Thank you for this. The North American plains Indians, the Lakota and Dakota, say mni wiconi, meaning water is life. Modern sensibility might interpret this sequentially, as simply meaning that life follows water. Nothing new there. But I think the indigenous see, and you demonstrate, a more wholistic understanding, that water also follows life.
They do talk about deserts in the ocean, ie areas of low nutrient availability, It would be interesting to have an overlay of nutrient availability and rainfall to understand the extent of bioprecipitation. This would then feed into river nutrient dispersal and deforestation for bioprecipitation and the tug of war at the land sea boundary. As I commented in the last post in relation to the apparent anomalies in the Amazon. All other things being equal the rotation of the earth may then set the thermal parameters which would not bode well for some parts of the world.
Also the role of cloud seed nuclei. Amazon and Sahara dust drivers and Northern Hemisphere western USA and k feldspar destruction by little mitigation of sulfur by products. Just my hypothesis but should be examined as well as the role of shifting ancient forests in the role of past Chacoan type droughts.
I too appreciate your comparritive abilities and explanations. Getting back to this live being, Earth, and talking of Oceans and forests. It appears that forests and oceans seem to do more to help balancing and providing assistance to elements of our planet as needed. In addition to balancing water requirements, both forests and oceans sequester Co2, of course oceans support micro organisms like Diatomic Phytoplankton floating around the continental shelves, which as we know are the little sequestering machines that phtosynthesize more co2 than all the rainforests. I see diatoms and forests acting like important immune systems of the planet. We just need to preserve their existence.
I noticed that you posted a photo of Yenesi River. it Looked more like a reservoir than a river
I added another photo of the Yenisey river concluding the post. It is a big river indeed, so that's how it looks like.
What is very interesting about ocean and land biotas is that they have very close primary productivities -- despite differing hugely in the biomass of primary producers, ~400+GtC for land and ~1 GtC for the ocean.
You do not need biomass in the fight for light and nutrients when you have mobility. Another interesting point is in relation to the agricultural revolution and temperature fluctuations . land use for agriculture from 1850 to 1940 went up from 1.19 to 3.15 billion HA which may account for the rising temperatures overweighing the rise in so2 and cooling effects of temperate deforestation with limited rise in co2. From 1940 to 1980 an extra billion HA was added while co2 and so2 were rising and tropical forests clearing was also rising but the temperature was held relatively constant as fertilizer use went from a few million tons to over 150m tons. so the acceleration in temperature after 1980 may have more to do with the lag effect of land dehydration and bioprecipitation producing high albedo clouds. coupled with the loss in the shock absorber effect of water as it has an energy density of 5000 times air. This may help prove a healthy hydrated biome could be on par or greater than co2 for temperature control so a lot could be done with the reorganization of our agricultural systems and healthy forest restoration.
Also a lot could be done to insure nutrients, trace elements, and minerals do not continue to get blocked and deposited behind huge dams preventing much of this sustainence ever reaching the oceans. Without adequate nutrient flux into our oceana they will eventually die. We must keep the major worlds rivers flowing if not it will not matter what we do.
Only active mobility, i.e. locomotion, may help fighting for light and nutrients. Phytoplankton cells are at the mercy of turbulent mixing, which treats them indiscriminately.
The biomass of trees is needed to run the biotic pump, because under the tree canopy there is a temperature inversion that prohibits uncontrolled evaporation from the ground and thus soil moisture store is under complete control of transpiration.
Yenisey, It may be called a river but it sure looks like a reservoir. I know that big rivers also can still have moving water areas. But this appears to be dead water little to no movement for miles that I can detect from the photos.
I wonder what it really looked like prior to construction of the large hydroelectric dam that stops and also blocks flow in the Angara river too. Most of the flow is blocked all summer long too.
According to people who live there, the Yenisey on the photos flows as it used to. This is not to say that the Angara dam is not a disaster especially for the very valuable fish stock. Also, as on the Amazon, recently there were periods of very low water.
Although very important, Much more than fish stock there is in disrepair . I wonder just how much evaporation in summer and even greater evaporation is coming of turbines in the winter? I wouldn't be surprised that huge clouds of water vapor are emittedv throuhgout the coldest part of winter. You do know that water is a Green House Gas. It intensifies the greenhouse Effect
John its the Planet that is talented, living, and cleaver. Forests are one of the Earths immune systems. It's really miraculous the similar systems that we share with the Earth.
