• Privacy Policy
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
Climate Change Dispatch
  • Home
  • Videos
  • Who We Are
  • Facts Vs. Fearmongering
    • Real science vs Junk Science
      • 1100-plus Peer-Reviewed Studies
      • 97% – Myth of the Climate Change Consensus
      • Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming
      • Climate change and its causes
      • Climate Science Primer
      • CO2 is not pollution
      • Deceptive Surface Temperature Records
      • Editorial: Great Global Warming Hoax
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 1
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 2
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 3
      • Why CO2 Is A Minor Player In Global Climate
      • Why Politicized Science Is So Dangerous
    • Facts Not Fear
      • A Simple Question For Climate Alarmists
      • Climate Change – The Facts
      • Climate Change Fears Are Empirically Baseless
      • Global Warming 101
      • Global Warming Q&A
      • Understanding The Medieval Warm Period
      • Ocean Cycles and Climate
      • Overview of Plate Climatology Theory
      • Precautionary Principle
      • Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?
      • The Skeptics Handbook
      • Weather Versus Climate
      • Why I’m a GW skeptic
      • Winning the climate debate with facts
      • Why Aliens Cause Global Warming
    • Greenhouse FAQs
      • CO2, Plants, & Industry
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • Is global warming real?
      • Measuring temperature
      • Swimming in CO2?
      • Scientists urge caution?
      • Today’s warming trend
      • Variations in temperature
    • Gore’s Greatest Goofs
      • Deconstructing the Truth
      • Fact-Checking Al Gore’s Latest Predictions
      • How Gore Created The Global Warming Hoax
    • Inside Real Climate
      • Closer look at the 97% Consensus
      • GW’s Amazing Story
      • IPCC gets failing grade
      • Real Climate Exposed!
      • Truth about Real Climate
      • We’ve Been Conned
      • What is there a 97% consensus about?
    • Behind the IPCC
      • 1,000 Scientists Dissent
      • Climategate: Caught Green-Handed!
      • Climategate Inquiries
      • Climategate Inquiries 2
      • NIPCC Report Now Available
      • Understanding the Climategate Inquiries
  • Submissions
  • Contact Us
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Videos
  • Who We Are
  • Facts Vs. Fearmongering
    • Real science vs Junk Science
      • 1100-plus Peer-Reviewed Studies
      • 97% – Myth of the Climate Change Consensus
      • Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming
      • Climate change and its causes
      • Climate Science Primer
      • CO2 is not pollution
      • Deceptive Surface Temperature Records
      • Editorial: Great Global Warming Hoax
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 1
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 2
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 3
      • Why CO2 Is A Minor Player In Global Climate
      • Why Politicized Science Is So Dangerous
    • Facts Not Fear
      • A Simple Question For Climate Alarmists
      • Climate Change – The Facts
      • Climate Change Fears Are Empirically Baseless
      • Global Warming 101
      • Global Warming Q&A
      • Understanding The Medieval Warm Period
      • Ocean Cycles and Climate
      • Overview of Plate Climatology Theory
      • Precautionary Principle
      • Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?
      • The Skeptics Handbook
      • Weather Versus Climate
      • Why I’m a GW skeptic
      • Winning the climate debate with facts
      • Why Aliens Cause Global Warming
    • Greenhouse FAQs
      • CO2, Plants, & Industry
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • Is global warming real?
      • Measuring temperature
      • Swimming in CO2?
      • Scientists urge caution?
      • Today’s warming trend
      • Variations in temperature
    • Gore’s Greatest Goofs
      • Deconstructing the Truth
      • Fact-Checking Al Gore’s Latest Predictions
      • How Gore Created The Global Warming Hoax
    • Inside Real Climate
      • Closer look at the 97% Consensus
      • GW’s Amazing Story
      • IPCC gets failing grade
      • Real Climate Exposed!
      • Truth about Real Climate
      • We’ve Been Conned
      • What is there a 97% consensus about?
    • Behind the IPCC
      • 1,000 Scientists Dissent
      • Climategate: Caught Green-Handed!
      • Climategate Inquiries
      • Climategate Inquiries 2
      • NIPCC Report Now Available
      • Understanding the Climategate Inquiries
  • Submissions
  • Contact Us
No Result
View All Result
Climate Change Dispatch
No Result
View All Result

NYT: Like Wildfires, Giant ‘Reset’ Floods Not Only Destroy—They Renew

by Jim Robbins
August 03, 2022, 9:07 AM
in News and Opinion
Reading Time: 4 mins read
A A
3
Share on FacebookShare on XwitterShare on Linkedin

yellowstone montana river floodingThe floodwaters that roared off the Yellowstone plateau and ripped through southern Montana in June have altered so much of the Yellowstone River that whitewater raft guides said they would have to relearn how to float the changed route. [bold, links added]

The flood, fueled by torrential rains that fell atop melting snow tore out much of the river’s template — the physical features of the river — and built a new one.

