Title: Yikes! A river just changed direction. Here's what's blamed.
Headings: Yikes! A river just changed direction. Here's what's blamed.
Yikes! A river just changed direction. Here's what's blamed.
Content: And day by day we could see the water level dropping.” Shugar and his colleagues were shocked. “ For the last 300 years, the Slims River flowed out to the Bering Sea,” he said, “and the smaller Kaskawulsh River flowed to the Gulf of Alaska. What we found was the glacial lake that fed Slims River had actually changed its outlet,” Shugar said. The situation, said Shugar’s colleague John Clague of Canada’s Simon Fraser University, partly came about because the glacier’s toe was sitting on a geologic divide. Climate change could make transatlantic flights really, really bumpy
“The event is a bit idiosyncratic given the peculiar geographic situation in which it happened, but in a broader sense it highlights the huge changes that glaciers are undergoing around the world due to climate change.” Clague told UWTODAY,
“I always point out to climate-change skeptics that Earth’s glaciers are becoming markedly smaller, and that can only happen in a warming climate,” he added, referencing a UW study that shows a 99.5% probability that the glacier’s retreat is showing the effects of modern climate change.