Tag: rice

A Few Observations About Ice and Glaciers

ice-glacier-climate-change
Fox Glacier image by Cath Singleton

One Thursday night while watching rugby league, I went to the freezer, extracted some ice cubes and wrapped them in a tea towel. The aim was to encase my throbbing thumb in an icy blanket of numbness.

It’s just arthritis, the doctor said, examining the swelling of the thumb joint. Gardening, playing guitar and driving tends to bring on the pain and swelling. Importantly, the doctor did not recommend ice, instead suggesting anti-inflammatories (tablets or gel).

For athletes the world over, ice has for decades been part of the treatment for swelling and pain brought on by sporting injuries. It was quite a revelation, then, to discover that ice no longer has the imprimatur it once had for treatment of bruises and sprains. It seems that doctors and physiotherapists now believe that moving the injured body part helps more with recovery than numbing it with ice.

To digress for a moment, a Deloitte survey of media and entertainment habits cited here a few weeks back found that 91% of survey participants multi-task while watching TV. I scoffed at the time, then started thinking about the things I was doing while ‘watching’ footie.

The ritual of icing my thumb expanded into googling (on my phone) all manner of references to ice (frozen water) as a future FOMM took shape. I may have toyed with my crossword book (seven down: a permanent mass of ice caught in a mountain pass).

I may also have left-handedly replied to two texts and three emails while watching the Brisbane Broncos make multiple mistakes, run sideways, miss tackles and wonder why they got beaten.

When it comes to ice and rugby league, you often footie players sitting forlornly on the bench with bags of ice strapped to their shoulders, knees, thighs or ankles. The most common rugby league injury is what is euphemistically known as a ‘cork’ which is what we kids used to call an ‘Uncle Charlie’, that is, when the schoolyard bully knees you in the thigh muscle. The result is extreme pain, as a deep-seated bruise takes shape within the traumatised tissue.

You will notice I have reclaimed the original definition of ice (the solid form of water). It takes this form when subjected to temperatures of zero and below. In contemporary culture, ice is most frequently used to serve chilled drinks and to create temporary fridges at large family gatherings.

The times when ice (frozen water) most often makes it into the news is when storms drop hailstones as big as golf balls, tennis balls, cricket balls or even bowling balls. It’s no fun being caught out in a hailstorm and can even be dangerous. There have been reports of people dying, going back to France in 1360, during the Hundred Years war, when 1,000 English soldiers were killed in a freak hailstorm. The deadliest of the last century was when 246 people died in Moradabad, India, in 1988.

Hailstorms bring out the worst in headline writers, as they struggle to find four or five letter words that create panic pictures (‘wreak havoc’ is a favourite) and so is ‘freak’, as in ‘a very unusual and unexpected event or situation’.

Hailstorms also play freakish havoc with the balance sheets of general insurers. The Insurance Council of Australia reveals its biggest payout in recent times was the $1.7 billion in losses a 1999 hailstorm caused to Sydney’s city’s east. Then there was the $31 million in losses caused by Sydney’s Anzac Day hailstorm of 2015. Not to mention the trauma and loss of production suffered by crop farmers and fruit-growers and the long queues of car owners waiting for their turn in the panel shop.

You may have already gathered I might steer this conversation from freak hailstorms to what climate change means for the world’s glaciers and arctic ice sheets.   

As Sarah Gibbons wrote in National Geographic this week: “Like an ice cube on a hot summer’s day, many of Earth’s glaciers are shrinking.”

The article is based on new data from researchers at the University of Zurich. They found that melting mountain glaciers contribute roughly a third of measured sea-level rise. This is about the same sea level rise as the Greenland ice sheet and more than the contribution of the Antarctic. Their research also highlighted that many of the world’s glaciers may disappear in the next century. Sea levels rose 27mm between 1961 and 2016, roughly half a millimetre a year. NASA now says sea levels are rising at the rate of 3mm a year, with melting glaciers contributing about a third of that volume.

Glacial movement is caused by variations in temperature with snow accumulating or melting, the evidence seen at the glacier terminus. The sheer weight of the glacier causes it to move slowly downhill, whether or not the glacier is advancing or retreating.