Its swell was measured at over 51,000 cubic feet per second just north of the park, far surpassing the high of more than 32,000 in 1990s flooding.

It’s the type of event that occurs here once every 500 years; floods of this magnitude are known as reset floods. …

In the midst of the damage and dislocation caused by overflowing rivers, experts point out that floods play a vital ecological role over time.

They are messy and chaotic — the technical term is disturbance regimes. Floods are considered a shot of adrenaline for the evolutionary survival of river systems.

Like conditions wrought by wildfires, once the flames and smoke die out, nature begins to rebuild.

“A common flood that goes over [its] bank re-waters the landscape, rejuvenates the vegetation, and leaves a veneer of fresh sediment,” said Jack C. Schmidt, a professor of watershed science at Utah State University and the director of the Center for Colorado River Studies. “That’s a fertile situation that allows a good seeding ground for cottonwoods.”

A flood of the magnitude that hit Yellowstone does even more.

“A gangbuster reset flood is a whole different deal,” Dr. Schmidt said. “It rips up the oldest of trees. It sends the river off into a new direction. It re-channelizes the flood plain and rejuvenates everything and gives the river a new lease on life.”

While floods do cause destruction of the natural world, Dr. Schmidt said that post-flood benefits greatly outweigh damage as the years pass.

A river that floods seems almost alive, constantly remaking and renewing itself. It’s not just the physical features of the river that are reborn; the living things that make their home in and along the river and have adapted to periodic flooding, are also renewed.

This natural ecological rebuilding process, however, is endangered.

Experts are concerned about the effects of the surge in dam building on river systems, stemming from economic benefits. … Only one-third of the world’s rivers remain free-flowing. (The Yellowstone is the longest undammed river in the United States at nearly 700 miles.)

Dams bring a great many benefits, from power generation to flood prevention, but they also have considerable effects, especially those caused by the end of high water levels downstream.

The periodic flooding and receding of a river are called a flood pulse, and while it can cause problems for people who live along a stream, it also turns rivers into biodiversity hotspots.

The floodplain and the river channel are a single system.

A free-flowing river, over time, behaves like a fire hose, snaking across a landscape much broader than the main channel when it floods, creating and nourishing a rich patchwork of marshes, swamps, oxbow lakes, riverside channels, and ponds while depositing sediment and other debris throughout its system.

“That rhythm of flooding is part of the heartbeat of rivers,” said David A. Lytle, a professor of integrative biology at Oregon State University. “One of the important things about flooding is the reconnection of off-channel habitat back to the main stem of the ecosystem,” which allows fish, amphibians, and other species to return to the river and nutrients to be exchanged, which fertilizes the food chain.

“These systems are dynamic,” said Paul Keddy, a former professor at Louisiana State University and the author of “Wetland Ecology: Principles and Conservation.”

“When people build dams to control the spring flood pulse, that has immediate deleterious effects,” Mr. Keddy said. “As soon as you cut out the spring floods, wetlands down the whole watershed start to shrink back toward the river.” …

A flood in 1941 sent a huge amount of sediment down the Rio Grande and created a fertile bed for the beginnings of the bosque. But the flood also wiped out farms and towns.

In the 1960s, construction of the giant Cochiti Dam, 50 miles north of Albuquerque, got underway to thwart the flow of water and sediment down the river. It worked — at a cost.

The dam also ended the flood pulse, which has prevented young cottonwoods from establishing, leaving only the eight-decade-old trees that grew up after the flood. Craig Allen, a retired U.S.G.S. ecologist in Santa Fe, N.M., calls it a “zombie forest.”

“It’s the living dead,” he said. “The whole riparian system has been transformed into something much drier.”

Invasive fire-prone species of tree, such as tamarisk, have moved in beneath the old cottonwoods. Bosque forest fires, once unheard of, are common.

Dams also cut off the gravel, silt, and other sediments that rivers carry, which are used to build new ecological features during a flood.

