When A Logjam Is A Good Thing:
When we think of rivers, we imagine water flowing freely from source to sea. But for some of the world’s great waterways, their natural state is to be blocked or dammed by fallen trees – on a massive scale. Today, the world’s largest tree-blockages or logjams can be found in the delta of Canada’s mighty Mackenzie River.
While the word ‘logjam’ is a byword for life’s annoying obstacles, recent studies have shown that river logjams are vital for wildlife and human communities, and are crucial stores of carbon.
The Mackenzie River, named after Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie (1764-1820), is the largest river that flows entirely within the boundaries of Canada. From its source in the Great Slave Lake of Canada’s Northwest Territories, it flows almost 1800km north through sparsely inhabited, forested lands to the Beaufort Sea and the Arctic.
Alicia Sendrowski, a research engineer from Michigan Tech Research Institute, has been examining the Mackenzie River logjams including the use of drones, satellite imagery and interviews with local people. She has published detailed research in the journal Geophysical Research Letters to provide greater understanding of the logjams’ formation and their importance.
Sendrowski believes that climate change might be breaking the logs down more quickly and this can be problem as such rapid decomposition speeds up the release of carbon stored in the wood. She estimates that the logjams store 3.4 million tons of carbon, equivalent to a year’s emissions from 2.5 million cars. In addition, as the land warms, live trees rooted in the permafrost become dislodged as it thaws and end up in the river. The dynamic, multi-layered changes in the region caused by climate change could release a great deal of this stored carbon.
Logjams are not just beneficial for the carbon they store. Wildlife also profits from the deeply dammed rivers. Firstly, by their nature logjams block water, diverting flow towards the river bed or banks and creating pools or channelling water into the surrounding land to form wetlands. Pools, especially those with plenty of woody vegetation, are excellent nurseries aquatic insects and small fish and the sediment deposited or exposed offers prime spawning grounds for salmon. With plenty of food, birds and mammals thrive.
I would play Husker Du’s ‘Something I Learned Today’ right here, but I don’t wish to disturb the pastoral nature of your Sunday morning.
Prepared To Be Hacked Off–And Hacked. This will disturb the pastoral nature of your Sunday morning:
This week could go down as the worst in the history of cybersecurity. On Wednesday, news emerged about two major vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language used by 70 percent of websites, which prompted governments, hospitals, and companies around the world to take digital services offline as a precaution. There have already been millions of attempts to exploit these weaknesses.
But the PHP vulnerabilities were just the most attention-grabbing in a series of alarming revelations. Security flaws in, or successful hacks of, several major software products and platforms—including some used by Netflix, PayPal, Walmart, and other big names—were announced that same day. Yesterday, Quest Diagnostics, which runs lab tests for a third of American adults each year, disclosed that it, too, had been breached. When I asked Sam Rubin, a senior vice president at the cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, about the potential fallout from yet another hack—this one of the cloud platform Railway, which is used by Intuit and MGM Resorts, among others—he paused. “I didn’t see that one,” Rubin said. “It’s been quite a busy week.”
For the next year or two, if not longer, the internet is going to feel a bit touch and go, and more dangerous than we’ve come to expect. “It’s going to feel like the sky is falling” for a while, Prince said. There’s a decades-long backlog of bugs in software written without much review or scrutiny—which was more or less fine so long as there was a very small number of skilled hackers. Over the past two decades, companies, governments, and individuals have been lulled into a false sense of security: Most people don’t think twice about punching credit-card numbers into the website of a local restaurant or gift shop, or forking over a home address and phone number in just about any customer survey. But the internet was always a dangerous place. We’re just waking up from a trance.
AI agents can now be deployed as a cheap and near-infinite hacker army. In just the past couple of months, Rubin said, open-source models—which can be downloaded for free and used without restrictions—have become very good at finding vulnerabilities and automating attacks. In turn, the amount of malicious cyber activity has spiked. More websites will be defaced, more personal information will be stolen, and ransomware will proliferate. Rubin told me that the internet is entering a “valley of pain.” When I posed the concern that this is the new normal to Adam Meyers, a senior vice president at the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike, he told me, “I think it’s going to get a lot worse, actually.”
Paucity Of Water Has Always Been The American West’s Kryptonite:
For William E. Smythe, the future of the West was clear. At the turn of the 20th century, long before low snowpacks and the climate crisis, before tens of millions of people moved westward, the New Englander turned western settler understood that water defined how life could be lived in the region. Unlike other parts of the country, much of the West was uniquely arid and would have to be irrigated to support further growth and development. People “will prosper or languish, create high conditions of social life, or lapse into semi-barbarism, in sure response to the manner in which the water supply is owned and administered,” Smythe wrote in The Atlantic’s November 1900 issue.
As he traveled through the western states, Smythe saw how early settlers failed to imagine a world where their water needs could not be met. Even in fertile California, the natural cycle of the West surprised settlers: Dry years turned flowered foothills dusty and barren.
Almost every major waterway in the West was overappropriated by the early 20th century. Farms were built without a complete accounting of how much water was available. Later generations realized that water was finite and perhaps more valuable than the precious metals they mined, and battles to control its flow began.
Despite the warning signs, water mismanagement continued in the pursuit of irrigation. Eventually, the federal government decided to intervene: In 1922, seven western states negotiated the Colorado River Compact, which allocated equal amounts of water between the upper basin (Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming) and the lower basin (Arizona, California, and Nevada). Federal projects, namely the Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon Dam, which formed Lake Mead and Lake Powell, respectively, offered better irrigation, hydropower, and flood control.
Recently, states have continued to struggle to share water fairly while maintaining their way of life. Localities are restricting water use earlier and earlier each year, and farmers in states such as California, Oregon, and Arizona, have been told on occasion that they will not receive any water for their crops. After decades of overappropriation, the Interior Department announced major water-allocation cuts to the Colorado River’s lower-basin states in August, slashing their allotment for next year by about one-fifth. Arizona and Nevada are suing the federal government over the plan, which they say threatens their survival. They are now seeing what Smythe foretold more than a century ago: When water becomes scarce, society will languish.
Only one way to send us out today. Mike Dinsmore will be pleased:
