Waterfalls are more threatened than you might think

More than 100 years ago today, a 63-year-old Michigan schoolteacher took the first ride ever down Niagara Falls in a barrel. Annie Edson Taylor may have survived, but the future will tell if the waterfalls available for such (now-illegal) escapades will. Here are a few threats to waterfalls we can’t ignore if we want to preserve these natural wonders.

1. Drought
Last year, Yosemite Falls went dry for five months. While the falls have always been ephemeral, meaning they flow seasonally, California’s severe drought had stopped them two months earlier than usual in June until December rains started them again a month late. In The Atlantic, outdoorsman and author Michael Lanza wondered if the world’s sixth-highest falls would actually disappear, with climate change leading to less and less snowfall. Snowpack in the Cascade Range has already decreased 15 to 30 percent in the past 70 years.
“In the words of Yosemite National Park hydrologist Jim Roche: ‘Snow is…an endangered resource,’” Lanza writes. “Climate models offer different prognoses for the future of snow, depending largely on what steps society takes in coming years to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Unfortunately, humanity has steadily emitted more CO2 than even the worst-case scenarios in forecasts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Nobel Peace Prize-winning United Nations body of more than two thousand scientists researching climate change.”
2. Dams
Although renewable hydroelectric power does important work in cutting the demand for fossil fuels, the technique sadly threatens our world’s waterfalls. For instance, Iceland gets 75 percent of its electricity from hydropower—at a cost to the pristine landscape. Excessive dam building has stopped or slowed to a trickle almost half of the waterfalls in the country since 2003, says artist Ruri, and much of the power generated goes toward multinational aluminum companies. She created Endangered Waters, an exhibit of 52 photographs of Iceland’s waterfalls alongside their sounds, to preserve their memory.