The Cellar - Han Dynasty vs Mother Nature

China's new found openness has allowed many scientific endeavors, one being deciphering the extent of man's meddling with Mother Nature.

Quote:

For thousands of years, Mother Nature has taken the blame for tremendous human suffering caused by massive flooding along the Yellow River, long known in China as the “River of Sorrow” and “Scourge of the Sons of Han.” Now, new research from Washington University in St. Louis links the river’s increasingly deadly floods to a widespread pattern of human-caused environmental degradation and related flood-mitigation efforts that began changing the river’s natural flow nearly 3,000 years ago.
~snip~
It also suggests that the Chinese government’s long-running efforts to tame the Yellow River with levees, dikes and drainage ditches actually made periodic flooding much worse, setting the stage for a catastrophic flood circa A.D. 14-17, which likely killed millions and triggered the collapse of the Western Han Dynasty.
~snip~
Researchers examined about 50 vertical feet of exposed soil layers at the Anshang site, carefully cleaning sections of a quarry wall to reveal patterns of sedimentary deposits dating back about 10,000 years. Nearly a third of this 10,000-year cross-section has been deposited in the last 2,000 years, indicating that the rate of deposit has steadily increased at a pace that mirrors the expansion of human activity in the region.
~snip~
“Our evidence suggests that the first levees were built to be about 6-7 feet high, but within a decade the one at Anshang was doubled in height and width,” Kidder said. “It’s easy to see the trap they fell into: building levees causes sediments to accumulate in the river bed, raising the river higher, and making it more vulnerable to flooding, which requires you to build the levee higher, which causes the sediments to accumulate, and the process repeats itself. The Yellow River has been an engineered river — entirely unnatural — for quite a long time.”

There might be lessons here for our Army Corps of Engineers along the Mississippi and Missouri. Ya think? ;)