Water by Caldecott Julian

Author:Caldecott, Julian [Caldecott, Julian]
Format: mobi
Publisher: Virgin Digital
Published: 2010-02-10T23:00:44+00:00

OTHER LAKES, OTHER ISSUES

This sample of lakes around the world, their associated catchments, wetlands and floodplains, and their fates and the lessons to be learned from them, could continue for hundreds of pages more. There are, after all, some five million lakes in the world. We could have looked at Lake Vostok, 5,300 km3 of super-cooled fresh water, supersaturated with oxygen and sealed below three kilometres of Antarctic ice. Or Lake Ohrid in Macedonia, five million years old and rich in endemics across the whole food chain. Or Lake Titicaca, high in the Andes, where Bolivia and Peru sort-of co-operate and sort-of compete over the lake's water. Or Lake Chad, where four West African countries meet, and where dams and diversions of the Hadejia, Jama'are and Logone rivers have caused catastrophic drying of lake and floodplain. Or the five Great Lakes of the USA and Canada – Huron, Superior, Erie, Michigan and Ontario – together containing almost as much fresh water as Lake Baikal, but with more than half North America's heavy industry in their catchments. Or Iran's Lake Hamoun, desiccated by dams on the Helmand River in Afghanistan, thus creating 300,000 environmental refugees, covering a hundred villages in sand dunes, and wiping out a thriving fishery with an annual catch of around 12,000 tonnes. Or we could have looked at the disasters waiting to happen, such as the glacial lakes in the Himalayas, bloated with melt-water from global warming, and temporarily blocked by ice and rock barriers that are just waiting to burst. But instead we'll see what patterns have already emerged from this brief tour.

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