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Comment by amvalo | Hacker News Reader

Huh? Big bend is nowhere near sea level..

Rising temperatures melting glacial/mountain ice more dramatically contributing to river water carry? I'm not saying that's specifically the case, just throwing out a possible hypothesis. Plenty of others exist (bad rainy season, tributary re-routing due to industry, removal of forested areas that would have previously soaked up water, etc).

Could be a global warming thing, could be a seasonal thing, could be anything really.

As a general rule, higher temperatures lead to atrophied snowmelt rivers because there's not as much accumulation. That's one of the contributing factors for water problems in a lot of Western (U.S.) areas.

Good point, but OP didn't mention if this was an isolated incident (the hot summer that burns off more cap snow which will never get replenished) or a sustained thing (this used to be a 4 foot stream, but for the last 5 years it's been 100 feet wide instead). Who knows what's actually going on in this story.

I'm not saying it's anything one way or the other since this is a hyper-empirical piece of data to be working off of. Based on context I'm assuming OP meant to imply that this is a sign of rising water levels, but I was just posting some alternate theories.

Yes, hyper-empirical is exactly right. I totally don't know what caused the bigger creek in Big Bend or how that relates to the larger climate. I was hoping Hacker News would chime in with exactly this kind of analysis.

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