+
upworthy
Heroes

River piracy may be climate change's weirdest effect. It just happened in Canada.

Kluane Lake in Canada is supposed to look like this:

[rebelmouse-image 19527245 dam="1" original_size="750x450" caption="Image via Mandruss/Wikimedia Commons." expand=1]Image via Mandruss/Wikimedia Commons.

The lake is one of Yukon's largest, home to a handful of small communities, and its waters eventually feed into the mighty Yukon River.


So how the heck did it end up looking like this virtually overnight?

Image via Jim Best/University of Illinois.

It's supposed to be pristine and blue, not brown and full of weird, muddy goosebumps and dry, dusty mudflats.

This is a shocking case of what scientists call "river piracy." Something stole Kluane Lake's river.

The culprit wasn't a foul-mouthed, foul-smelling 17th-century sailor, though. The real culprit was — and is — much more creeping and insidious.

Kluane Lake used to get a big chunk of its water from the Slims River, which in turn was fed by the Kaskawulsh glacier. For years, the Slims River had been an ice-cold torrent of water up to 10 feet deep and too strong to wade through in some areas.

Over the course of four days in May 2016, though, river gauge data shows that all of that water just ... disappeared.

An aerial view of water being diverted from the Slims River. Image via Dan Shugar/University of Washington Tacoma.

Dan Shugar and Jim Best, scientists from the University of Washington and University of Illinois, went up to investigate in person. When they got there, they found a bare trickle of water where the river should have been.

"We were really surprised when we got there and there was basically no water in the river," Shugar said in an Associated Press report. "We could walk across it and we wouldn't get our shirts wet.”

They knew if something was stopping water from getting to the river, it must have happened uphill, likely at the mighty Kaskawulsh glacier that feeds the river.

When the scientists went to investigate, they found a massive 100-foot-tall ice canyon — a giant hole basically — inside the glacier's edge.

The ice-walled canyon. Image via Jim Best/University of Illinois.

It was the evidence they needed to identify the primary suspect behind the river's sudden vanishing act: climate change.

As the planet has gotten warmer, the Kaskawulsh glacier has been retreating and breaking up. For a long time, its meltwater had been going toward the Slims River.

When the river disappeared in May 2016, it was the result of the glacier having retreated enough that an ice wall collapsed, forming a canyon and diverting the meltwater down a different side of the mountain, away from the Slims River. Instead, the glacier's water rushed into the Alsek River, a phenomenon scientists call river piracy.

Satellite images taken one year apart show how much the river has fallen. Image via the European Space Agency.

River piracy hasn't been documented in modern times and certainly never this quickly. Shugar's team is more than 99% sure this wouldn't have happened without climate change.

Ever since, the Slims River has been a mere trickle and Kluane Lake has dropped more than 5 feet below average.

Shugar at Kluane Lake. Image via Jim Best/University of Illinois.

Kluane Lake is more than 45 miles long, so this isn’t a small amount of water we're talking about. The two communities on the lake will likely have to learn to deal with the water shortage because it’s virtually impossible that things will go back to the way they were.

Being witness to a case of river piracy is pretty incredible, but the speed at which it happened is a stark reminder that the effects of climate change can happen both slowly and all at once.

The Yukon is a pretty remote and sparsely populated area, but if a river disappeared in, say, the Andes or the Himalayas, it could affect the water supplies of millions of people, giving them little time to adapt to the change.

There are still plenty of things we can do to mollify the effects of climate change, but the first thing is to take it — and its causes — seriously and make sure the people in charge take it seriously too. Because if we don't, who knows where or when river piracy will strike again.

The team's findings were published in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience.

Community

How to end hunger, according to the people who face it daily

Here’s what people facing food insecurity want you to know about solving the hunger problem in America

True

Even though America is the world’s wealthiest nation, about 1 in 6 of our neighbors turned to food banks and community programs in order to feed themselves and their families last year. Think about it: More than 9 million children faced hunger in 2021 (1 in 8 children).

In order to solve a problem, we must first understand it. Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization, released its second annual Elevating Voices: Insights Report and turned to the experts—people experiencing hunger—to find out how this issue can be solved once and for all.

Here are the four most important things people facing hunger want you to know.

Keep ReadingShow less

A guy passes out on his bed eating pizza.

