Hi everybody, welcome back to episode 3 of Look What I've Found.
We are going to do a brief introduction of ourselves for those who are new to this podcast
and I'll hand it to Kay.
Thank you, VK.
This is Kay.
Hi, I am a college professor.
I teach physics and I'm married to VK and VK and I talk about science all the time.
So we are here to share some of these thoughts that we discuss from media articles that have
been covered by popular press about real science and scientific topics.
Thank you Kay for that lovely introduction.
I am VK.
I have a PhD in psychology and I am also a college professor.
Kay and I have been married for 21 years and four years ago we visited Weaverville in North
Carolina which is going to be part of the episode today and we love the area in Asheville.
We've been there four times.
We visited various parts of that region.
So this episode which is entitled When Bent is Better Than Straight is actually deeply
personal for us and really meaningful so strap on and hopefully you enjoy this conversation.
Yeah, this is a great find VK because like you said, we've been to Asheville.
We like the place a lot and we hear that some of the rains that brought all the devastation
that we've heard about there really makes this article a little more sort of closer
to our heart if you will.
And so the article that we're going to be talking to you about I think was carried by
BBC.
That's where we saw this and it was actually quite interesting.
It was talking about meandering rivers is the norm as it has been for sort of how a
human kind of known rivers except for the past 200 years.
Yeah, so just to give you all a little bit of a background, one of the things that I'm
going to start with is by reminding us that this episode was initiated, inspired by the
devastation that we saw happen due to Hurricane Helene.
In particular, folks in Asheville have experienced profound, profound devastation.
Their lives have been impacted tremendously.
So if you all can do anything for them, please do to help.
But I'm going to before we get into the article that we saw on BBC, I'm going to read out
this passage that I think will provide a nice framework and then we'll tie it back towards
the end of the episode in terms of how it relates to the science that we read, the conversations
that we had.
So here goes.
Darkness filled the Appalachian sky, but in the east, a line of pink emerged.
Days came and went, showers ebbed and floored.
The coming hurricane spared Asheville from the brunt of the rains.
But onto the soils and rivers, the splintered ancestral brooks and creeks of the French
broad basin, water fell from the sky throughout the region too often to dissipate.
South-eastern rivers rose exponentially and filled every basin, where there were mountains,
narrow valleys and shallow beds delivered disaster.
At Pilkmo Village, North Carolina, in the early morning hours, an exhausted 17-year-old
named Catherine, cohere'd alone on a tree, praying for her life and the safety of her
family, most of whom sank into the turbid waters that day.
You might think that this passage describes what happened due to Hurricane Haleen, but
this passage actually describes the great flood of 1916.
And it's provided in an article by Anthony de Paul Sadler from 2016.
The flood that is described in the article took place more than a century ago.
Yeah, exactly, this is not new stuff.
This is, we've known about these sorts of events.
And here we are again, sort of witnessing this.
So let me sort of start by phrasing this article, which is the idea of that rivers naturally
meander, but over the past couple of centuries, we've started to canalize rivers, to make
them sort of flow straighter when we want them to, to sort of help with controlling
where the water flows, how things are irrigated, to sort of keep farmland safe.
And the article is about a river in the UK.
And I think it, it was sort of stark to me, it was amazed me to say, I realized that 97%
of the rivers in Britain are fragmented, which means they're sort of canalized and they
have manmade barriers that have been installed there to control how the river flows, to control
its speed in some places, to accelerate it in some places to sort of stall it a little
more to sort of control the river.
So I just want to say that Kay's description of the article is absolutely accurate.
One of the things I want to highlight is that folks believe 200 years ago that straightening
the river artificially, which means not allowing the river to flow where it wants to, would
actually prevent flooding and increase the possibility of using the land, which is around
the river, which is extremely rich in not just water, but nutrients for farming.
Now that strategy succeeded, off and on.
River flooding was actually seen as a positive thing because it enriches the soil, it clarifies
the water quality.
And that's how we live for 200 years.
But here's the problem.
We've got this other issue that's happening right now, which is climate change.
And what climate change is doing per the article that got published in Earth's Future is that
climate change is changing the amount of water that is falling in valleys, in places where
rivers flow.
Yeah, so let me explain that a little more.
So when things were stable, when the rainfall was as it was 200 years ago, we could control
the rivers flow by making these canals and everything else because they flowed a particular
way.