Heart=Oceans Cardivascular
Blood flow- Major river systems
Lungs/Respiratory system, Atmosphere
Land sustainance housing/interconnection land decomposition feeds river, river feeds marine life, even the microscopic diatoms
So Prussia, haven't heard that used and where is Prussia? It no longer exists as far as I know. I Sympathise with the obscenities of Garbage and waste the US seems to be carelessly pushing. but throwing the baby out with the bath water at such an early stage in this dictatorship will bring him down much quicker. This will lead to unforseen outcomes, a little suffering for many
Thank you, John, for this perspective. This was Victor's dominant feeling shortly after the biotic pump discovery. Materialist as he was, he essentially worshipped trees, from an aesthetic viewpoint as well as marveling at their complexity as a scientist, and also feeling gratitude for them being where he was. To witness that depth of feelings was very remarkable. But when he also realized that they move water across the planet -- well, his hat had been off from the very beginning, but he got absolutely overwhelmed.
Dear Anastassia, Right now, I'm thinking that time is a more restricting resource than water, so I have not been able to absorb all the knowledge contained in your post. Those animated graphs in the early part of your post (latitude 3 deg S) showing how the Congo and Amazon win the tug-of-war with the oceans are fascinating. Would there be any data to show how this movement of water inland from the ocean were to stop pretty suddenly once the trees ended? The sort of data I am looking for is not the example of Australia where there are virtually no trees in the interior (and so no rain). Rather I am hoping you (me, or other readers of your post) can think of a region of the world where there are significant/adequate trees from the coast to say 40% towards the interior, and hopefully we can find rainfall data to show that the rain also extends only 40% into the interior (while the trees are actively transpiring). It might also be possible to find a region (possibly the new "green wall" of trees south of the Sahara desert) that proves that a large area of trees, cut off from the ocean (by a treeless border) are far less effective in that tug of war.
HI Bruce when you look at the Africa transect it quite clearly shows that the ocean on the east coast is winning the tug of war even though there is a hilly area at the equator a few degrees north the land flattens out for hundreds of km before any rain shadow effect. In its way it also shows an answer to the first query but at about a 60/40 representation. If a green wall were to be started as I said in another post I think it should be up the east coast from the equator to take advantage or the precipitation build up off shore and the prevailing winds.
The observed GPCP graph shows precipitation off the east coast quite well it just is being pushed out by the heat dome that is Somalia and in some ways Anastasia is right when she said in a previous post if you can hold the water on the land then vegetation will come. In the Sahal flat lands and Somalia flat lands the notion we can levee to a meter or less and trap all the monsoon rain, as I said is being trialed in Australia's monsoonal arid north. Therefore the same fuel it takes to drive a truck 1000km can be used to grade a circle of the same circumference helping to hydrate an area of flat land of 80 000 km2. Once the vegetation takes this will create the soil sponge and by the time the levee starts to break down there should be some ground water replenishment and vegetation to kickstart the biotic pump. Theory is good only up to the point of putting it into practice though, but coupled with work from the south with another green wall it is definitely an area I would be looking at.
Thanks Theodore, the trial in the north of Australia sounds very interesting. Would you have any contacts of people working on this project, or is there a website where we can monitor progress of this project? MUCH easier for the Australian government to implement this trial (a single competent government vs Civil war in Mozambique, a non-government in Zimbabwe, bankrupt nation in Malawi etc.) but Life is about communities, and, despite the short comings of our governments, I believe the Australian experiment would help convince our communities to embark on this strategy (of restoring our rains, through trees and soils) by simply using our local resources.
HI Bruce here are a couple , there is some repetition but it gives you a quick visual representation of the benefit of small long levee capture and slow release of water in semi arid degraded landscapes. Low cost with excellent benefits across massive areas. Coupled with selective grazing to allow regeneration to take hold and these farmers are transforming degraded areas which are a cost to the system into ecological havens filtering and cleaning our water that store carbon and are a benefit to down stream communities.
