‘River piracy’ on a high glacier lets one waterway rob another
Channel formed by melting ice diverts water flow, leaving loser high and dry
HIGH-WATER ROBBERY The melting of Kaskawulsh Glacier in northwestern Canada diverted water flow from one river into another, plummeting water levels in the waterway that once fed Kluane Lake (shown).
Jim Best/University of Illinois
River piracy
\RIV-er PAHY-ruh-see \ n.
The diversion of headwaters from one stream into another
Ahoy! There be liquid booty on the move in the high mountains. Since May 2016, a channel carved through one of northwestern Canada’s largest glaciers has allowed one river to pillage water from another, new observations reveal. This phenomenon, almost certainly the result of climate change, is the first modern record of river piracy caused by a melting glacier, researchers report online April 17 in Nature Geoscience. Such piracy was rampant as the colossal ice sheets of the Last Glacial Maximum began shrinking around 18,000 years ago.
For hundreds of years, the Kaskawulsh Glacier formed a wall that segregates snow and ice meltwater into two streams: the Slims River, which joins with other streams and crosses Alaska before draining into the Bering Sea, and the Kaskawulsh