Things were stable in some historical sense.
And what has happened, the opposite effect, which is what we're seeing now, which is that
there's pronounced flooding that happens in these river systems today, as VK was pointing
out because of climate unpredictable weather patterns, where we have enormous amounts of
rainfall, because the morphology of the river now does not support the flow.
And in physics, you think about flow as a volume and a speed of fluid moving through
some areas.
So there is some geometrical idea that comes into this naturally.
One of the things I was thinking about, Kay, when you were mentioning this, is that if
you drop water straight from a glass, it will flow down really quickly.
But if you drop that same water onto a table first, it will flow across the table down
to the floor, which essentially means it will flow slowly.
And what we've done by straightening the rivers when there's a lot of water is that that water
has gained a lot of speed.
Indeed.
And on the downstream consequences of those sort of high speeds is that it doesn't support
some kind of fish.
For instance, I think salmon and trout were sort of mentioned in the article as the fish
that disappeared because the speed of the flowing water was too high.
And so the article, of course, was about not just about the problem, but about the fix,
which was so beautiful.
You just add the wiggles back.
Yeah.
Let the river go.
We all like let the river go.
The river wants to curve.
It wants to be wiggly.
It wants to be chaotic.
And to me, there is a real beauty in that response, right?
Because for 200 years, we did what we needed to do for economic progress.
And now the answer is to go back to the way things were.
And one of the things I want to make clear is that these problems come in about because
climate change has made it so that there's tons of water in the hurricanes.
There is like the rains and that's that's pouring down.
That's right.
Because the atmosphere can hold water better when it's warmer.
And it's going to therefore dump it back when it's raining.
Yeah.
So they're like saturated sponges, you know, and they're like like dumping it all.
And because the rivers are straight, they can't hold the water in their banks.
Now if they were curvy, that same water would flow more gently, which means it would not
overflow the banks.
The other thing that's very important is to remember that when rivers hit their flood
plain, they actually like to split up.
Yeah.
And you know, and this happens in nature all over the place because you can see this
in geological structures, you can see this in biological structures where natural processes
will somehow increase what we think of as sort of surface area or, you know, sort of
because of the curviness, the length of the river is starting to change the length around
the edges.
And that's exactly what we need because it absorbs water better.
It allows leaky wood trees to sort of, you know, be formed around them, which which just
form natural sort of barriers again to absorbing excess water.
So they're just more efficient to contain extra water that we have all the time now.
Yeah.
And one of the things that the article talked about was some of the like natural flood management
techniques, which is what Kay is talking about.
And one of them is allowing beaver pens and actually like allowing beavers to make their
pens because their pens are made out of wood.
That would actually like literally forces the water to slow down.
The other thing is to allow tree planting around rivers so that trees shed wood into
the ground into the ground into the water again, just adding a natural barrier that
over time decay.
So it's not like, you know, you're pouring concrete, which you can't change, but naturally
adding a barrier.
And the other one, of course, which I thought was really interesting is that rewiggling
of the river.
That's exactly right.
And I found sort of a sister article from this one, which was that they did this rewiggling
or maybe it was in this article itself.
I can't recall now.
In 2016, they literally sort of used some length of the river to go back and, you know,
stretch it out and use tractors and just excavators to change the shape.
And in three months, the salmon and the trout were back.
And that's because when the water is moving at speed, right, like some of the aquatic
life that fish feed on, like frogs and tadpoles, can't live in that water because that water
won't support the things that they eat.
And so, you know, like this is this is part of the issue, right?
Like when we intervene, we've got to be really careful that we understand the connections
between all parts of the ecosystem.
So the fish are back because the tadpoles are back and the tadpoles are back because
the aquatic, the plants are back, right?
So they're all connected to each other.
The other thing that I loved about this article in the BBC was the fact that one of the one
of the researchers literally said rivers have to be dynamic and chaotic.
How beautiful is that?
That nature loves chaos and it wants to be a little bit chaotic.
It needs to roam free, y'all.
It just needs to do its own thing.
And by adding bends or allowing rivers to curve, we actually like slow down the flow
of the water as well as the volume of the water in any one place, right?
Which is what prevents the flooding.
Yeah.
Thanks, VK.
That was all of those great points.
How are we going to get there?