SQL| Sustainable Solutions for Drought and Erosion
You need to do a search of their site but there is lots of good info
Landscape Rehydration and Rehabilitation with Verterra Ecological Engineering
Thanks Theodore. I am sorry it has taken me a while to acknowledge your information, for some reason Substack did not advise me that you had replied. So I only discovered this when I came back here to check on something else. I am busy with visitors for the next 2 weeks, so won't be able to deal with all those links immediately, but I will come back to you once I have looked at it all.
The one I like is the gent that completely transformed his farm ( thousands of acres ) with an old tractor with a grader and an levee less than a foot high , no need to get back to me but when i find extra info I think will help I will pass it on
siltation mesh used on construction sites may be a cheap viable substitute for wood across erosion gulleys to allow for slow release and can be removed when the grasslands recover
I can refer you to the study of Andrich and Imberger (2013) who studied the decline in rainfall in Australia as related to land clearing (there used to be trees there, too). Their abstract runs as follows
It is widely recognised that southwest Western Australia has experienced a decline in rainfall over the last 40 years. It is generally thought that this decline is due to natural periodic variations and changes induced by global warming, but recently evidence has emerged suggesting that a substantial part of the decline may be due to extensive logging close to the coast to make way for housing developments and the clearing of native vegetation for wheat planting on the higher ground. We compare coastal and inland rainfall to show empirically that 55% to 62% of the observed rainfall decline is the result of land clearing alone. Using the index of sustainable functionality, we show that the economic consequences associated with this change of land use on fresh water resource availability have been underestimated to date and disproportionately affect the environment and poorest members of the population.
Dear Anastassia, Years from now, I believe historians will marvel at how, for the last 50 years, any observed change in the weather has been blamed on CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. This obsession with CO2 has meant that we have ignored all sorts of other factors - like deforestation, soil degradation and water-table over exploitation. Another aspect that will baffle future historians is that, in trying to solve the problem of excess CO2 emissions, mankind did not make anywhere near enough effort in solving one of the root causes of these excessive emissions - our throw away society. If governments were to mandate that all manufacturers must (a) guarantee to supply all parts (and instructions) to repair their goods and (b) be responsible for disposing of that product once the market no longer has a need for it, we would go a long way to reducing our need for fossil fuels (and the many other resources that we extracted with so much effort, and then dump on our landfill sites). It would also create some much needed employment for our burgeoning human population. Thanks for the link and keep well
I was just thinking about biotic pump today and this article came up, thank you.
So if I understand, the climate models claim to "not need" biotic pump to explain hydrology because they incorporate an empirical parameter that partially includes the effects you attribute to biotic pump?
Thank you Anastassia, I really appreciate your research and your writings. I love this characterisation of the seasonal dance of water vapour, condensation, rain , land and ocean evaporation as a tug-of-war, it seems really appropriate. Regarding your comment on the tracks of tropical storms and how there are no tropical storm tracks between the Amazon and Congo - it is easy to see from the picture but I imagine that factors other than the biotic pump would also play a part. Som thoughts that spring to mind for example, no tropical storms will form along the ITCZ, which the Amazon and Congo both straddle. Also, colder ocean currents reaching up from the Antarctic circumpolar current may play a part in suppressing storm activity through relatively cooler surface temps. Clearly, there is an observable effect shown in the diagram where perhaps a storm creation tipping point is never reached between the Amazon and Congo, and I am wondering if you can shed any light on what other factors you consider to be at play. Thanks so much, Andy
Thank you for this. The North American plains Indians, the Lakota and Dakota, say mni wiconi, meaning water is life. Modern sensibility might interpret this sequentially, as simply meaning that life follows water. Nothing new there. But I think the indigenous see, and you demonstrate, a more wholistic understanding, that water also follows life.
Hi Rob I like to think they have a mutually beneficial relationship
They do talk about deserts in the ocean, ie areas of low nutrient availability, It would be interesting to have an overlay of nutrient availability and rainfall to understand the extent of bioprecipitation. This would then feed into river nutrient dispersal and deforestation for bioprecipitation and the tug of war at the land sea boundary. As I commented in the last post in relation to the apparent anomalies in the Amazon. All other things being equal the rotation of the earth may then set the thermal parameters which would not bode well for some parts of the world.
