Mekong River "At Breaking Point": Dam Building, Sand Mining, Pollution, Warming, Extinctions

[hatrack]

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For years people have warned that an environmental crisis looms along the 2,700-mile-long waterway, which runs through six Asian countries. The Mekong could not withstand the onslaught of dam building, overfishing, and sand mining forever, they argued. Yet somehow the river has, so far, powered through, delivering an almost indescribable bounty to the more than 60 million people who depend on it for their livelihoods. (Dramatic photos show how sand mining threatens a way of life in Southeast Asia).

Then, in 2019 things took a turn for the worse. It started when critical monsoon rains failed to arrive as usual in late May. As drought gripped the region, water levels in the Mekong dropped to their lowest in 100 years. The rains finally came, but they didn’t last as long as usual, and the drought continued. In recent months strange things have begun to happen. In some places in the north, the mighty Mekong has slowed almost to a trickle. The water has changed to an ominous color and begun filling with globs of algae. Catches from the world’s largest inland fishery have dwindled, and the fish that are being caught are so emaciated that they can only be used to feed other fish.

“Everywhere you look there are indications that this river, which has provided for so many, for so long, is at a breaking point,” says Zeb Hogan, a fish biologist at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a National Geographic Explorer.

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It is a deeply interconnected river in which changes in one place can have major consequences elsewhere. Its great productivity—it is home to more than 1,000 species of fish, with many yet to be discovered—depends in large part on seasonal floods that create ideal habitats for fish and water birds, and carry sediment crucial to agriculture downriver. But that natural ebb and flow is increasingly being disrupted, experts say, with the effects of hydropower dams and climate change becoming ever more evident.

A large part of the problem has long been China, which operates 11 dams on the Mekong. During times of extreme drought, like now, China’s portion of the river contributes up to half of the river’s flow, with the dams holding back more than 12 trillion gallons of water, severely disrupting the water flow downstream. “When drought sets in, China effectively controls the flow of the river,” says Brian Eyler, director of the Southeast Asia program at The Stimson Center in Washington, D.C. Fishers and farmers in northern Thailand have long had to deal with wild fluctuations in river flow as China stores and releases water from its dams. Such changes have a detrimental impact on fish migration, and sudden increases in water level often wash away crops, livestock, and equipment, disrupting rural economies.

Lately, the situation has grown more dire. After China halved output from its Jinghong dam during several days of testing earlier this month, the water level dropped so low in some stretches of the river that it became virtually unrecognizable, with giant rocks and sandbars exposed in the middle of the wide waterway. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” says Chainarong Setthachau, an environmentalist at Thailand’s Mahasarakham University, who has studied the river for decades.

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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/01/southeast-asia-most-critical-river-enters-uncharted-waters/

[Nay]

1. OH, WELL. The chickens are coming home to roost, as they say. Too many people, too

much plastic junk, too little sense, and a large capitalism-gone-mad country controlling the dams -- recipe for disaster. But we knew that already, didn't we?