Papyrus by John Gaudet

Author:John Gaudet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2014-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

15

The Battle for Lake Victoria

The Papyrus Yellow Warbler (Chloropeta gracilirostris), White-winged Warbler (Bradypterus carpalis), Carruthers’s Cisticola (Cisticola carruthersi), Papyrus Gonolek (Laniarius mufumbiri) and Papyrus Canary (Serinus koliensis) are all five confined to swamps in the western arm of the Rift Valley and around Lake Victoria, spending most, if not all of their time in papyrus swamps.

—A. Owino and P. Ryan, 2006,

African Jour. of Ecology

One day while waiting at JFK airport in New York for an onward connection, I turned to the best seller Passages, by Gail Sheehy, to while away a few hours. This was the original narrative about predictable crises in life. Not usually my kind of book, but I was at a stage where I had to make decisions about my career, and someone had told me to read Sheehy’s book: “It might help.”

In a way, it did, as it reminded me of how many phenomena in nature are geared to cycles. Even the “seven-year itch” in marriages could be due to external forces, much like the effect that sunspots have on the weather. This was an idea that definitely rang a bell. I’d always been curious about the extremes that are so obvious in Africa, where once a drought sets in it lasts for about five or more years; then comes rain unlike anything you can imagine, causing floods that set everything awash for another half dozen years. It’s truly feast or famine, and it takes about eleven years for these cycles to complete themselves.

This is the basis for the theory that the weather in Africa and elsewhere is correlated with sunspot eruptions, which happen about every eleven years. The first indication is an increase in magnetic activity in the atmosphere, followed by rain, then a rise in lake levels. The theory has still to be proved, and any mechanism behind it, if it does exist, is still uncertain,1 but recent research found that all nine of the past century’s sunspot maxima coincided with maximum water levels in Lake Victoria.2 When I began writing this book, the next peak in the sunspot cycle was predicted for 2011, when heavy rains were expected to pummel East Africa—which they did. Prior to that time, drought had set in and lakes had been drying up. Lake Chad, the papyrus-fringed lake in the arid zone of North Africa, had shrunken until it was only a shadow of its former self. The Kenyan lake, Lake Naivasha, followed suit. Also of note was the decrease in Lake Victoria. At 26,563 square miles, it is the largest freshwater lake in Africa. In 2006 it dropped by over seven feet, reaching its lowest level in eighty years!

Where was the water going? The only way in which such an enormous drop in level could happen would be if water were lost through the Victoria Nile at Jinja, which is the only exit for the lake. But when asked about such things, the authorities in Uganda who control the flow through the dam at Jinja turned a deaf ear.

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