Grand Canyon Flooded
The Grand Canyon has been flooded recently for the third time since 1996. Der Spiegel has a series of articles on the preparation, the process of the flooding, and the aftermath. Some environmentalists claim that the interval between man-made floods is too big to simulate the flooding intervals that occurred naturally, before the Colorado River was dammed (see also this previous blog post on planetwater). Besides bringing water to land on higher elevation, the natural floods lead to a completely different sediment scheme in the Colorado River. The major reservoirs retain a big part of the naturally occurring sediment load.
As a side-note to the topic “Grand Canyon”: Carl Zimmer recently had an article on weird commenting on how creationists try to prove that Noah’s Arc was very much related to the Grand Canyon, only a couple of 1000 years ago…