Not All Deltas Will Be Destroyed by Global Warming

Scientists have determined that the current global-warming phenomenon will not lead to all the river deltas in the world being swamped. A multitude of factors will determine which of the landscape features will be destroyed or not, including the level of tectonic activity in plates around their locations, and the types of soils they contain. As a result, certain systems may remain intact, while others will be submerged by rising sea levels, caused by meltdowns in both glaciers and ice sheets, Nature News reports. We could therefore witness completely different manifestations of global warming in deltas.

“In coastal systems we have to think about combined impacts,” Richard Feely said. He is an oceanographer at the Seattle, Washington-based Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory. The expert made the statement in Portland, Oregon on November 3, at this year's meeting of the Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation. In the case of the Mississippi Delta, known for a long time to have been witnessing the full effects of climate change, the action of rising sea levels is also coupled with soils subsidizing, which results in its levels dropping far faster than normally.

“It's quite clear that if we try to focus on conserving the outer areas, it's going to be almost impossible,” to mend the effects of warming on the Mississippi Delta, Carles Ibanez Marti added. The expert is the director of the Spanish Institute for Food and Agricultural Research and Technology's Aquatic Ecosystems unit, in Sant Carles de la Rapita. He adds that there is not necessarily need to despair. During the last time the delta was in jeopardy, at the end of the last ice age, the formation simply retreated upriver, thus preserving itself.

However, at the time, there were no human settlements in the delta. The thing is, researchers fear, common people may not be at all willing to relocate from their endangered homes, which means that all conservation efforts placed in the area (which may be useless to begin with) will have to be squeezed in between urban development, descending soils, and rising sea levels in the near future.

Conversely, one of the few deltas that seem bent on surviving is the Danube Delta in Eastern Europe, on the eastern shores of Romania. In spite of the dam construction, the river still carries enough sediments to keep the delta stable.