Opening soon just downriver - a new hot sauce factory!
Posted on 09/07/2012 2:31:16 PM PDT by kingattax
For a river known as the "golden watercourse," red is a strange color to see.
Yet that's the shade turning up in the Yangtze River and officials have no idea why.
The red began appearing in the Yangtze, the longest and largest river in China and the third longest river in the world, yesterday near the city of Chongquing, where the Yangtze connects to the Jialin River.
The Yangtze, called "golden" because of the heavy rainfall it receives year-round, runs through Chongqing, Southwest China's largest industrial and commercial center, also known as the "mountain city" because of the hills and peaks upon which its many buildings and factories stand.
The red color stopped some residents in their tracks. They put water from the river in bottles to save it. Fishermen and other workers who rely on the river for income kept going about their business, according to the UK's Daily Mail.
While the river's red coloring was most pronounced near Chongqing it was also reported at several other points. Officials are reportedly investigating the cause.
(Excerpt) Read more at gma.yahoo.com ...
That epidemic is already on the way.
It touched the Eastern Quadrant, so that meant this was just short of the worst kind of drought.
Currently the drought is breaking as hurricanes spin up and onto the continent!
China's drought should also break this year.
The WORST we had that anyone saw personally and wrote about was in the Eastern Quadrant for a 70 year period ~ ending about 1609 or thereabouts. 17 years in the last half saw no precipitation at all and may have influenced Spanish thinking about how to carve North America up in the Treaty of London (1604).
Red tide 1000 miles upstream of the sea, and 500 miles upstream of the dam isn't cause for optimism. Maybe this is one period in which East Asian and North American drought cycles decouple.
Red clay is common throughout China. So is yellow clay. That's a mountainous region. Lots and lots of red and yellow clay around.
Moses came back from Heaven and dipped his staff into the river. The Chinese Pharaoh has been given notice!
Maybe an algae. If it’s like Karenia brevis and in high enough concentration, it’ll be toxic in fish.
Not all red tides are harmful, BTW.
One natural explanation for red water that can likely be ruled out is color-producing microorganisms, according to Emily Stanley, a professor of limnology (the study of inland waters) at the University of Wisconsin.
"When water turns red, the thing a lot of people think of first is red tide," Stanley told Life's Little Mysteries. "But the algae that causes red tide is a marine group and not a freshwater group, so it's highly, highly unlikely that this is a red-tide-related phenomenon."
Fresh water does occasionally turn blood-red for biological reasons (a lake that turned red during a drought in Texas last summer led to talk of the end times), but Stanley said this is most often due to incursions of color-producing bacteria that arrive when a body of water has less oxygen than normal. Because rivers move constantly, struggling and mixing with the air above them as they go, they rarely ever get the oxygen deficiencies necessary for a life-based red dye job.
After reviewing a few images of Chongqing's shockingly red river, Stanley put her money on a man-made cause.
"It looks like a pollutant phenomenon," she said. "Water bodies that have turned red very fast in the past have happened because people have dumped dyes into them."
An industrial dye dump was in fact the explanation when an urban stretch of another Chinese river, the Jian, turned crimson last December. Investigators traced the color back to a chemical plant that they said had been illegally producing red dye for firework wrappers.
Still, Stanley says she can't rule out the other possibility officials are now reportedly investigating: an upstream influx of silt. Her instinct, though, is that red clay would be more likely.
"China is well known for having areas with a lot of steep hill sides and a lot of land use practices that promote soil erosion and soil going into rivers," she said. "You can get red-colored clays that wouldn't be a whole lot different from having a big dose of dye go in there. But if that's the cause I'd imagine there would have had to be a huge storm or a huge amount of clay go into the system."
Taking another look at the Campbell's-hued Yangtze, she said, "It looks really industrial somehow."
That is the “Crimson Tide” GO BAMA !!!
That's going to usually be various minerals with a lot of iron in them.
The mystery is going to be where it came from because cityscapes are usually pretty busy with surfaces, fixtures and structures that keep that land from drying up and blowing away ~ but a steep slope out in the country would be my guess ~ the very fine dust blows in on light breezes and encounters the higher humidity levels of the city which brings it down to the river where it shows up red.
That does not rule out some industrial point source, but this more general area source will have that same 'industrial' feel simply because it has a high iron content.
Having grown up in the lower mIdwest I have had numerous occasions to fly over the Ohio or the Mississippi River. The old story is the Missouri has a higher silt load than the main course of the river (The Mississippi gets 90% of its flow from the Ohio, not the MIssouri) so it will appear brown next to the silt free water in the Ohio, which will seem blue.
Actually, I"ve seen it both ways where the Mississippi/Missouri water is clearer than the more brownish looking Ohio water (usually due to heavy rains in the Ohio valley that bring down microparticles of silt from the Appalachians and the associated weathered limestone and shale lowlands.
Much of the color difference has to do with the way the visual cortex processes the signals it gets from the eyes.
Another source of red can come from recent weathering on an old limestone surface. It just so happens that some limestone beds have iron inclusions that turned to rust aeons ago. Once the rock matrix starts breaking up the iron is free to rust further and turn red ~ as it flows downstream.
Here in Virginia we have an iron mining region right in the Northern Virginia urban area ~ at Manassas! There are 3 different forms of iron ore in that area. Up until Pittsburgh was opened up this was a major source of iron in the East Coast. Depending on the season the Occoquan River that drains this area may be slate gray, teal blue or wine dark! Just look it up on Google and call up images. Your first pages will show examples of each phenomenon.
You can get a nice red color like that river in China shows with an infusion of waste sulfur compounds too. Most folks would think of that as industrial waste but for some bacteria, it's a major meal!
But they’re making profits! And it’s amazing that some in here believe there should be no regulations whatsoever on what kind of crap businesses can pour into rivers.
It could be dust from bare red soil if there has been drought an dust storms upstream. Any areas out there with soil the color of Georgia clay?
Or it could be something leached out from layers of ground that had long been dry before being inundated by the construction the dams.
Red with the blood of all the aborted babies.
Much of the soil is acidic red clay, but irrigation and heavy fertilizer use - both organic, and chemical - have earned Chinese farmers high yields. The highest grain yields in the country come from the south, for example the Sichuan basin and the lower Chang Jiang (Yangtze River) valley. Non-staple crops include cotton and tea; potatoes and wheat are grown in the hilly areas.
There's another one between North Dakota and Minnesota, which flows North into Canada.
But we call that Chinese Ketsup around my house!
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