Also the role of cloud seed nuclei. Amazon and Sahara dust drivers and Northern Hemisphere western USA and k feldspar destruction by little mitigation of sulfur by products. Just my hypothesis but should be examined as well as the role of shifting ancient forests in the role of past Chacoan type droughts.
I too appreciate your comparritive abilities and explanations. Getting back to this live being, Earth, and talking of Oceans and forests. It appears that forests and oceans seem to do more to help balancing and providing assistance to elements of our planet as needed. In addition to balancing water requirements, both forests and oceans sequester Co2, of course oceans support micro organisms like Diatomic Phytoplankton floating around the continental shelves, which as we know are the little sequestering machines that phtosynthesize more co2 than all the rainforests. I see diatoms and forests acting like important immune systems of the planet. We just need to preserve their existence.
I noticed that you posted a photo of Yenesi River. it Looked more like a reservoir than a river
Any comment on that?
.
I added another photo of the Yenisey river concluding the post. It is a big river indeed, so that's how it looks like.
What is very interesting about ocean and land biotas is that they have very close primary productivities -- despite differing hugely in the biomass of primary producers, ~400+GtC for land and ~1 GtC for the ocean.
You do not need biomass in the fight for light and nutrients when you have mobility. Another interesting point is in relation to the agricultural revolution and temperature fluctuations . land use for agriculture from 1850 to 1940 went up from 1.19 to 3.15 billion HA which may account for the rising temperatures overweighing the rise in so2 and cooling effects of temperate deforestation with limited rise in co2. From 1940 to 1980 an extra billion HA was added while co2 and so2 were rising and tropical forests clearing was also rising but the temperature was held relatively constant as fertilizer use went from a few million tons to over 150m tons. so the acceleration in temperature after 1980 may have more to do with the lag effect of land dehydration and bioprecipitation producing high albedo clouds. coupled with the loss in the shock absorber effect of water as it has an energy density of 5000 times air. This may help prove a healthy hydrated biome could be on par or greater than co2 for temperature control so a lot could be done with the reorganization of our agricultural systems and healthy forest restoration.
Also a lot could be done to insure nutrients, trace elements, and minerals do not continue to get blocked and deposited behind huge dams preventing much of this sustainence ever reaching the oceans. Without adequate nutrient flux into our oceana they will eventually die. We must keep the major worlds rivers flowing if not it will not matter what we do.
Only active mobility, i.e. locomotion, may help fighting for light and nutrients. Phytoplankton cells are at the mercy of turbulent mixing, which treats them indiscriminately.
The biomass of trees is needed to run the biotic pump, because under the tree canopy there is a temperature inversion that prohibits uncontrolled evaporation from the ground and thus soil moisture store is under complete control of transpiration.
Yenisey, It may be called a river but it sure looks like a reservoir. I know that big rivers also can still have moving water areas. But this appears to be dead water little to no movement for miles that I can detect from the photos.
I wonder what it really looked like prior to construction of the large hydroelectric dam that stops and also blocks flow in the Angara river too. Most of the flow is blocked all summer long too.
According to people who live there, the Yenisey on the photos flows as it used to. This is not to say that the Angara dam is not a disaster especially for the very valuable fish stock. Also, as on the Amazon, recently there were periods of very low water.
Although very important, Much more than fish stock there is in disrepair . I wonder just how much evaporation in summer and even greater evaporation is coming of turbines in the winter? I wouldn't be surprised that huge clouds of water vapor are emittedv throuhgout the coldest part of winter. You do know that water is a Green House Gas. It intensifies the greenhouse Effect
Thank You, Anastassia.
I am grateful that forests are so clever and talented.
John its the Planet that is talented, living, and cleaver. Forests are one of the Earths immune systems. It's really miraculous the similar systems that we share with the Earth.
Heart=Oceans Cardivascular
Blood flow- Major river systems
Lungs/Respiratory system, Atmosphere
Land sustainance housing/interconnection land decomposition feeds river, river feeds marine life, even the microscopic diatoms
Killjoy.
I was just being pleasant.
Are you, perhaps, Prussian?
;-)
I'm a Gaiaist. If you're not familiar Gaia Theory by James Lovelock
I am, but your presentation struck me as Prussian, and your name is consistent with that.
