyone knew about this, but some facts and statistics were really surprising. I personally think that there is absolutely no positive to this problem. Even if there is more water for daily uses, that just means that there is going to be more water being wasted! What's even worse is that the amount of water being added to our oceans is increasing more and more each year. I'm sure many people have seen the movie, "The Day After Tomorrow", and I'm pretty sure I don't want that to happen to us! It's quite scary thinking about what global warming could do to this planet. I found an extremely helpful site for this topic. It includes many facts and what could possibly happen if this gets worse: http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/global_warming_worldbook.html
ReplyDelete#1. Another major contributor to global warming is volcanic eruptions because of all the pollutants that are released into the atmosphere.
#2. The interesting part of all of this is that although we are getting more water, it is still not helping the lack of water and water quality in some third-world countries.
Although I already knew that global warming was causing these problems, I didn't realize how much of the fresh water was getting "wasted." I was extremely surprised to find out that amount of water in the Mississippi River flows into the ocean every year. This is very scary because we already have not much fresh water, and this may cause that amount to lessen greatly. I understand that this water doesn't stay in the ocean forever, but it does destroy and affect certain places in the world. In my opinion, we shouldn't only try to change this fact or just adapt to these changes, but a little bit of both. We have been discussing a lot about slowing down global warming with driving less cars and such, and we still should be. Trying to accept it is something necessary too, because no matter what we say, global warming and these problems will continue, just hopefully on a smaller note.
ReplyDeleteTo answer question two, this problem has to do with water shortage in a sense that global warming is changing the location of the water, where in other countries water shortage may have to do with the capability to attain water and the cleanliness of it. Also, when the water leaves, it has to go somewhere else. In these cases, it comes up in places in floods and storms. With our other recent studies, they hardly had water at all.
This is definatley a BIG topic. And its getting bigger by the day. What we need to do is we need to stop it ASAP.Its amazing to me the amount of damage being done to the oceans and our enviornment. It is my opinion that we really need to work harder at trying to prevent global warming from getting any worse. This article is a good reminder at how bad global warming really is. This article mentions that the amount of fresh water added to the ocean is about the amount of the water in the Mississippi River. http://www.caleuche.com/River/RiverFacts.htm I found this wbsite about how big the Mississippi river is. The information most relevant to this article is that the Mississippi river holds about 7489 ft cubed of water. I knew the Mississippi was big but I didnt know it was that big. That information really helped put into perspective how much water is being emptied into the ocean each day. In conclution whats happening to our oceans should be a wake up call for all of us and help us realize how bad global warming really is and how badly we need to stop it.
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