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There are many rivers on Earth – much more than we badumed.
Previous Estimate of the Coverage of Rivers and Streams on Our Planet According to a new study from the University of North Carolina, this was not accurate. Excluding land covered with glaciers or ice caps, our planet is braided with approximately 773,000 square kilometers of rivers and streams – 44% more than previously estimated.
My River Overflows
To Know More How Many "River" You Need to Make a "Land" Team – University of North Carolina Hydrologists George Allen and Tamlin Pavelsky – shot thousands of images recorded by Landsat satellite NASA. Using software designed specifically by Pavelsky for this task, they took over 58 million measurements of rivers, streams and other similar watercourses. Researchers estimated river shapes by measuring their widths. Finally, they all added up to calculate the total area they cover.
To make sure that the software would not clutter the measures, the team recruited "a small army of undergraduates" to monitor the program as and when about his task. One of the main concerns of the team was that roads or other similar structures could be treated as rivers by the program, but this was not the case.
In addition to finding these additional 300,000 square miles of Texas River, to put it in perspective), the researchers also report that the rivers were both narrower and sparser in developed areas. This could be due to seasonal variations, water drainage for agriculture, habitat loss (such as swamp drainage), or river backfilling for landfills. 39; hydroelectricity. The team, however, can not say for sure what the cause is, and calls for further research in the region.
Not only will the results lead fishing enthusiasts to encourage their cane, but they will also have more disturbing implications. Namely, it influences the way we study and treat climate change. Watercourses are the main source of greenhouse gas exchange between the surface and the atmosphere, especially when water is polluted.
For a long time, people have been content to leave the rivers in the ocean. It was a simpler time when we thought we could afford it. In the last decade, however, researchers have been interested in the fact that rivers are helping to break down these wastes and release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Some of the most prevalent pollutants in the water courses are fertilizers, sewage and soil drainage – and the damp, relatively oxygenated, biodiversity-rich backdrop of a river is a great place for these pollutants to decompose. By breaking down, they release gases such as methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Even though they end up in the ocean, this is by no means a prison card.
If rivers cover more territory than we badumed (and 44% more this report yields significantly more) then our current calculations on the amount of greenhouse gases they release need to be recut .
"If you look around the world, the rivers look different from one place to another," says Allen Gizmodo . "They could be braided, or winding, or meandering, and for the most part, the current technology does not take into account the actual morphology of the rivers." This dataset is the first of its kind to do so at this time. High resolution global scale. "
This global map of rivers could also help predict floods and will be an invaluable resource in the future, when we try to keep track of how rivers behave like the Earth. heats.
The article "The overall extent of rivers and streams" was published in the journal Science .
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