I am a friend of Anastassia's, and some others of similar mind. I blog at drjohnsblog.substack.com and closed a recent post with this article.
Her articles generally get to be the closing thought.
I have also tracked The Limits To Growth, since I learned about it in 1974.
So Prussia, haven't heard that used and where is Prussia? It no longer exists as far as I know. I Sympathise with the obscenities of Garbage and waste the US seems to be carelessly pushing. but throwing the baby out with the bath water at such an early stage in this dictatorship will bring him down much quicker. This will lead to unforseen outcomes, a little suffering for many
Prussia largely ran German affairs, especially military affairs for a century or so. Here is a map https://omniatlas.com/maps/europe/18660614/
If you search the origin of your name, which I did, it is from the area which was Prussia.
Thanks for taking a look, Cliff. I hope to be of practical use to you.
Thank you, John, for this perspective. This was Victor's dominant feeling shortly after the biotic pump discovery. Materialist as he was, he essentially worshipped trees, from an aesthetic viewpoint as well as marveling at their complexity as a scientist, and also feeling gratitude for them being where he was. To witness that depth of feelings was very remarkable. But when he also realized that they move water across the planet -- well, his hat had been off from the very beginning, but he got absolutely overwhelmed.
;-} I am glad to hear that.
Dear Anastassia, Right now, I'm thinking that time is a more restricting resource than water, so I have not been able to absorb all the knowledge contained in your post. Those animated graphs in the early part of your post (latitude 3 deg S) showing how the Congo and Amazon win the tug-of-war with the oceans are fascinating. Would there be any data to show how this movement of water inland from the ocean were to stop pretty suddenly once the trees ended? The sort of data I am looking for is not the example of Australia where there are virtually no trees in the interior (and so no rain). Rather I am hoping you (me, or other readers of your post) can think of a region of the world where there are significant/adequate trees from the coast to say 40% towards the interior, and hopefully we can find rainfall data to show that the rain also extends only 40% into the interior (while the trees are actively transpiring). It might also be possible to find a region (possibly the new "green wall" of trees south of the Sahara desert) that proves that a large area of trees, cut off from the ocean (by a treeless border) are far less effective in that tug of war.
HI Bruce when you look at the Africa transect it quite clearly shows that the ocean on the east coast is winning the tug of war even though there is a hilly area at the equator a few degrees north the land flattens out for hundreds of km before any rain shadow effect. In its way it also shows an answer to the first query but at about a 60/40 representation. If a green wall were to be started as I said in another post I think it should be up the east coast from the equator to take advantage or the precipitation build up off shore and the prevailing winds.
The observed GPCP graph shows precipitation off the east coast quite well it just is being pushed out by the heat dome that is Somalia and in some ways Anastasia is right when she said in a previous post if you can hold the water on the land then vegetation will come. In the Sahal flat lands and Somalia flat lands the notion we can levee to a meter or less and trap all the monsoon rain, as I said is being trialed in Australia's monsoonal arid north. Therefore the same fuel it takes to drive a truck 1000km can be used to grade a circle of the same circumference helping to hydrate an area of flat land of 80 000 km2. Once the vegetation takes this will create the soil sponge and by the time the levee starts to break down there should be some ground water replenishment and vegetation to kickstart the biotic pump. Theory is good only up to the point of putting it into practice though, but coupled with work from the south with another green wall it is definitely an area I would be looking at.
Thanks Theodore, the trial in the north of Australia sounds very interesting. Would you have any contacts of people working on this project, or is there a website where we can monitor progress of this project? MUCH easier for the Australian government to implement this trial (a single competent government vs Civil war in Mozambique, a non-government in Zimbabwe, bankrupt nation in Malawi etc.) but Life is about communities, and, despite the short comings of our governments, I believe the Australian experiment would help convince our communities to embark on this strategy (of restoring our rains, through trees and soils) by simply using our local resources.
HI Bruce here are a couple , there is some repetition but it gives you a quick visual representation of the benefit of small long levee capture and slow release of water in semi arid degraded landscapes. Low cost with excellent benefits across massive areas. Coupled with selective grazing to allow regeneration to take hold and these farmers are transforming degraded areas which are a cost to the system into ecological havens filtering and cleaning our water that store carbon and are a benefit to down stream communities.
