Why Alaska Rivers Are Turning an Eerie Orange | Hacker News Reader

Why Alaska Rivers Are Turning an Eerie Orange

atlasobscura.com

84 pointsrbanffy38 comments

From the article, the Cause:

    The reason for the change in color was as alarming as its hue: The waters are rusting. As permafrost melts, long-stored acids and metals—including iron—are released into rivers, where they interact with oxygen, turning the water from clear blue to a milky orange, according to new research in the journal Communications: Earth and Environment.

The impact:

    That cost goes deeper than the rivers’ orange, turbid surface. The contaminated waters aren’t healthy for fish and the aquatic insects they eat, which threatens fisheries that local communities and wildlife rely on.

So we are seeing more and more of the outcomes of the climate catastrophe. I don't know what it will take for regulators to make the climate change impact their primary priority. At what point will the frog know that the water is hot enough.

> I don't know what it will take for regulators to make the climate change impact their primary priority. At what point will the frog know that the water is hot enough.

We vote parties and persons that have other priorities.

Reminds me of the Queen River in Tasmania, which is unable to support life (runoff from old mines which have turned it orange):

Video of Beau Miles trying to raft down the river: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFFSFxjg-TY

Just wanted to plug Beau Miles further, his videos are definitely worth a try! My favorite that I remember is the “human bean” one. I wish he would open a patreon or something so I could give him my money.

He does have a Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/beaumiles

And agreed, he puts out some superb videos.

Oh nice! Thanks for mentioning this, I’ve been wanting to subscribe for a good while now, not sure how I missed when he started one

> I wish he would open a patreon or something

Hah, literally the video he put out yesterday is him paragliding with the Patreon CEO.

The colors in the rivers are indications of sulfide mineral deposits that previously didn't have water flowing through them. The kinds of deposits where many of our metals come from.

arsenic does that too

I have some cool photographs of this region from the air when my uncle took me up to Prudhoe in the 170. One of snaking crystal blue rivers is my desktop background.

I assumed it was iron run off, this happens in Maine too, lots of iron in both places.

We have iron in our water in Maryland too

Beautiful state!

"An unforseen consequence" they say....but idk, having been to Vietnam where orange rivers can be normal, because of iron deposits in the soil, I felt like I knew the answer before clicking the article, and I'm just a schmo that knows almost nothing, not a climate scientist. I feel like this could have been fairly easily figured by someone who spends thier life thinking about such things.

Indeed. But, does it present a problem (or a solution/opportunity?) You know who might be good at answering these questions? Programmers who are sick of sitting on their butts.

I pray to the clickbait gods that it is something more interesting than rust, but, alas, our punishment is eternal and the reason is just what you thought it was.

I don't think the point is that it's rust, but what's causing the rust to form...

Runoff from mining? Activist groups I'm sympathetic to have been screaming for years about certain types of mining specifically open pit mining obliterating watersheds. At a guess I would say either new mining interests are being developed around the relevant rivers in Alaska or old mining interests are being improperly decommissioned. Either way id bet my guess is right or close to right.

Why is there rust in a river? Why now? Is it bad? What can be done?

Would “Why there is rust in Alaska’s rivers” be more acceptable to you?

This is more a commentary on how bad things have gotten, but I’d say this is like a 3/10 on the Clickbait’o’meter.

At leas the rivers don’t run Java anymore.

The photos make it look similar to other instances of mining runoff. How do they rule out runoff from current or past activities and attribute it so confidently to permafrost melting?

From the linked research: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01446-z

"Nearly all orange streams occur in remote areas, tens to hundreds of kilometers from land-use impacts such as mining or roads... Importantly, while Alaska has an extensive mining history, our observations of orange streams are not downstream of any mines and are mostly within protected lands"

Just like clockwork!

Why Are Alaska's Rivers Turning Orange? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38757610

Alaska’s Arctic Waterways Are Turning a Foreboding Orange https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34209889

Alaska's rusting waters: Pristine rivers and streams turning orange https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40432495

Alaska’s Arctic Waterways Are Turning a Foreboding Orange https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268143

Why are Alaska's rivers turning orange? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39123276 (5 months ago)

Alaska's Pristine Waterways Are Turning Orange https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40488187 (37 days ago)

Alaska Rivers Are Turning an Eerie Orange https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40829465 (4 days ago)

HN dupery kicks in when the posts have some conversation attached and these mostly don't.

Why inject "eerie" into it? I don't find orange eerie, no matter how hard I try.

You don't find rivers abruptly turning orange to be eerie?

I find it to be problematic because it's obviously a man mad catastrophe with a very logic explanaiton, but not "eerie".

I'd prefer to say: "Humans fucked up, we caused the climate to rise and fucked a bunch of rivers in Alaska over because we're greedy, stupid assholes."

TL;DR Just tell it like it is.

Except it isn’t that, necessarily, and all the things you are saying could just as easily be hyperbolic editorializing. Eerie is the exceptionally mellow thing to say.

For instance, they noted it had been happening since at least ‘08 in the area - but didn’t note that it had not been happening since before then. Which I suspect means they only had aerial footage since ‘08. Or they would have said it.

These kinds of things do actually happen naturally in some areas, and it could be a slight increase - or just something that happens every once in awhile in that specific river. No one actually knows, apparently, based on that article.

Exactly, random rivers throughout Alaska could be turning orange than eventually going back to blue for the last 10,000+ years for all we know. As the article stressed, these rivers are in the middle of nowhere so it would be hard for anybody to notice. But that story is boring, better to turn it into a menacing tale of climate change for more clicks.

Yup, it could also be new and a sign of an actual increasing problem!

We can’t tell from this one data point, but as you note they need the clicks.

Fear sells.

Fear sells indeed. We also have many more data points than were previously available. The problem, realistically, is discerning the signal in the noise and making out the meaning.

The paper that is the basis for the article and which it cites in the second paragraph (https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01446-z) uses time series data going back to 1985 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01446-z/figures/3). And the study looks at a large number of streams within the Brooks Range, not a "specific river". And it makes a strong case that the changes are due to climate change-related permafrost thaw.

Personally I'd rather find out why it is happening and assign my own response rather than be primed a certain way.

But I recognize that this is an important issue and if it takes a bit of pizzazz to spread the article farther than it otherwise might I say why not.

Having emotions about things doesn't preclude people from finding out what's happening. We are not robots.

Let's not be reductionist. It affects how we find out, what we remember about it, and perhaps to some extent what we will do. I'm highlighting an issue more endemic in mainstream media.

only the Canal

More of a green-brown.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com