New Zealand’s Fox Glacier advanced between 1995 and 2009 at the rate of a metre per week. Since 2009, the glacier has begun retreating again, as it did in the decades prior to 1995.

Fox and neighbouring Franz Josef are not typical glaciers, though. They retreat or advance 10 times faster than glaciers located in other countries. This is partially to do with the excessive precipitation on New Zealand’s west coast, but also the extremely large neve* above the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers.

(*that’s glacier-speak for snow accumulated above a glacier).

The New Zealand situation seems anomalous, however, as US scientists found that 2017 was the 38th year in a row of mass loss of mountain glaciers worldwide. According to the State of the Climate in 2017, the cumulative mass balance loss from 1980 to 2016 was 19.9m, the equivalent of cutting a 22m-thick slice off the top of the average glacier.

My original premise of using ice to soothe pain arose again when friends came over to watch A Star is Born. You know that scene where Bradley Cooper’s character Jackson Maine drags Lady Gaga’s character Ally into a suburban all-night supermarket? This is not long after Ally has biffed an off-duty cop in the face and apparently damaged her hand.

“Better get something on that, before the swelling starts,” Maine says.

So he scurries around the supermarket, putting together a makeshift icepack to soothe Ally’s bruised knuckles. (I read this as a bit of rock star foreplay, giving Jackson an excuse to stroke Ally’s hand).

Gabe Mirkin, author of “The Sports Medicine Book,” where the RICE (rest-ice-compression-elevation), acronym first appeared in 1978, now says the rest and ice part of the cure is no longer recommended. He changed his mind after reviewing the latest research, which includes a study published in 2014 by the European Society of Sports Traumatology, Knee Surgery & Arthroscopy. The report found that icing injured tissue shuts off the blood supply that brings in healing cells. “Ice doesn’t increase healing — it delays it,” Mirkin says, and the studies back him up

It would seem the rugby league fraternity did not get this memo.

Perhaps they should take the tip from commentator Gus Gould, who, despite a seven-year footie career marred by injuries, appears to advocate stoicism.

“Aw that’s nothing,” says Gus. “It’s just a cork – he can run that off.”

#shutupgus

Moving North Queensland water to Murray-Darling

North-Queensland-Water-Murray-Darling
Barron Falls demonstrates North Queensland water excesses. Photo by Coral Sea Baz

Australia’s mismanagement of water is coming home to roost now, with the highly visible deluge in North Queensland in sharp contrast to the water-starved Murray-Darling Basin.

Far North Queensland residents and emergency workers are still struggling to cope with the worst floods in living memory. Tully, arguably the wettest place in Australia, had 955mm over 27 days since New Year’s Day, about a quarter of its annual rain. Townsville broke all records with 1,200mm falling in just nine days, which accounted for unprecedented flooding and the decision to open the floodgates of Ross River Dam.

Residents of the seaside Townsville suburb of Balgal Beach, seemingly impervious to flooding, found out otherwise.

The Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) recorded North Queensland rainfall totals in January and the first week in February ranging from 1,036mm (Cairns) to 1,325mm (Townsville) The highest weekly total in January was 766mm at Whyanbeel Valley. Crikey, that’s a few millimetres more than the annual rainfall for Australia’s second-largest inland city, Toowoomba.

Last time we were in that fair city (September), the only green grass around was in the city’s three parks, watered by Council to celebrate the Carnival of Flowers. That was the month parts of the Western Downs were added to the 53% of Queensland’s drought-declared local government areas.

Meanwhile in Southern states, BoM made the telling observation that annual rainfall in 2018 was the seventh-lowest on record (since 1900) for the Murray-Darling Basin.  Rainfall was low over the south-eastern quarter of the mainland in 2018, with much of the region experiencing totals in the lowest 10% of records.

This is brought into sharper focus when we are told that parts of Australia’s mainland from around Newcastle in NSW to Euroa in Victoria are now included on the United Nations’ list of the Top Ten Global Water Hotspots (see further reading).

