Climate change and the flood this time
Tuesday, May 10, 2011 - 10:00
in Earth & Climate
Midwest flooding is a taste of climate change in its early stages. We've got to fight back, and fast.Last week, at a place called Bird's Point, just below the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi rivers, the Army Corps of Engineers was busy mining a huge levee with explosives. The work was made dangerous by outbreaks of lightning, but eventually the charges were in place and corps Maj. Gen. Michael Walsh gave the order: A 2-mile-wide hole was blasted in the earthen levee, and a wall of water greater than the flow over Niagara Falls inundated 130,000 acres of prime Missouri farmland.