Sometimes nature can surprise us by the amount of strange and inexplicable phenomena that exist. Places that seem taken from stories, phenomena that not even science can explain. East is the case of the river Slims, protagonist of an inexplicable and extraordinary phenomenon that has occurred in our most recent history.
To date, nothing of this magnitude has been documented. And it is that this river has dried up and has disappeared in a matter of four days. Do you want to know how and why this has happened?
The River Slims
This river is located in northern Canada and has been carrying meltwater northward for hundreds of years. The water flowed from the Kaskawulsh Glacier in the Canadian territory of Yukon to the Kluane River, and then continued toward the Bering Sea. However, This past spring of 2016 an extraordinary event took place that changed everything.
Probably due to global warming, the period of intense melting of the glacier has increased, causing the gradient along which the river drains to shift in favor of a second river that redirected the water towards the Gulf of Alaska, located thousands of kilometers from the original path. This is a significant change in the flow of water in the region, similar to what occurs in other parts of the world, such as in the winds of Spain, which are also affected by climatic phenomena.
Given this phenomenon, it was detected that the river's water levels had dropped sharply between May 26 and 29, 2016. Given this situation, they wanted to know where all that water had ended up, and they analyzed it using drones and a helicopter. To the surprise of the scientific community, the culprit that a river disappeared in just four days had been a river catch. This is how this phenomenon has been called that has never been observed before in history.
River catch
This phenomenon is a hydrographic event that consists of the erosion produced by the waters of a river of such magnitude that it is capable of opening a gap in the channel of another river, thus capturing its waters and leaving it without flow. The impressive thing about this phenomenon is that the historical evidence of this type of phenomenon suggested that it takes thousands of years to erode enough to give rise to this process. However, this time it happened in just four days.
Researchers traveled to the Slims River to find out why this phenomenon occurred in the Yukon in August 2016. The surprise was when, upon reaching the river, which normally carries a flow of about 480 meters wide, it had disappeared.
According to James Best, a geologist at the University of Illinois, the following occurred:
We went to the area with the intention of continuing our measurements on the River Slims, but found the riverbed more or less dry. The top of the delta that we had navigated in a small boat was now a dust storm. In terms of landscape change it was incredibly dramatic.
This phenomenon wiped out the entire flow of the Slims River, but the opposite happened to the Alsek River. By absorbing the entire flow of the Slims River, its own flow increased enormously. The relationship between rivers and climates also plays a vital role, as can be seen in other places in Canada, where significant changes in water patterns have been recorded. An example of this can be seen in the rivers of Spain, where extreme weather can also influence water availability.
Why did this phenomenon occur?
In order to explain a phenomenon of such magnitude like this, studies have been carried out on the field and they all reach the same conclusion: are affected by climate change. Rising global temperatures and the consequent retreat of glaciers caused a period of intense melting and the drilling of a new channel in the ice. This fact is the one that has directed the flow of water towards the south through the river Kaskawulsh.
This means that instead of ending up in the Bering Sea via Lake Kluane, the meltwater now runs in a south-east direction and eventually reaches the Pacific Ocean. A massive turnaround, and not only because it is the first time that river capture has occurred so quickly, but because it is the first case in which scientists think that the phenomenon occurred due to man-made climate change.