SQL| Sustainable Solutions for Drought and Erosion
You need to do a search of their site but there is lots of good info
Landscape Rehydration and Rehabilitation with Verterra Ecological Engineering
https://irp.cdn-
This focuses on levee from about half way
website.com/1018ad9f/files/uploaded/Water_spreading_to_improve_degraded_native_pastures_UPDATED-a1266ec3.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koDUSA51d-0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WOXvCgFvPQ
https://soilsforlife.org.au/salisbury-rehabilitating-the-scalds/
https://youtu.be/Ge0wRQgspv0
Hope the links are correct and are of help
Thanks Theodore. I am sorry it has taken me a while to acknowledge your information, for some reason Substack did not advise me that you had replied. So I only discovered this when I came back here to check on something else. I am busy with visitors for the next 2 weeks, so won't be able to deal with all those links immediately, but I will come back to you once I have looked at it all.
The one I like is the gent that completely transformed his farm ( thousands of acres ) with an old tractor with a grader and an levee less than a foot high , no need to get back to me but when i find extra info I think will help I will pass it on
Landscape Rehydration and Rehabilitation with Verterra Ecological Engineering
https://irp.cdn-
this is all one address , sorry I split it so it did not work
this web site is spliting it into two for some reason?
siltation mesh used on construction sites may be a cheap viable substitute for wood across erosion gulleys to allow for slow release and can be removed when the grasslands recover
Dear Bruce,
I can refer you to the study of Andrich and Imberger (2013) who studied the decline in rainfall in Australia as related to land clearing (there used to be trees there, too). Their abstract runs as follows
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13504509.2013.850752
It is widely recognised that southwest Western Australia has experienced a decline in rainfall over the last 40 years. It is generally thought that this decline is due to natural periodic variations and changes induced by global warming, but recently evidence has emerged suggesting that a substantial part of the decline may be due to extensive logging close to the coast to make way for housing developments and the clearing of native vegetation for wheat planting on the higher ground. We compare coastal and inland rainfall to show empirically that 55% to 62% of the observed rainfall decline is the result of land clearing alone. Using the index of sustainable functionality, we show that the economic consequences associated with this change of land use on fresh water resource availability have been underestimated to date and disproportionately affect the environment and poorest members of the population.
Dear Anastassia, Years from now, I believe historians will marvel at how, for the last 50 years, any observed change in the weather has been blamed on CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. This obsession with CO2 has meant that we have ignored all sorts of other factors - like deforestation, soil degradation and water-table over exploitation. Another aspect that will baffle future historians is that, in trying to solve the problem of excess CO2 emissions, mankind did not make anywhere near enough effort in solving one of the root causes of these excessive emissions - our throw away society. If governments were to mandate that all manufacturers must (a) guarantee to supply all parts (and instructions) to repair their goods and (b) be responsible for disposing of that product once the market no longer has a need for it, we would go a long way to reducing our need for fossil fuels (and the many other resources that we extracted with so much effort, and then dump on our landfill sites). It would also create some much needed employment for our burgeoning human population. Thanks for the link and keep well
I was just thinking about biotic pump today and this article came up, thank you.
So if I understand, the climate models claim to "not need" biotic pump to explain hydrology because they incorporate an empirical parameter that partially includes the effects you attribute to biotic pump?
Thank you Anastassia, I really appreciate your research and your writings. I love this characterisation of the seasonal dance of water vapour, condensation, rain , land and ocean evaporation as a tug-of-war, it seems really appropriate. Regarding your comment on the tracks of tropical storms and how there are no tropical storm tracks between the Amazon and Congo - it is easy to see from the picture but I imagine that factors other than the biotic pump would also play a part. Som thoughts that spring to mind for example, no tropical storms will form along the ITCZ, which the Amazon and Congo both straddle. Also, colder ocean currents reaching up from the Antarctic circumpolar current may play a part in suppressing storm activity through relatively cooler surface temps. Clearly, there is an observable effect shown in the diagram where perhaps a storm creation tipping point is never reached between the Amazon and Congo, and I am wondering if you can shed any light on what other factors you consider to be at play. Thanks so much, Andy