HOME|CHICAGOAN |London Daily News | theLONDONpost|TORONTO TIMES  |The New York Telegraph |The Indian|SYDNEY WORLD|Post of Melbourne | NATION NOW | SOWETODAY

The CHICAGOAN Wednesday 05/26/10

THE NEW COLD WAR- WILL HUDSON BAY INVADE?

A  Federal report, which the government will not confirm exists and some scientists say is being suppressed, is said to suggest that the US could face severe flooding - but rather than rising sea levels threatening coastal areas it is the Midwest that could be facing a potentially catastrophic climate disaster. The report discusses two scenarios. Firstly the upper Midwest and the headwaters of the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers experience a sudden shift to very mild winters with a dramatic increase in winter precipitation, negligible winter snowfall, and a significant increase in summer rainfall. The situation would make the cities along both rivers and their tributaries in constant danger of flood.

However it is a hitherto unimagined nightmare scenario that is most alarming. Hudson Bay and James Bay overflow, sending water surging south. Both are really inland seas rather than anything as modest as a bay. Hudson Bay has limited access to the Atlantic so the melting of glaciers on Baffin Island and elsewhere would flow into the Bay unimpeded. Additionally Hudson Bay is shallow so the impact of a sudden rise in water levels would be damaging and dangerous. As the water breached the shoreline of Hudson Bay it would encounter increasing elevation, and its progress would, or at least should, be halted.

Although often thought of as a watercourse of the Arctic, Hudson Bay  stretches deep into Ontario, forming James Bay which has a southernmost point only about 500 miles (800KM) north of Toronto.
Hudson Bay is the natural draining basin for much of central Canada and parts of the northern United States. (Essentially a drainage basin is the area in which rivers flow downhill from their source to an outlet.)

The southern shores of Hudson Bay are a marshy landscape stretching for hundreds of miles inland. There are only a few coastal villages around the lake, frozen in winter and overrun with mosquitoes in summer, and not one with any kind of scientific monitoring. Unobserved and uninhabited, this land is slowly being reclaimed by the Bay anyway, and 350m people are oblivious to it.

It seems obvious now but with so much ice melting and possibly an area in excess of one million square miles of it still to come why didn’t anyone consider Hudson Bay as a threat? Many meteorologists say they have been warning about the possibility but a lack of interest has aggravated the ignorance of the problem.

A few scientists and geologists think large segments of crashing ice will form tsunamis.  Some of those think there will be a long series of small tsunamis which, like a series of earth tremors, will not do major damage but will erode the southern shores gradually but manageably. However a splinter group thinks there could be a truly spectacular event. They say it is possible a massive wave will hurl itself across the shallow waters and then be funnelled into James Bay where it will crash on the shore with ferocious power. Luckily even they think there is only a slight chance of such an occurrence.

Whatever happens in the vicinity of Hudson Bay we should expect the unexpected. Water and rainfall have shaped landscapes through time, forming canyons and ravines. The relatively high elevations of the Upper Midwest will curtail the damage of an expanding Hudson Bay, though there is still considerable debate about hidden damage.

Almost everyone agrees that the damage or flooding will be on the lower elevations of the Canadian prairies. A scientist splinter group thinks we should still be prepared for nature’s unpredictability.

In their scenarios the sheer force of water forces Hudson Bay to smash its way through the landscape and force rivers flowing towards the bay to either flood and form lakes or reroute themselves. Now if a river was near a dip in elevation there is a remote possibility that it could switchback, and if all conditions were ideal the river begins to flow south. For this to happen a river would need to find a succession of slopes leading into ever lower valleys, and that is very unlikely. But if did happen the momentum of water could alter landscapes, even removing natural obstacles. Then at least a few of rivers that flow naturally downhill to Hudson Bay could be forced to switchback at points where the topography permitted. In other words water surging downhill to the Bay could be forced in the opposite direction through lower elevations nearby. If the land was level or dipped then the water would go in the direction it came from, and that could be a big problem.
The other doomsday scenario is potentially more frightening, because it is invisible. The sudden surge of water flows into caves and supplements underground rivers which become raging torrents, with immense waterfalls below the surface, which allow the entire overflow from the bay to reach a lower elevation vey quickly. Eventually the pressure forces the rivers to surface and then the chaos could occur.

“We are very much in the ‘land of ifs’ but if the water flowed unabated and appeared say in the Midwest then it would be impossible to control,” says Lew Wilson, a geogist and at the university of Kansas. “It sounds incredible, all the melting ice could find an outlet in the American Heartland! It’s only a theory at this stage, but you can’t second guess nature, so I wouldn’t rule it out.”

Even if the water was contained by a subterranean watercourse, the changes to the water table could be immense and the implications uncertain.

It is known that a federal emergency plan has branches of Government being evacuated to the major cities of the Rockies with Denver functioning as the nation’s capital in the event of apocalyptic flooding.

Details of the Federal report have led to a flurry of rumors that the UN has also complied a dossier that has been voluntarily suppressed because of its alarmist nature. On conditions of anonymity one UN official said the report did consider the profound environmental but it concentrated more on social breakdown.  “Although the USA is a very large society which often seems disjoined its ability to cohere in crises is probably the greatest in the Western world. However the environmental threat it faces is unsurpassed in the developed world and this will almost certainly lead to a chaotic unravelling as its position as sole superpower. There could be many millions of refugees in a short time. The US economy will face collapse. Due to the prevalence of guns in American society the risk is very high that the country could descend into civil war very quickly.”

It is widely believed that the report has been shelved because its social findings would infuriate Washington even more than the the ecological predictions.