Fine sediment trapped behind the dam contains essential nutrients “and the base of the food chain is undermined,” said Matt Kondolf, a professor of environmental planning at the University of California, Berkeley.

Because the dam also reduces stream flow, “it simplifies the channel,” he said. “So, where before you had gravel bars and pools and riffles, all of that gets washed away, and you wind up with a bowling alley geometry. If there’s a fish in there, there’s no place for them to hide, they just get washed downstream.”

Floods also stimulate life in the main river channel by capturing and bringing nutrients from the flood plain into the main channel, which provides more food for insects, which in turn feed other creatures.

After a major flood at a study site on Sycamore Creek in Arizona, Dr. Lytle said the waterway, with downed trees and heaps of mud, looked like a disaster.

“Debris was piled everywhere,” he said. When he and his team began looking below the stream bed, however, they found more mayflies than they had ever seen.

“A big pulse of nutrition was triggered by that major flood,” he said. “The conditions were just right for them to explode in numbers. That means more food for birds, lizards, spiders, and fish.”

Read rest at NY Times

  • Truth
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Gettr
  • Threads
  • gab-logo Gab
  • Mastodon
  • Buffer
  • Telegram
  • Email
  • Copy Link
  • Share Using More Networks…
Share via
  • Facebook
  • Like
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • Digg
  • Tumblr
  • VKontakte
  • Print
  • Email
  • Reddit
  • Buffer
  • Love This
  • Weibo
  • Pocket
  • Xing
  • Odnoklassniki
  • WhatsApp
  • Meneame
  • Blogger
  • Amazon
  • Yahoo Mail
  • Gmail
  • AOL
  • Newsvine
  • HackerNews
  • Evernote
  • MySpace
  • Mail.ru
  • Viadeo
  • Line
  • Flipboard
  • Comments
  • SMS
  • Viber
  • Telegram
  • Subscribe
  • Skype
  • Facebook Messenger
  • Kakao
  • LiveJournal
  • Yammer
  • Edgar
  • Fintel
  • Mix
  • Instapaper
  • Copy Link
  • Truth
  • gab-logo Gab
  • Gettr
  • Baidu
  • Mastodon
  • Threads
  • Bluesky

Join our list

Subscribe to our mailing list and get interesting stuff and updates to your email inbox.

Thank you for subscribing.

Something went wrong.

We respect your privacy and take protecting it seriously

Related Posts

Electric Vehicles (EVs)

Gavin Newsom Is Seething After Congress Repealed California’s Gas Car Ban

May 27, 2025
Energy

Congress Resurrects Fight Against The Climate Cult’s Regulatory Assault

May 27, 2025
Health

No, Climate Change Isn’t Behind Britain’s Mosquito Fears

May 27, 2025

Comments 3

  1. Tom says:
    3 years ago

    Mother Earth has survived billions of years using creative destruction to renew itself. Humans, especially liberals, global warmers and greenies, are interrupting the process. Mother Earth wins in the end and couldn’t care less if man survives.

  2. Phil Logan says:
    3 years ago

    Yukon River, just the portion in Alaska is 1,250 miles

Stay Connected On Social Media

gab-logo

Donate Today

Beating back the alarmist narrative takes time and money. Please donate today to help!