There were a couple of thoughts that followed from this article.
But before we get into that, let's talk about the other piece that both of us found quite
intriguing about this work.
The first thing that popped up was there was no cited literature in this article.
There was no primary citation.
So we had to dig around a little bit to find the science, so to speak, in this area.
And it was catershot at best.
So I'm not a geologist and I'm not an expert in water management.
But it's fairly easy to look around and find literature in areas.
And it took a long time to find articles that connected to this piece of reporting.
Yeah, KK, I'm just, thank you for mentioning that.
I'm just like heartbroken about this, y'all.
Like, as I say in every episode, I love science and I genuinely thought like, oh, this is
important research.
Like, I'll go look and there'll be like 5,000 articles.
And it was shocking to me how difficult it was to find the stuff that we did find, how
difficult it was to read the material, how difficult it was to understand it.
And then it's just the volume of the work that exists in Europe versus the United States.
Like, there's a big difference, y'all.
Like, they're doing a lot more work on this than...
But even in Europe, I mean, it's not concerted and it's certainly not what I would think
of as a thriving sort of a scientific area of work and contribution.
So that was very interesting to see.
Though, well, a couple of things did show up unequivocally in some senses from literature.
One of the things is that over the past 200 years, industrial demands is kind of sort of
one of the big reasons why this has happened in terms of sort of taming the river, so to
say.
And it made me wonder whether this was sort of partially lobbied or funded and controlled
in some way.
And that would be sad if that were true.
But industrialization causes straightening is not something that scientists are afraid
of saying anymore.
So they're certainly reporting that in literature.
And then the other thing that really sort of also is this clear is that we have what's
called compound flooding as they call it from here, which is both coastal and riverine flooding,
which is floods that come out from the coasts because there are hurricanes or winds.
And then there's also rain that sort of just swells water bodies like rivers and that floods
together.
And so they call these compound flooding events.
And that's also reportedly gone up clearly over the past few years.
So that's the literature and that's the science right now.
Yeah, I mean, and I don't want to talk a little bit about compound flooding because to me that
was a really interesting article was published in Earth's Future, which is an open source
journal.
We link that to the episode description.
Yeah, we'll link all these articles because you know, in this particular episode especially
it was hard to find some of this.
So we'll try to put out as much as we can for this.
But essentially what that article is saying is that as seas get warmer, when there are
storms, these storms gather up more water.
Essentially even as these storms move inland, that water drops to the soil, which means it
goes into the river because water finds water.
That's what it does.
And the water that finds the rivers is like the volume is much higher.
And because of that, if you've got a coastal hurricane, you're going to see some flooding
inland because of the sheer volume of water due to the warmth, right?
So the other thing that I thought also that was worthy mentioning here is that this was
an article from Nature in 2019 that historical sort of patterns for rainfall and water catchment
areas have changed significantly.
And this was based in Europe again.
But you know, and it has gone both ways.
In some places it's increased to over 11%.
And in other places it's decreased by 23%.
So this impacts sort of human living conditions because we've evolved our societies and our
cities and our towns around natural water bodies all the time.
So this is, you know, it's obviously impactful and something that we all have to take sort
of a little more seriously.
And one would hope that they would be a little more hard science because I think we have the
tools as just a matter of sort of finding out how to work it together and finding motivation
and funding, I would imagine to sort of keep this going.
Yeah, okay.
I'm going to talk about that a little bit later because I do have some thoughts.
But right now what I do want to say is that the Nature article in particular, right, like
the one that Kay was just talking about how there's increased water in some places and
decreased water in others, right.
And that's part of the confusion that a lot of people have that, you know, locally, I'm
not seeing more water, right.
Like that was a response in Nashville too, right.
Like how did we get flooded?
Yeah.
So that's happened in Southern Europe and Eastern Europe.
They've lost sort of their dryer, they're not as wet.
So people living in areas like that start to imagine that this is, well, it can be right.
You know, I'm not getting more water.
So certainly not flooding here, but it's local.
These phenomena are local.
And we're sort of, as you mentioned earlier, these are chaotic, complex systems.
That complex system part is the one that I want to unpack a little bit.
What that essentially means, let me try and explain it in human terms because that's what
I understand best.
If you are a member of a family and your parent or your child is having a tough time, they
are having mental health problems.