Many readers will be familiar with the crisis facing the Murray-Darling system: blue-green algae, millions of dead fish, the Darling River drying up; water being diverted for irrigation to grow water-intensive crops like cotton and rice. The recently published report by the South Australian Royal Commission found that the 2012 Murray-Darling Basin Plan must be strengthened if there is to be any chance of saving the river system. Professor Jamie Pittock of the Australian National University writes that the Commission found systemic failures of the Basin Plan, adopted in 2012 to address over-allocation of water to irrigated farming. The Commission’s 111 findings and 44 recommendations accuse federal agencies of maladministration and challenge key policies that were pursued in implementing the plan.

Amid revelations of water theft, the awful legacy of dead fish in the oxygen-deprived Darling River and outback towns running out of water, plenty of people are having their say.

This week, South Australian independent Senator Rex Patrick dared to confront the cotton industry, demanding that growers justify the use of water and the right to grow that export crop. (The same could be said of rice, Ed.)

This is a long-running saga. In 2011 an article published by the Permaculture Research Institute explored a report that revealed Australia as the world’s largest net exporter of ‘virtual’ water (exported virtual water is defined as water consumed to create crops, livestock and industrial products for export). The report blamed the agricultural sector for the vast majority of the total volume of water exported from Australia in this way (72,000 gigalitres of virtual water exported overseas every year).

I’m not a scientist, hydrologist or environmental engineer, yet the answer seems desperately obvious. We need to channel and export North Queensland water to the arid south-eastern states and inland Queensland, NSW and South Australia.

One only has to think for five minutes about the Snowy Mountains hydro-electricity/irrigation scheme to see we are more than capable of funding, building and maintaining large and ambitious infrastructure projects.

Sydney food technology engineer Terry Bowring told The Courier-Mail in 2010 about his $9 billion plan to move water from the Burdekin and other north Queensland rivers to arid parts of inland NSW, Victoria and South Australia. Mr Bowring’s plan involved channelling about 4,000 gigalitres of water a year. The water would be transported 1,800kms by canals, with 60% of the water sold to irrigators. The rest would go to cities such as Toowoomba and Brisbane for domestic use.

Mr Bowring told FOMM yesterday the plan was similar to the Bradfield scheme proposed in 1938. Until Mr Bowring’s plan surfaced (he’d been working on it for years), no-one had taken Dr John Bradfield’s scheme forward to include costings.

Mr Bowring said the costings were based on experiences from the US, where he worked for some five years. The system would take six years to build but only four or five years to recover costs.

As with the Bradfield scheme, critics said the Bowring plan was uneconomic and impractical. The telling thing is that it would only take about 13% of the water that flows from the Burdekin to the ocean. Typically, more water flows to sea from the Burdekin than the Murray-Darling Basin and all city dams combined.

Mr Bowring, who is in his 80s, said he has no intention of pursuing the plan, but will make his research available for future use.

The other side of this argument was provided by the (then) Federal Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities.

The 28-page report generally scotches the idea, which is often raised when there are weather extremes in the north or the south.

“Moving water long distances is costly, energy intensive, and can have significant environmental, social and cultural impacts,” (item 1 under Key Facts).

“Using water that is locally available is generally more cost effective than transporting water long distances. Current studies show that local options, such as water conservation, desalination and recycling, cost around $1–2 per thousand litres; a supply from 1500 kilometres (km) away would cost around $5–6 per thousand litres.”

However the immediate problem is to make the Murray-Darling system a Federal and State priority, no matter the financial or political cost. It is shocking to consider that outback towns like Walgett, Wilcannia and Bourke have either run out of drinking water or are under extreme water stress. These events seem to have flown beneath the media radar that picked up on the early 2018 water crisis in Cape Town (South Africa).

The real danger is the risk to the fragile ecosystem of a river system that spans 77,000 kilometres of rivers over one million square kilometres across four States and the ACT. Environmental challenges include excessive water being diverted for agricultural, the blue-green algae that killed millions of fish, and salinity (in 2016-17, 1.84 million tonnes of salt was flushed out to sea through the Murray mouth).

As the Australian Conservation Foundation summed up, in an advertisement posted on social media:

“The heart-breaking death of these fish is no natural disaster. Powerful corporate interests and their cashed up lobbyists are bleeding our rivers dry. For too long, state and federal governments have let them get away with it.”

Further reading: https://www.fabians.org.au/australia_s_water_crisis (a (long), technical article by Watermark Australia’s Dr Wayne Chamley).

FOMM backpages: