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Water
Click
on thumbnails for a larger view
The Death of a River, the Rebirth of a River
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The
water in the Colorado River through Grand Canyon exits the bottom of Glen
Canyon Dam
frigid
and clear. The nutrient-laden silt that the river once carried settles
in the upper end
of
Powell Reservoir, never reaching the dam some 150 river miles away (not
yet anyway).
The
picture on the right is from the head of Powell Reservoir where the living
Colorado
meets
the stagnant green death of the reservoir. Other pictures of this
meeting can be
found
at another one of my pages here.
The
picture on the left is at the confluence of the Little Colorado and the
main stem of the
Colorado
River in Grand Canyon. This spot is about 80 river miles below Glen
Canyon Dam.
After
exiting the dam, the river frequently runs clear all the way through
Grand
Canyon. But when rains are heavy, the river once again takes on the
rich
browns and reds of its name Colorado=Colored. The small Paria River
might
contribute some silt, but it is the large drainage of the Little Colorado
springing
from
all the way to the New Mexico border that most often recolors the river.
Here
then are two pictures exhibiting a parallel and a juxtaposition.
The river losing its
character
and color and then being reborn in the same fractal boils and swirls 230
river
miles
later. The heavy red-brown, silt-laden waters sliding underneath
the clear green
unnatural
color wrought by the tall plug of a dam. The scales are different,
but the
resistance
to mixing due to density differences, the forces and the beauty are the
same.
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Two more views of the same juxtaposition
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One
could sit all day and watch the changing show, the push and pull of clear
and cloudy,
like
watching the sky on a stormy summer afternoon.
Without
scale, the boils could be a few inches, a few feet, or thousands
of
feet wide.
The
flows continue to resist mixing long after the waters are joined into a
single
channel.
Finally,
the turbulence of a small riffle below the confluence provides the
energy
necessary to cause water to mix with water.