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Bjørn Burr Nyberg
December 12, 2018 @ 12:15 pm - 1:00 pm
Evolution of sedimentary systems with human activity
Society develops in response to sedimentary systems. At the same time these systems are increasingly modified by society. For example, management of hydrological systems to meet water resource demands (e.g., dams, canals, weirs, etc…) reduces and restricts sediment supply to deltas and floodplains, thus increasing vulnerability of population, infrastructure and agricultural land to future flood events, land retreat and sea-level rise. In response, water diversion, land reclamation, river, barrier and coastal armouring are a few of the numerous techniques used to manage and protect coastal and deltaic sedimentary environments to preserve human livelihoods. Given that nearly a third of the world’s population, ~22% of the world’s cropland and ~21% of the world’s pastures are supported by sedimentary systems that cover no more than 16% of Earths landsurface, it is imperative to study the influence of anthropogenic activity on sedimentary systems. However, relatively little is known from a global and quantitative perspective on the extent of the anthropogenic activity on sedimentary systems, and vice versa.
Here we show how recent advances in analyzing the spatial-temporal change in 30 years of satellite imagery by the Google Earth Engine can highlight anthropogenic influence on the surface geomorphology of sedimentary systems. Focusing on deltaic environments, the historical imagery show that upstream capture in water by dam constructions has a direct and observable impact on the propagation of downstream sedimentary successions. A decrease in both water discharge and total suspended sediment supply are a primary factor responsible for net land loss in coastal environments. As sea-levels are expected to rise and dam construction predicted to grow, half a billion people living on deltaic environments are of increasing risk to climate change.
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Afrikaans Albanian Amharic Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bengali Bosnian Bulgarian Catalan Cebuano Chichewa Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Corsican Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Esperanto Estonian Filipino Finnish French Frisian Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hausa Hawaiian Hebrew Hindi Hmong Hungarian Icelandic Igbo Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Kazakh Khmer Korean Kurdish Kyrgyz Lao Latin Latvian Lithuanian Luxembourgish Macedonian Malagasy Malay Malayalam Maltese Maori Marathi Mongolian Myanmar (Burmese) Nepali Norwegian Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Samoan Scots Gaelic Serbian Sesotho Shona Sindhi Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Somali Spanish Sundanese Swahili Swedish Tajik Tamil Telugu Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Uzbek Vietnamese Welsh Xhosa Yiddish Yoruba Zulu |
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