I came across a NewScientist video on the Dead Water Effect in an eMail newsletter on Friday.
It caught my eye not because it was NewScientist (I used to read every issue in the library at CJC during my JC years) but because of the recent completion of the Marina Barrage.
Where fresh and sea waters meet, the place becomes more interesting. You have creatures living there that thrive in both environments. And some that you won't see anywhere else (mud skippers come to mind). Over time, the sea water in the basin is going to be displaced by the fresh water brought in by the Kallang and Singapore rivers. Given the size of it, that'll be a long time. Fresh water will tend to "float" on top of the denser sea water, and with the barrage shut most of the time, there won't be tides to mix the fresh and sea waters around.
In the final episode of David Attenborough's excellent "Planet Earth" series, he has a segment where the Ganges River meets the sea - the creatures that live there, and how the water has changed from when it first originated high up in the himalayas. And in Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything", Bryson has a section that talks about how layers of water, less dense warm layers and more dense cold layers, interact to give rise to complex systems that pull and push sections of water around the oceans. These water flows are influenced by, and influence in turn wind currents and storm systems, and the delivery of rain, our source of freshwater, to our lands.
I'm thinking of where that interface where different human communities, with their distinct ideas and practices mingle and interact. How interesting hybrids arise, how there is sometimes dilution, sometimes strengthening. But always creating something new, and feeding into a system of energy flows that is too big and complex for us to understand, and that ultimately creates the future of humanity.
It caught my eye not because it was NewScientist (I used to read every issue in the library at CJC during my JC years) but because of the recent completion of the Marina Barrage.
Where fresh and sea waters meet, the place becomes more interesting. You have creatures living there that thrive in both environments. And some that you won't see anywhere else (mud skippers come to mind). Over time, the sea water in the basin is going to be displaced by the fresh water brought in by the Kallang and Singapore rivers. Given the size of it, that'll be a long time. Fresh water will tend to "float" on top of the denser sea water, and with the barrage shut most of the time, there won't be tides to mix the fresh and sea waters around.
In the final episode of David Attenborough's excellent "Planet Earth" series, he has a segment where the Ganges River meets the sea - the creatures that live there, and how the water has changed from when it first originated high up in the himalayas. And in Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything", Bryson has a section that talks about how layers of water, less dense warm layers and more dense cold layers, interact to give rise to complex systems that pull and push sections of water around the oceans. These water flows are influenced by, and influence in turn wind currents and storm systems, and the delivery of rain, our source of freshwater, to our lands.
No comments:
Post a Comment