Recent Posts

  • Gavin Newsom PresserGavin Newsom Is Seething After Congress Repealed California’s Gas Car Ban
    May 27, 2025
    Gov. Newsom is steamed after Congress repealed a Biden EPA waiver letting California ban gas-powered cars and said he'll fight back. […]
  • Capitol Hill DCCongress Resurrects Fight Against The Climate Cult’s Regulatory Assault
    May 27, 2025
    Congress eyes bills to rein in climate overreach, challenge secret science, and expose hypocrisy fueling the elite-driven climate change narrative. […]
  • mosquitoNo, Climate Change Isn’t Behind Britain’s Mosquito Fears
    May 27, 2025
    The Guardian asserts that climate change will make the UK more hospitable to mosquito-borne diseases, ignoring established drivers. […]
  • wind turbine blades landfill‘Green’ Waste Piles Up As Solar Panels And Wind Turbines Pollute Landfills
    May 27, 2025
    Solar and wind waste is piling up with no clear plan for disposal, raising new questions about the cost of going green and the myth of net zero. […]
  • new orleans blackoutMISO Ignored Warnings Before Holiday Blackout Left Blue City In The Dark
    May 27, 2025
    Nearly 100,000 lost power in New Orleans after MISO cut the grid, raising alarm over blackout risk tied to green energy replacing coal and gas. […]
  • protest FFF world on fire‘Doomed From Birth’: How Climate Alarmism Is Stoking An Epidemic Of Youth Anxiety
    May 26, 2025
    Hollywood heirs like Ramona Sarsgaard and Violet Affleck are spiraling into climate panic—fueled by activism, media hype, and elite institutions. […]
  • Biden touting green economyGOP’s Big, Beautiful Bill Would Rescind $500 Billion In Green Energy Handouts
    May 26, 2025
    The House-passed BBB would repeal $500B in green handouts, slash subsidies, and undo key parts of the inaptly named Inflation Reduction Act. […]
  • humpback whale ny coastHow Climate Buzzwords Hijacked The Language To Hide Environmental Harm
    May 26, 2025
    Climate buzzwords like ‘carbon footprint’ and ‘green energy’ mislead the public and mask real environmental damage. […]
  • north sea oil rigTrump Urges UK To Cut Sky-High Bills With More Drilling, Less Renewables
    May 23, 2025
    Trump urged the UK to slash sky-high energy bills by expanding oil and gas drilling, embracing fracking, and ditching costly renewables and imports. […]
  • Ocean waves near pierMeteorologist Slams CNN For Stoking Debunked Fears Of A Collapsing AMOC
    May 23, 2025
    CNN pushes debunked AMOC collapse claims to fuel coastal flooding and economic panic—ignoring data, expert doubts, and real insurance cost drivers. […]

Get Instant Email Notifications

Enter your email address to receive notifications of new posts by email either instantly or daily. Check your Junk folder for any verification emails upon subscribing.

Submit a tip

Please enter your email, so we know you're human.

Books We Like

very convenient warming

exposing great lie

Have a suggestion? Let us know! We swap out books based on your input. We participate in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. See here.

  • About
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact Us

© Portions copyright Climate Change Dispatch

Share via
  • Threads
  • gab-logo Gab
  • Mastodon
  • Buffer
  • Telegram
  • Email
  • Copy Link
  • Share Using More Networks…
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Videos
  • Who We Are
  • Facts Vs. Fearmongering
    • Real science vs Junk Science
      • 1100-plus Peer-Reviewed Studies
      • 97% – Myth of the Climate Change Consensus
      • Michael Crichton: Aliens Cause Global Warming
      • Climate change and its causes
      • Climate Science Primer
      • CO2 is not pollution
      • Deceptive Surface Temperature Records
      • Editorial: Great Global Warming Hoax
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 1
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 2
      • Rules for Climate Radicals: Part 3
      • Why CO2 Is A Minor Player In Global Climate
      • Why Politicized Science Is So Dangerous
    • Facts Not Fear
      • A Simple Question For Climate Alarmists
      • Climate Change – The Facts
      • Climate Change Fears Are Empirically Baseless
      • Global Warming 101
      • Global Warming Q&A
      • Understanding The Medieval Warm Period
      • Ocean Cycles and Climate
      • Overview of Plate Climatology Theory
      • Precautionary Principle
      • Should We Celebrate Carbon Dioxide?
      • The Skeptics Handbook
      • Weather Versus Climate
      • Why I’m a GW skeptic
      • Winning the climate debate with facts
      • Why Aliens Cause Global Warming
    • Greenhouse FAQs
      • CO2, Plants, & Industry
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • How much have temps changed?
      • Is global warming real?
      • Measuring temperature
      • Swimming in CO2?
      • Scientists urge caution?
      • Today’s warming trend
      • Variations in temperature
    • Gore’s Greatest Goofs
      • Deconstructing the Truth
      • Fact-Checking Al Gore’s Latest Predictions
      • How Gore Created The Global Warming Hoax
    • Inside Real Climate
      • Closer look at the 97% Consensus
      • GW’s Amazing Story
      • IPCC gets failing grade
      • Real Climate Exposed!
      • Truth about Real Climate
      • We’ve Been Conned
      • What is there a 97% consensus about?
    • Behind the IPCC
      • 1,000 Scientists Dissent
      • Climategate: Caught Green-Handed!
      • Climategate Inquiries
      • Climategate Inquiries 2
      • NIPCC Report Now Available
      • Understanding the Climategate Inquiries
  • Submissions
  • Contact Us

© 2025 Climate Change Dispatch