For the First Time On Record, Human-Caused Climate Change Has Rerouted an Entire River (washingtonpost.com)

A team of scientists on Monday documented what they're describing as the first case of large-scale river reorganization as a result of human-caused climate change (Editor's note: could be paywalled; alternative source). From a report: They found that in mid-2016, the retreat of a very large glacier in Canada's Yukon territory led to the rerouting of its vast stream of meltwater from one river system to another -- cutting down flow to the Yukon's largest lake, and channeling freshwater to the Pacific Ocean south of Alaska, rather than to the Bering Sea. The researchers dubbed the reorganization an act of "rapid river piracy," saying that such events had often occurred in the Earth's geologic past, but never before, to their knowledge, as a sudden present-day event. They also called it "geologically instantaneous." "The river wasn't what we had seen a few years ago. It was a faded version of its former self," lead study author Daniel Shugar of the University of Washington at Tacoma said of the Slims River, which lost much of its flow because of the glacial change. "It was barely flowing at all. Literally, every day, we could see the water level dropping, we could see sandbars popping out in the river."

Comments

Re:Chain of conclusions

[Gravis Zero]

Also I wonder how on-clock we believe these cycles have been coming in the past. Have they all been well within that 15% estimated drift of today? 15% doesn't sound like much for a system so incredibly complex. I may be wrong.

Sounds like you don't really know just how fucked thing have become. Using ice core samples, they were able to calculate how much atmospheric CO2 there was in the past. Here's a graph of it including our really fucked present.