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Geology News
Floods Current Events

View a photo slideshow of some of the world’s most destructive storms since 1970. Included are: Cyclone Nargis, Cyclone Sidr, Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Mitch, Tropical Storm Thelma, Super Typhoon Nina, and the Bhola Cyclone, among others.

The largest flood on the lower Mississippi River since 1973 was measured on April 22 in Vicksburg, Mississippi by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The flow measured 1.8 million cubic feet per second. That is enough water to fill more than 20 Olympic size swimming pools in one second, or more than 1.75 million pools in a day.

Urban coastal flood exposure will increase enormously if sea levels rise as expected. This article at Strategic Risk explores the geographic distribution of this problem along with some mitigation and adaptation that might accompany it.

Early this month there was significant flooding on the White River of Arkansas. These two Landsat images, available in greater detail at Earth Observatory, clearly show the extent of the flooding on April 7th, 2008 (top image) compared to April 14th, 2006 (bottom image).

This has been an exceptional year for flooding in this area. The river reached its fifth highest crest of 33.78 feet on April 19, 2008, and its sixth highest crest of 33.04 feet on March 29, 2008.

NASA Image

Many areas of the world rely on glacier runoff for drinking water and agriculture. As global temperature rises, glaciers are melting faster and earlier in the year. This can cause flooding in the spring and a lack of water when it is most needed in the summer months. Additionally, smaller glaciers may completely disappear in the coming years - leaving the surrounding areas without this valuable resource altogether.

As global warming progresses and the planet’s ice sheets melt away, many coastal regions will become flooded. Some scientists now estimated that sea level might rise by a meter in this century. This change will have an acute impact on low-lying countries like Bangladesh, where a significant portion of land is within a meter of sea level.

World Map for Various Levels of Sea Level Rise

Researchers find that climate change is causing summer water levels on the Mackenzie River Delta to be three times higher than normal. They are also finding water level increases in the low elevation lakes on the delta. They believe that what they see on the Mackenzie Delta is representative of the circumpolar Arctic.

USGS Water Watch now has a special webpage where you can see a map of high flow conditions across the United States. It shows location dots where streams are in the 95th or higher percentile of flow for that calendar day and triangles where the stream is above flood stage.

Venice, the City of Canals, has long been sinking into the sea. An expensive project to install steel flood gates is already underway, but now officials are considering something else - putting the city on stilts.

NOAA Image

Heavy rains on saturated ground have produced a lot of run-off in the Mississippi River Basin. The Chief of the Watershed Division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says that they might need to open some of the emergency channels.

I really like to see publications like this placed on the web where citizens have free access to valuable information prepared by government agencies. This publication includes chapters on floods, earthquakes, problem soils, mass movements, subsidence and earth fissures, radon, karst, abandon mines, volcanic hazards and radon. Every state should have a publication like this on their website.

The weather front that caused heavy flooding in the central United States over the past few days is moving east. The geographic distribution of streams in flood can be seen at the USGS stream monitoring website. One of their maps from Thursday morning is posted below. Each dot is a gaging station. The color of the dot represents stream flow compared to percentiles of historical daily stream flow for that day of the year. Stream shown as black dots are very high. Get a real-time map at USGS WaterWatch.

Very heavy rains have triggered flooding in the central United States, leaving at least 13 dead. Some USGS Gaging Stations in Illinois - where one foot of rain fell - show stage increases of 20 feet or more.

The extreme floods that hit the UK during 2007 were of unusual extent and severity. The UK’s Centre for Ecology & Hydrology has issued a report stating that they were singular weather events and unrelated to climate change. We link to a webpage with a summary where you can choose to download the full pdf report.

Last week, Arizona’s Grand Canyon was flooded in an effort to improve the area’s ecosystem. Now that the waters have subsided, we can begin to see the effects.

NASA Image

Heavy rains have caused widespread flooding in northern and central South America. Cooler-than-normal ocean surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific have triggered La Niña conditions, which are thought to be causing the rain.

Arizona’s Grand Canyon has been artificially flooded in an effort to improve the area’s ecosystem. The BBC tells the story through a series of interesting photos.