You're going to be impacted.
Even if it's not happening to you.
And if you use that idea in nature, something that's happening 250 miles away could impact
you because everything in nature is interconnected.
Yeah, that's well put, VK.
So you know, let me try to do the technical piece here about complex systems and chaos
really quickly.
The idea is that when you have simple systems, you know, something even as simple as in many
of our physics classes that we use as a model as a ticking pendulum, when you have multiple
of the same objects, you have multiple pen, you know, bobs that are ticking away.
If you just connect them, you're going to see completely chaotic, crazy motion sometimes.
That's kind of sort of what we're talking about here.
The weather is an interplay of small basic localized pockets of systems that are all
interconnected, just like our brains.
And just like many biological sort of systems, our bodies and hills, all of these possess
the same features in some sense.
And that's kind of what we think about as complex systems.
These systems can be inherently chaotic, but yet extremely stable for very long periods
of time.
And then suddenly just dissolve away and sort of move into other patterns.
Yeah, I when you were describing the multiple pendulum strung together, I was actually thinking
of like a box full of tennis balls, right?
Like if you shake the box, you don't, you don't know where they'll fall.
They'll stay contained, but you don't know.
So if you mark a tennis ball, you put it in a box full of like multiple tennis balls and
you shake the box up, you won't know where your balls going to end up.
And that's the chaotic piece of it.
And they're still in the same box though, and they're all connected to each other.
And the very fact that they're connected is what causes the chaos.
So the problem we've got right now is that we know the seas are getting warmer, which
means the hurricanes have more water.
But what has got to go somewhere where it's going to go?
That depends on a whole host of other factors.
But what we know, we understand is that allowing rivers to curve to become wiggly to bend is
a potential solution to the flooding.
Yeah, the straight line approach is not always the best one that nature has told us or no
more again, a straight line is probably a human construct that we need to understand
to wiggle a little ourselves.
I agree.
I had to do tons of wiggling over this one because y'all, I was shocked.
I was shocked at the smaller model literature that I could find.
I was uncomfortable that I could not like, you know, cite like multiple resources like
the stuff that I do.
And this is okay.
This is a little bit of a rant, but this is part of the problem is, you know, who's funding
the research, right?
And what are they funding?
And who's stopping folks from talking about the solutions instead of just talking about
the problems?
Because the solutions are being implemented in Germany.
They're being implemented in the UK.
And we'll link those articles so you all can see them.
Well, yes, and, you know, I'll just sort of add to that, even in Europe, which has by
far way more sort of peer reviewed journal articles on this subject matter, even there,
the approaches that are getting implemented are being done locally, you know, they're,
it's privately done in some sort of English castle.
I read an article, it was done in a small town in Germany where they had wastewater and sewage
sort of pollution in the river.
So they had to clean up 85 kilometers of that river.
They used all these techniques mentioned by the BBC article there.
It costs money, but it brought in 1400 jobs to that town.
So you know, there is sort of, there's meaning in all of this, we can, we can actually do
this if we decide to.
We got to be stewards of nature, I feel, rather than sort of overlords.
Well, and also I'll just, I'll just say this, that, you know, there's also the other issue
that we've got to consider.
Either we spend the money trying to clean up after a flooding event, or we spend the money
preventing flooding events, right?
Like those are our options.
And there are solutions available, right?
And we can all use them.
Like I was excited to see the solutions.
A stitch in time saves nine.
Yeah.
And like the thing that broke my heart was like those solutions exist.
And it's not the science that's picking this up.
It's, you know, folks doing their own thing.
Yeah, volunteers mainly.
Yeah.
So that's, that's our discussion for today.
This was a pretty heavy one.
And you know, that was our discussion for today.
But for next week, I think we've got something that's really funky out there.
Yeah.
We're going to be talking about centipedes that are eight feet long.
Yeah, stuff from all of the nightmare video games that I play.
Yeah, I'm going to have nightmares all week.
Do not forget to download, like, subscribe, send us an email if you like this.
If you have questions, let us know, you know, how you feel about the episodes because we
love talking to you all and we'd love to hear from you.
Yep.
I would echo everything VK said.
It's great to see that people are actually enjoying some of the stuff and listening to
this.
So we'd love to hear from you guys.
So take care and we'll see you next week.
Take care, y'all.
Bye.