A 29-year-old woman had a baby girl, and after a brief maternity leave, she had to return to work. She couldn't afford childcare, so her husband, 35, reluctantly agreed to watch the baby while she was at work.

“It’s important to know that he’s been unemployed since 2021,” the woman wrote on Reddit’s AITA subforum. “He receives benefits. It’s also important to know that he’s extremely lazy. He doesn’t cook, clean, or help out in any way. I was nervous about leaving her home with her father, but I had no choice.”

The mother had reason to be worried about leaving her baby home alone with her husband, but in the beginning, things seemed fine. “When I came back from work, she was clean and sleeping. The next few times I came home, he was either playing with her, feeding her, or out for a walk with her. I was happy,” she wrote.

Keep ReadingShow less
Photo via Canva, @WhattheADHD/Twitter

The 'bionic reading' font is designed to help keep you focused and read faster.

Reading is a fundamental tool of learning for most people, which is why it's one of the first things kids learn in school and why nations set literacy goals.

But even those of us who are able to read fluently might sometimes struggle with the act of reading itself. Perhaps we don't read as quickly as we wish we could or maybe our minds wander as our eyes move across the words. Sometimes we get to the end of a paragraph and realize we didn't retain anything we just read.

People with focus or attention issues can struggle with reading, despite having no actual reading disabilities. It can be extremely frustrating to want to read something and have no issues with understanding the material, yet be unable to keep your mind engaged with the text long enough to get "into" what you're reading.

Keep ReadingShow less
Pets

Family brings home the wrong dog from daycare until their cats saved the day

A quick trip to the vet confirmed the cats' and family's suspicions.

Family accidentally brings wrong dog home but their cats knew

It's not a secret that nearly all golden retrievers are identical. Honestly, magic has to be involved for owners to know which one belongs to them when more than one golden retriever is around. Seriously, how do they all seem have the same face? It's like someone fell asleep on the copy machine when they were being created.

Outside of collars, harnesses and bandanas, immediately identifying the dog that belongs to you has to be a secret skill because at first glance, their personalities are also super similar. That's why it's not surprising when one family dropped off their sweet golden pooch at daycare and to be groomed, they didn't notice the daycare sent out the wrong dog.

See, not even their human parents can tell them apart because when the swapped dog got home, nothing seemed odd to the owners at first. She was freshly groomed so any small differences were quickly brushed off. But this accidental doppelgänger wasn't fooling her feline siblings.

Keep ReadingShow less

Only child asks her friends what it's like to grow up with siblings.

Ahhh, siblings. Sometimes they're your best friends and other times your living room turns into an MMA octagon over the remote control. If you grew up with brothers and sisters, it's hard to imagine what it would be like to be an only child. (That's not to say you didn't dream about it when your sister stole your favorite shirt for the 30th time.)

But not everyone has siblings, so it can be equally as hard for someone who grew up as an only child to picture what it would be like to have them. Only children also likely had moments where they dreamt of having a little brother or sister, not realizing the literal torment siblings can inflict on each other.

TikTok creator Lonnie IIV recently posted a video of himself with two other friends seemingly out to lunch, when the girl in the group asked what it was like to grow up with siblings. In less than a minute she realized she lucked out being an only child because her two guy friends gave her a crash course in sibling behavior.

Keep ReadingShow less
Photo: courtesy BioCarbon Engineering/WikiCommons

Technology is the single greatest contributor to climate change but it may also soon be used to offset the damage we've done to our planet since the Industrial Age began.

In September 2018, a project in Myanmar used drones to fire "seed missiles" into remote areas of the country where trees were not growing. Less than a year later, thousands of those seed missiles have sprouted into 20-inch mangrove saplings that could literally be a case study in how technology can be used to innovate our way out of the climate change crisis.

Keep ReadingShow less
Health

Artists got fed up with these 'anti-homeless spikes.' So they made them a bit more ... comfy.

"Our moral compass is skewed if we think things like this are acceptable."

Photo courtesy of CC BY-ND, Immo Klink and Marco Godoy

Spikes line the concrete to prevent sleeping.


These are called "anti-homeless spikes." They're about as friendly as they sound.

As you may have guessed, they're intended to deter people who are homeless from sitting or sleeping on that concrete step. And yeah, they're pretty awful.

The spikes are a prime example of how cities design spaces to keep homeless people away.

Keep ReadingShow less