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Scavenger Hunt Question 2
World Savvy Admin
October 29th 2012
How does 2012 rank in terms of draughts and floods, compared to past years? Were there more, less, an average number? List three explanations you have found for the difference.
Worldwide, the earth we stand on is parched. From the US to the black sea, Kazakhstan to Iraq, droughts have severely impacted the world’s bread-baskets. The monsoon seasons in Southern Asia are proving to be very meager. Some countries are seeing record-high dryness. However, other parts of the world are experiencing major floods. West and central Africa and the eastern coast of Canada were amongst the victims. One possible explanation is global warming. Global warming shifts precipitation patterns, making one area drier while causing a heavy rain flow in another. This would make sense as warm air can hold more moisture, causing high rain levels. Drought could also be attributed to high and low air pressure systems. Where there is a high pressure system, moisture will not rise, and vice versa. Whereas normally high pressure systems and low pressure systems may come and go over an area, prolonged stay of a high pressure system disrupts evaporation and no water goes into the atmosphere. A high pressure system is normally stalled by jet streams or cold or warm ocean currents. Finally, droughts can be caused if the winds responsible for carrying the water from the ocean to inland is diverted. This can result from the wind not being strong enough, blowing in the right direction, or at the right time. Because of this, the water does not reach its usual destination. Mountains also disrupt this process; as vapor must sometimes go up mountains to reach its final destination, it may reach cold air and condensate right there. By the time the vapor has passed the peak, only a small insignificant amount is left.
Sources:
http://library.thinkquest.org/C003603/english/droughts/causesofdroughts.shtml
http://www.nwf.org/Global-Warming/What-is-Global-Warming/Global-Warming-is-Causing-Extreme-Weather.aspx
Previous Entry
Congratulations to our winners Duncan and Sophie! They will be entered in a raffle for a chance to win a World Savvy t-shirt for their excellent responses to Scavenger Hunt Question 2:
2012 is ranking very highly on the list of years that have had bad droughts. In fact, it has been 56 years since a drought has affected so much land and been so terrible. The drought has affected 48 states in the United States and 57.2% of them are experiencing high amounts of dryness after July of this year. Even more troubling, this is the sixth worst drought on record. And, it doesn’t seem as if it is going to end here. 2013 may very well hold worse droughts.
2012 also holds more floods than there have been in previous years. If a line graph were to display how the number of floods occurring per year were differing when studying different years, the line graph would be going upward, and it would be getting even steeper as it went on. Since floods and droughts are both increasing, you would think that they would balance each other out, right? But, unfortunately, the droughts are existing around the areas that don’t flood, and vice versa.
These floods and droughts are now occurring more because of several reasons. One of them is that as we are altering our landscape so much, we end up involuntarily creating ways for the land to flood. A reason that droughts are existing in larger areas and with greater intensities is because of the ongoing problem known as Global Warming. Our ozone layer is getting destroyed by various “greenhouse gases” that are causing the sun to heat up Earth a lot more. Without our protective shield of oxygen, or our ozone, droughts will only continue to appear, and they will emerge with greater intensity than we ever imagined possible. The second reason that floods are occurring more often is also because of global warming, so since the ozone layer is deteriorating, more sunlight is coming in, thus the polar ice caps are beginning to melt, and more floods are occurring. This is especially a big problem because there are gigantic masses of ice covering the entire continent of Antarctica, which is gigantic and located on the bottom of Earth. As long as that ice is melting, the ocean levels will rise, and they have been rising. In fact, they have risen one inch in the last decade! That may not sound like much, but think of it as the thousands of square miles and the trillions of gallons contained in the ocean. Then one inch is a phenomenal amount.
As long as climate change and altering of landscapes continue, we won’t be able to sustain costal cities for too much longer. This is bad news for cities like New York and New Jersey, both of which are large coastal cities. Droughts are also problems because they not only kill crops and make it difficult for them to grow, but they also cause wildfires all over the world.
By Duncan Henry