| Water Colors: 10 Unnaturally Dyed Polluted Rivers | |
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White River
China’s Yellow River (or Huang He, in Chinese) is one of the world’s great rivers and the second-longest in all of China. Even the largest, widest and deepest rivers can fall prey to pollution on a massive scale, unfortunately, and such was the case on Friday, Dec 22nd of 2006 when the Yellow River turned ivory white around the city of Lanzhou. Though milky white residue coated rocks along the shoreline and a sour odor emanated from the water itself, no explanation was ever found (or released).
Rivers have other ways of turning white, though the culprit is still pollution. Nature-lovers were rather “irked” in April of 2009 when a 150-ft stretch of the River Irk was subsumed in bright white foam up to 10 feet thick. A detergent factory upstream denied responsibility for the situation, stating the cause “remains a mystery.” Another infamous white foamy river winds its way through southeastern Brazil. The Tietê River fills with foam spawned by phosphate-laden domestic runoff in the dry season when water levels and the river’s flow rate are at their lowest. Pink River
Walk through any crowded city anywhere in the world and you’ll see pink: this pleasing shade of pale red is the predominant hue for girl’s and women’s clothing. What’s not so pleasing (and less well-known) is that cute clothing gets its tint from harsh chemical dyes that are expensive to filter from waste water at textile plants. Check the label on your pink blouse – you can be fairly sure that where it’s made, a pink river runs through it.
Here in the western world, we dye our rivers pink on purpose which somehow doesn’t really seem right. We can’t really argue about the temporary dyeing of Philadelphia’s famous Love Fountain, though, as it was done to raise awareness about breast cancer. One hopes the water was disposed of properly, or better yet recycled. Red River
When rivers run red it’s never a good ting, no matter how red they get or how they get red. Take the Jian River, which runs through Luoyang City in China’s Henan Province and provides drinking water for its residents… who are definitely NOT vampires.
Local government authorities and environmental activists worked together (or at least, in parallel) to find the source of the non-NCAA-approved crimson tide: two dye houses situated upstream that were both quickly ordered closed. You might say they were caught red-handed. Orange River
Save the Wales? Not to mention the ducks for whom “a l’orange” became a recipe for disaster long before the dinner table beckoned. The tangerine tributaries above were tinted by either runoff from aflooded iron mine or “unknown causes”, neither of which sounds appetizing.
Then there’s the brilliant vermilion river above, tainted by toxic tailings from a nearby nickel mine in Canada. The photograph, taken by Edward Burtynsky in 1996, depicts an eerie and forbidding landscape. Notice any trees, shrubs, a single blade of grass anywhere near its blackened shores? If this is why people are so down on Nickelback, well, I can’t say I blame them. Yellow River
China’s Yellow River was named for the pale silt it carries, though in today’s industrialized China it may be tinted yellow or any other color due to pollution and “accidental” waste water releases. The above images show //english.cri.cn/3100/2008/01/08/ This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it " target="_blank" style="border-style: initial; border-color: initial; outline-width: 0px; outline-style: initial; font-weight: bold; font-style: inherit; font-size: 13px; font-family: Arial, helvetica, sans-serif; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); ">poisonous yellow bubbles floating on the river due to an oil spill. Those ducks had better not duck…
We mentioned the Yellow River was located in China… well it is, but it also was: in New Hampshire and central Massachusetts, going incognito under the name “Nashua River”. Toxic runoff from textile, shoe and paper mills in the 1950s and 1960s regularly turned the Nashua a variety of startling shades but mainly through the tireless efforts of environmental activist Marion Stoddart, the Nashua has regained much of its original vitality – not to mention a more complementary hue.
Dyeing rivers green has become an American pastime, it seems, especially in Chicago on the Saturday before St. Patrick’s Day. Since 1962 the Chicago River, which is hardly crystal-clear at the best of times, turns green – not with envy, but with environmentally-friendly dye.
Enjoying those water chestnuts in your order of Cantonese Chow Mein? Hopefully they weren’t picked by the woman above, mired in a polluted river in eastern China. Explosive blooms of green algae often occur in waterways infused with organic sewage and agricultural runoff. Sometimes ‘going green” isn’t such a good thing. Blue River
Many rivers look blue naturally but the vivid, sky-blue and turquoise rivers depicted here are the result of various forms of toxic water pollution. Caused mainly by waste water drainage from textile factoriesand paper mills, blue rivers are a sign of extreme environmental degradation.
Those stone-washed jeans you wear to look natural? They’re probably made to look that way in Mexico and China where unregulated factories pump indigo waste water into local streams and rivers. Traditional fisheries have been wiped out, drinking water supplies have been compromised and irrigation water contaminated with toxic chemicals “nourishes” food crops… but hey, how’re those jeans fitting? Purple River
Industrial waste, clothing dyes, ruptured agricultural waste lagoons… all of these and more can turn a river purple – and kill it in the process. If there’s one good thing about rivers changing colors, it’s that the radical visual shift can act as an alarm indicating something is seriously wrong.
Though their colors may be similar, rivers turned purple by pollution and those artificially tinted with dye to support the local football team are vastly different: Fort Worthians can celebrate the TCU Horned Frogs without having to dip into the river for their drinking and washing water. Black River
Once a river’s gone black, it can rarely go back to its original, clear, life-giving ways. Such is the case in Lago Agrio, located in the Ecuadorian Amazon forest where oil reserves were discovered in the 1960s and exploited by multinational oil companies with little regard for environmental practices. Though the government of Ecuador bears its share of responsibility for the resulting eco-disaster, people o the ground are much more likely to resent foreign big business interests who took the money and ran, so to speak, leaving an awful mess behind.
Across the globe the rivers also run black but the cause isn’t oil exploration, it’s industry that runs ON oil. These blighted rivers in China are closer to open sewers than natural waterways but their toxic load ends up in the same place: a bigger river. One can extrapolate into a future where those bigger rivers are themselves blackened; their sluggish flow dumping poisons into the ocean… which HAS no outlet. Rainbow River
It only seems fitting to end this review of a rainbow of rivers with a river of rainbows, though the latter is hardly a thing of beauty. Oil and water don’t mix, after all, and the shimmering iridescence above only camouflages unseen toxins below.
Another sort of rainbow is formed by flotsam and jetsam: the technicolor trail of trash that in some cases can choke a river to within an inch of its life. Take Indonesia’s Citarum River, if you can stand doing so without holding your nose. This workhorse of a river not only provides millions of people in Jakarta with drinking water, it also takes away their trash and sewage. More than 500 factories line the banks of the 200-mile long Citarum – you do the math. As sad as it seems, the Citarum is a trend-setter of sorts: it shows, graphically, what happens to rivers that are used and abused. Here you’ll find all the colors of the rainbow… but no pot of gold. Source: ecoist
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