Lakes disappear, Glaciers melt

Lakes disappear, glaciers melt, are floods next?

Reports state that a Lake, situated more than 2000 miles from the capital Santiago, Chile, has disappeared ! A body of water the size of ten football fields usually filled with water up to 30 metres deep is dry situated some 2000 miles and usually fed by the surrounding glaciers! One main reason put forward is the seismic frequency in the region.

It was reported that the Patagonia glaciers of Chile and Argentina are melting so fast they are making a significant contribution to sea-level rise.

Lake Chad, once one of the African continent’s largest bodies of fresh water, has dramatically decreased in size due to climate change and human demand for water. Once a great lake close in surface area to North America’s Lake Erie, Lake Chad is now a ghost of its former self.

Lake Songor in Ghana is rapidly shrinking, partly as a result of intensive salt production, and the extraordinary changes in the Zambezi river system as a result of the building of the Cabora Basa dam site.

Other impacts, some natural and some human-made and which can only be truly appreciated from space, include the extensive deforestation around Lake Nakuru in Kenya.

Satellite measurements, detailing the falling water levels of Lake Victoria are also mapped. Africa’s largest freshwater lake is now about a meter lower than it was in the early 1990s.

Global warming, climate change, human interaction…all of these seem to be playing a role in the phenomena we are experience with nature today.

Nothing can be taken for granted any longer as, in this world of interdependence, what we thought would last forever is no longer. Countries are threatened, wildlife is threatened, people are affected, cultural habits are affected, increasingly.
Over the next two decades, population levels are set to double to around 40 million causing a dramatic demand for water.

Meanwhile rainfall and river flows in the region have declined steadily in the past 30 years in some parts of the world and this is partly linked to higher evaporation rates as a result of climate change.

Will the Great Floods be next?

A call to action is necessary and immediate.

Source: BBC, UNEP, WWF