Heavy rain in Peru has caused flooding and many landslides. Many homes, industrial facilities and crops have been lost.

A cold front dumped heavy rains in the central and southern Philippines. Nearly 300,000 have been displaced and 21 killed by floods and landslides.

At least 72 people have died from Cholera in Mozambique following flooding that happened in January. About 100,000 have been displaced and 250,000 depend upon emergency food.

Lakes high in the Himalaya areas of Nepal and Bhutan have been forming from glacial melt water. The number and size of these lakes has increased in recent years in response to global warming. They present a danger to people living in valleys below because the lakes are held by weak natural dams.

Heavy rains have triggered flooding in the African nation of Malawi. When it floods there the rising waters can bring crocodiles.

Robert C. Walter and Dorothy J. Merritts of Franklin and Marshall College believe that some early stream process studies were unknowingly done in the sediment fill behind historic dams. The part that I found interesting was how many dams can be attributed to early settlers. I am sure that some of the landscapes that I have seen (and thought natural at the time) were in sediments trapped by a dam.

“An experiment using high flows from Glen Canyon Dam to study and improve Colorado River resources in Grand Canyon National Park has been proposed by the Department of the Interior. The goal is to better understand whether higher flows can be used to rebuild eroded beaches downstream of Glen Canyon Dam by moving sand accumulated in the riverbed onto sandbars. The 2008 test would be different than previous high-flow tests conducted in 1996 and 2004.”

People suffering losses from Hurricane Katrina have filed nearly one half million damage claims against the US government. Many of these are based upon failure of levees or flood walls. Over 200 claims are in excess of $1 billion.

Southern Africa is in its rainy season now and the Pungue River is flooding because of the intense rain. Earth Observatory has a satellite image pair that illustrates this flood.

A break in an earthen levee resulted in the flooding of much of the town of Fernley, Nevada. Parts of the town were under as much as eight feet of water. The break in the levee was repaired but much of the water has no drainage route out of the town. Freezing weather makes this a difficult situation.

Days of heavy rain triggered flooding and many landslides in the Karanganyar district of Indonesia. You can see photos and a short video at the MSN website.

This is a video of a flood and mudflow that destroyed buildings and forced the closing of US Route 30 near Clatskanie, Oregon. The Oregon Department of Transportation closed the road and evacuated residents shortly before the slide occurred. [CNN Video]   [Oregon Live News Report]

This is a website that has an enormous number of photos to document flooding that occurred in Guyana during early 2005. It also has a lesser number of photos for flooding that occurred at later dates. This isn’t “news” but there are some interesting images on the site.

USGS has placed over 1.5 billion instantaneous streamflow measurements taken from 5,500 stream gages in 26 states into an online access system. This data will be very useful to researchers and teachers.

LiveScience has a short presentation titled “The Ten Worst U.S. Natural Disasters”. It gives a brief background on ten events which include: Tri-State Tornado, Peshtigo Fire, Johnstown Flood, Heat Wave of 1988, Heat Wave of 1980, Okeechobee Hurricane, San Francisco Earthquake, Dust Bowl, Hurricane Katrina, and Hurricane Galveston.

A week of heavy rain has flooded large areas of Mexico. Especially hard hit was the state of Tabasco which is reported to have been 70% to 80% under water - and many homes were flooded to their rooftops.

Ted Strickland, Ohio Governor, has declared a flood emergency for nine northern Ohio counties. Hundreds of people have been forced out of their homes and an inmate population had to be moved to a jail on higher ground.

NASA Image

Texas and Oklahoma have been deluged with rain over the past two weeks, causing significant flooding and other problems. Many areas of these states received over 12 inches of rain in just a few days and numerous rainfall records have been broken. NASA has an interesting precipitation map showing the cumulative rainfall for the period between June 20th and June 28th. Their rainfall map was created from satellite data. The article explains why ground-based data can be in disagreement with the satellite data - it’s a matter of resolution.

Damage from earthquakes, floods, subsidence, landslides, expansive soils, and other geologic processes are not covered by the typical homeowners insurance policy. Thousands of people across the United States are learning very expensive geology lessons every year. This makes a strong case for geoscience education, easy access to professional opinion, and maybe some changes in the way that insurance is sold.