The Rhône is shrinking
Once the glaciers melt, they’re gone, so the rivers go too. That’s happening in the Camargue:
People have always been attracted to the Camargue because of the abundance of species and resources it contains despite the challenges of living between the ebb and flow of an ever-evolving delta. Its nutrient-rich wetlands contain an enormous amount of biodiversity, making it one of the most productive ecosystems in the world. The Rhône river has long served as the Camargue’s lifeline, bringing fresh water from the Alps and dampening salt levels in the Camargue. As rain and snowfall decrease, it’s becoming a less reliable fresh water source, with researchers estimating the river’s flow has reduced by 30% in the last 50 years. It is expected to only worsen.
“Glaciers which are in the process of melting at an incredibly high rate have already passed the point of no return, so probably in the years to come, the 40% of river flow that arrives in Camargue will be reduced to a much smaller percentage,” said Jean Jalbert of Tour du Valat.
If you melt your glaciers, they’re gone.
It’s a worldwide problem, too. Here, north of Seattle, the glacial melt off Mt. Baker feeds the Nooksack river, which ultimately provides water for the entire northwestern corner of the state of Washington–and those glaciers are receding at an astonishing pace. There was a time when so-called “dry glaciers” (those without a cover of snowfall) were only seen, if at all, at the end of the summer season, but now there are sections of glacier on both Baker as well as Rainier that go dry very shortly after the start of summer. For the last few summers, we here have been put on voluntary water restrictions due to the state of Lake Whatcom, our municipal water supply, which is fed by the Nooksack River via the Deming Glacier on Mt. Baker. We also had a full month of no rainfall, which was remarkable even to people who have lived their entire 50+-year lives here. Nobody thinks of NW Washington as being drought-prone, or in danger of not having enough water, but that’s the direction that we’re moving in.
Meanwhile in eastern Norway the worst crisis seems to have been averted for now thanks to an unusually wet autumn. Of course, lots of people are already talking as if this means everything is back to “normal”, when, in fact, the sustained downpours we have been witnessing are in themselves highly anomalous. An increase in both droughts and floods doesn’t mean the problems “cancel out”. Again, it’s rather like arguing that if your head is in the oven and your feet in the refrigerator, you are on average doing just fine.