China's Yangtze River Turns Red

redletterdave writes "The Yangtze River, the third longest river in the world traditionally known as the 'golden watercourse,' mysteriously blushed for the first time on Sept. 6. Residents in the surrounding area near the city of Chongqing, where the Yangtze connects to the Jialin River, literally stopped in their tracks when they noticed their once golden river had turned a shocking shade of red. Residents have carefully crept down to the riverbanks for the past few days to save some of the red, tomato juice-like river water in bottles. Early predictions from scientists say the red water was likely a result of pollution, but investigators are still investigating the unknown cause."

Comments

sounds familiar

[__aaltlg1547]

Soon Moh She will lead the workers out of their factories and part the Yellow Sea.

Re:sounds familiar

[K. S. Kyosuke]

But not before the evil Pharaoh will have been humbled by the other nine plagues of Communism: shortage of diapers in drug stores, ten years of waiting time for a new Volga car, dirty tram seats, the darkness-causing industrial air pollution, attentive secret police agents on every corner, badly fitting shapeless clothes made of rough fabric that itches on your bum, badly maintained roads threatening to destroy your Volga car's shock absorbers on every kilometer (if you have one (a Volga car, not a kilometer)), oranges only for Christmas in shops, and worst of all, Soviet ballet movies with outrageous picture quality every night on the telly.

Obvious propaganda is obvious.

[fragfoo]

Obvious propaganda from the chinese communist party.

Re:Obvious propaganda is obvious.

[icebike]

Oh right, commemorating the great events of September ???, lessee, when was that?

Huge earthquakes, near Yiliang County.
Followed by heavy rains.
Large landslides.
117 miles south of a major Yangtze tributary into which local rivers drain.

Far more likely an industrial spill or iron ore laden mudslide.

Re:Obvious propaganda is obvious.

[Russ1642]

Hopefully Mother Earth has already had The Talk with the river.

Re:Obvious propaganda is obvious.

[fm6]

I don't remember the parties having any colors when I was a kid, though according to WP, the Dems and Reps did indeed sometimes use Red and Blue respectively. And of course everywhere but here, the left is "Red" and the right is "Blue". I think this has to do with the left being fond of waving red flags (an old symbol for a fight to the death) and the right usually being associated with asserting traditional hierarchies, which originally meant rule by so-called Blue Bloods — people who had the right ancestors.

But the red flag became the symbol of the socialist movement, which has always been unpopular in the U.S. I think American liberals consciously avoided using red, so as to avoid assisting those who defined a commie as anybody to the left of Genghis Khan. So the standard color scheme never really caught on here. Meanwhile, the world socialist movement fell out of favor after the biggest Marxist state collapsed and the second-biggest basically switched over to intensive capitalism — pretty much destroying the whole red-versus-blue image. Since Americans aren't great at historical memory, they were now free to re-invent the color scheme.

It's true that the current Red-State/Blue-State thing started out on TV. (WP says it was first used in the 2000 presidential coverage). But I think the main credit for its spread goes to the right, which embraced an image that neatly illustrated their claim that liberals represent a group of people living in a few prosperous coastal states, and who completely ignore the needs of Americans in flyover states.

Note that redstate.com is an influential political blog, while bluestate.com belongs to an obscure lighting and design firm whose web site has been in parking mode since 2007.

Re:Obvious propaganda is obvious.

[dbIII]

If you judge Mao by his actions he was a dictator far to the right of Ghenghis Khan that just happened to use left wing excuses for his actions.

Apple has finally done it !!!!

[future assassin]

They've unleashed gods wrath on us with their patent wars....

Re:Uh-huh..

[Anonymous Coward]

Trying to figure out the scientific explanation behind this isn't nerdy enough?

Some photos obviously enhanced

[DaTrueDave]

I was looking at some of the photos linked in that article, and I noticed that some of them are pretty obviously photoshopped. I'm sure the river was red, but I'm not so sure it was such a dramatic shade of red. You can see where the editing was sloppy and bled over into the arm and thumb of the person holding the bottle, and the arm of the guy behind, as well as some sections that are probably the actual shade of red that the river turned.

Re:Some photos obviously enhanced

[Clsid]

We don't know but the guy does have a point, that picture was photoshopped.

Re:Some photos obviously enhanced

[TaoPhoenix]

I'm so upset that I didn't even bother to read more than a few sentences of the article given the topic we're having.
"Nobody is quite sure what caused the color change."

So in the rush to get there first with the reporting race, someone couldn't be bothered to give a college chem lab student lunch and an hour to get a chemical composition of the water? Oh, right, that would actually take journalism work.

Re:Some photos obviously enhanced

[Anonymous Coward]

The same already photoshopped picture is available from both China Foto Press and Barcroft Media, which are credited in the Daily Mail picture. Sloppy screening on the Daily Mail's behalf, but the image manipulation appears to originate closer to the source.

Re:Some photos obviously enhanced

[wonkey_monkey]

I'm willing to bet that anything that could change the river to a color like this would probably stain the skin a bit.

That doesn't explain why there is a patch of un-brightened water under the guy's forearm, the line of which exactly matches up with the patch of orange on his arm itself.

Re:Some photos obviously enhanced

[poity]

On the captions you see it's by China Photo Press/Barcroft Media, which means DailyMail bought them from 3rd party photo journalists, who obviously were looking for a quick sell and weren't concerned with some color enhancement. Here's a phone camera video taken yesterday http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNDQ3ODM2NDUy.html It's not as red as the photos, but still very red. The locals who are talking to the guy filming say it's the first time they've seen anything like this, so it's not a total fake either.

