| Title | A Third of Rivers in US Found to be Changing From Blue to Green and Yellow | |
| Date | Monday January 11 2021, @12:50AM | |
| Author | requerdanos | |
| Topic | ||
| from the dept. | ||
US rivers are changing from blue to yellow and green, satellite images show:
A third of U.S. rivers have significantly changed color over the last 36 years, turning from blue to yellow and green, striking new images reveal.
Researchers analyzed 235,000 satellite images — taken over a 34-year period between 1984 and 2018 — from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Landsat program. The changing hues can be viewed in an interactive map.
More than half of those satellite images showed rivers with a dominant hue of yellow, while more than a third of images were mostly green. Just 8% of river pics were mostly blue.
"Most of the rivers are changing gradually and not noticeable to the human eye," lead author John Gardner, a postdoctoral researcher in the global hydrology lab at University of North Carolina, told Live Science. "But areas that are the fastest changing are more likely to be man-made."
[...] More research is now needed to determine just how accurate river color is at determining ecosystem health and which changes are important to monitor.
Also at: Phys.org.
Journal Reference:
John R. Gardner, Xiao Yang, Simon N. Topp, et al. The Color of Rivers, Geophysical Research Letters (DOI: 10.1029/2020GL088946)
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printed from SoylentNews, A Third of Rivers in US Found to be Changing From Blue to Green and Yellow on 2024-04-25 11:58:45