[Rockhounds] Stealing a river

[Peter Richards]

As the article points out, such things can happen quite suddenly in a melting glacier environment.  During the last 12,000 years or so, as glaciers receded from the Great Lakes region, the drainage network changed drastically a number of times, as new lower outflow paths were uncovered by glacial melting or blocked by isostatic rebound of the crust.  There were at least two intervals during which Lake Erie had no connection to the rest of the Great Lakes, being fed only by local streams and having no outlet!
___________________________
R. Peter Richards, Ph.D.
rpr at heidelberg.edu
Morphological Crystallographer

> On Apr 18, 2017, at 11:57 PM, Kreigh Tomaszewski <kreigh at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> In the blink of a geological eye, climate change has helped reverse the
> flow of water melting from a glacier in Canada’s Yukon, a hijacking that
> scientists call “river piracy.”
> 
> This engaging term refers to one river capturing and diverting the flow of
> another. It occurred last spring at the Kaskawulsh Glacier, one of Canada’s
> largest, with a suddenness that startled scientists.
> 
> A process that would ordinarily take thousands of years — or more —
> happened in just a few months in 2016.
> 
> I saw this river just a few month's before it disappeared.
> 
> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/17/science/climate-change-glacier-yukon-river.html
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