Re:Uh-huh..

[turkeyfeathers]

Blood from sacrifices at Foxconn factory?

Re:Red?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was thinking the same thing then clicked the link in the article and that was where the red pictures were, the page we are linked to has the before pictures.

It's pretty unmistakeably red if you can see red.

Ukraine

[roman_mir]

Here is a picture that I remember from way back - this is a red river in the city of Zaporizhia in Ukraine, this city has (or had) a number of factories, smelters, motor factories, I think most of them were just dumping the waste right into Dnepr (the main river in Ukraine) and then all that water flows into the Black sea.

That's nothing serious

[dkleinsc]

I'm from Cleveland. Call me when the Yangste is on fire.

Re:That's nothing serious

[TapeCutter]

How long will it take China to start taking their environment seriously?

China's environmental record is similar to the US in that it is full of contradictions. Look up the Loose (sic?) plateau in NW China, it's an area the size of France that 20yrs ago looked like an Afghan desert and today is one of the world's largest apple producing regions, goats are now fenced in, the hills now have trees and wild life, the land has stopped eroding away faster than anywhere else on earth, locals were given land to farm in exchange for caring for it in the prescribed manner, and the average income of the locals has quadrupled (after taking inflation into account). The entire thing cost $500M and was done with hand tools using local labor. However these were all secondary aims of the project, the primary aim of the project was to stop silt filling up the three gorges dam. ;)

Iron oxide, maybe a spill from an aluminium plant

[jopet]

Aluminium plants produce a huge quantity of "red mud" which is red from iron oxide. A spill could well color the whole river red.
See e.g. here where the mud spilled through a broken dam in Hungary: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2010/10/05/GA2010100502818.html

Re:Red?

[SuurMyy]

Here are the red pictures

Sounds like a red tide

[Grayhand]

There are chemicals that can cause it but the other option is all the fertilizer resulted in a red tide, a type of algae. For wildlife it's as bad or worse than a chemical spill. The blooms can come on suddenly and should fade once the food source gets used up.

And now for a musical interlude

[dkleinsc]

When Android was in China's land ... let my cell phones go!
Just trolled so hard they could not stand .. let my cell phones go!
Go down, Samsung, way down in China's land,
tell ol' Jintao to let my cell phones go!

(Nah, it just doesn't quite have the same ring to it)

People's Republic Rejoice!

[Suffering Bastard]

Only Glorious Red Rivers for Glorious Red Chinese Communist Republic! Soon all waters and newborn babies everywhere will shine triumphantly with Glorious Red Hue!

Perfectly reasonable

[fredgiblet]

I blame Obama. Who's with me?

Listen

[Anonymous Coward]

Just let the Jews go. It only gets worse from here.

- Pharaoh

Re:Listen

[jbeaupre]

If it gets to where all the first born children die, there won't be many people left to stop them from leaving in this one-child-only country.

Re:Red?

[icebike]

Use this link:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2199800/The-river-DID-run-red-Residents-Chinese-city-left-baffled-Yangtze-turns-scarlet.html#ixzz25u00nD4M

No idea why the story insisted on linking to a secondary source.

Dumping

[Animats]

Some of the religious nuts will probably claim this is bibilical, but more likely, somebody dumped some industrial waste.

Something like that happened in San Jose, CA about twenty years ago. Someone dumped several big industrial plating baths into the sewers all at once. This killed most of the bacteria that digest waste in the sewerage treatment plant. So for about three days, raw sewerage was dumped into the San Francisco Bay. Big mess, especially since there isn't much water flow in the south end of San Francisco Bay to dilute that stuff. It could be both seen and smelled. EPA fined San Jose millions for that. San Jose found and fined the plating company.

Re:Red?

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite obviously photoshopped. Look at the photo with the two men, one holding a bottle. Now look along the left side of the bottle. Look at the men's left arms. Screaming fake. If you inspect some of the other pictures closely, you will also find other areas where color manipulation is evident.

Re:Red?

[Anonymous Coward]

AC Parent is a liar

No, he's not.

Take a good look at the area under the bottle in this image. Some of the water remains brown, yet parts of the two men's arms are the exact same color as the water.

Image is poorly Photoshopped - restored version

[wonkey_monkey]

Based on a quick study of the poorly Photoshopped image (you can clearly see the mask lines, and the bits they forgot to alter) it looks like someone simply doubled the saturation on the water.

I've made an attempt to restore the image to something approaching reality.

Re:You know when you're in a flat with three girls

[codepigeon]

I have mod points, where is the option +1 Fucking gross comment.

Re:Red?

[hey!]

It looks to me like they tweaked the saturation. I was wondering about that because I saw the same pictures elsewhere and the color is not nearly so dramatic -- at least if you're not conditioned to having the river look one way or the other.

My wife is a physical oceanographer and her first reaction when she heard about this is that it was some kind of phytoplankton bloom. Some pictures I've seen make it look like some kind of dye, which is more plausible than you might think.

When my brother was a civil engineering co-op student he caused a local news sensation . He'd been given the job of doing a dye study looking for illegal sewer connections. What happens is that developers assume the first pipe they come to is the right one to hook the sanitary sewer lines up to. He only needed half a teaspoon of dye powder, but the smallest quantity he could order was a two gallon pail. So he flushed the whole pail down the toilet, and hit the jackpot, dyeing the whole harbor of Salem Mass fluorescent green.