A drowning world: Kenyas quiet slide underwater
Kenya's great lakes are flooding, in a devastating and long-ignored environmental disaster that is displacing hundreds of thousands of
people
One of the first scientists to realise that something was wrong with
the lakes was a geologist named Simon Onywere. He came to the topic by accident. Between 2010 and 2013 he had been studying Lake Baringo,
Kenya's fourth-largest lake by volume. The bones of residents of the
area around the lake weaken uncommonly fast, and Onywere was
investigating whether this may be linked to high fluoride levels in
the water. Then, in early 2013, while he was meeting with residents of
Marigat, a town near the lake, one old man stood up. "Prof," he said.
"We don't care about the fluoride. What we want to know is how the
water has entered our schools."
Curious to know what the man was talking about, Onywere visited the
local Salabani primary school. There, he found the lake lapping
through the grounds of the school. Nonplussed, he took out his map. He
looked at the location of the lake and the location of the school, and
wondered how the lake had moved 2km without it becoming news.
Onywere rushed back to Nairobi, where he and his colleagues at several
Kenyan universities studied recent satellite images of the lake. The
images showed that the lake had, in the past year, flooded the area
around it. Then Onywere searched for images of some of the lakes
nearby: Lakes Bogoria, Naivasha and Nakuru. All of these had flooded.
As he extended his search, he saw that Lake Victoria, Africa's largest
lake, had flooded, too. So had Lake Turkana, the largest desert lake
in the world.
By September 2013, after further investigation and mapping, it was
clear to Onywere and his colleagues how extreme the damage was. In
Baringo, schools had been flooded and people had been displaced. Lake
Nakuru, which was previously enclosed by a national park, now extended
beyond it. It had increased in size by 50%.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/17/kenya-quiet-slide-underwater-great-rift-valley-lakes-east-africa-flooding?utm_source=pocket-newtab>
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