I know this area pretty well, I have been to Menindee and spent my youth in the surrounding regions. This is a massive farming region, and there is plenty of Monsanto and Bayer product in the area. Large farms there experiment with crops, use lots of fertilizer and herbicides and have been known to cause mass fish die offs in the past, along with massive algae blooms and other general groundwater contaminations. I don’t know if that is the case in this instance, but its a likely place to look. During the recent floods, weirs will have been opened to allow the flooding out, and that lets a lot of the contaminants flow downstream. The Murray pushes back on the Darling, so Menindee and that whole region gets flooded a lot when there is rain in the north (relatively speaking, it’s the outback of Australia, after all - maybe every 20 years or so).
Its a massive river basin and there are a lot of jurisdictions involved, each of which have different regulations on who is allowed to do what. With the overflow caused by the floods, upstream problems do become downstream problems.
The other thing to note, which the article does point out, is that with a mass of flooding in the region, fish will spawn a lot of fry and that can result in overcrowding once the water subsides. I’ve seen that happen along that river system in the past… every time the Murray floods, there is a fish boom and bust. If it weren’t for the cotton farmers upstream, I would have put this whole thing a fish boom, but undoubtedly, chemicals also are playing their part.
So, if one sifts through all the fluff, it’s the fault of the farmers? I’m surprised they forgot to add climate change. I’m not surprised there’s no mention of geo-engineering. @dogsbreth thanks for the ‘local’ info.
They also forgot to mention the refilling of the groundwater across the whole of eastern Australia. The whole of the south of Australia, that is, south of Sydney latitude, minus the desert, the southern seaboard and Tasmania, is only habitable because of the arterial basin. The floods, wherever they came from this time, guarantee massive and stable crops for the next 10 years, along with good grazing and general quality of life for everything on the surface.
That’s not something the disaster analysts tend to point out. Maybe 15-20% of the worlds grain crops are now guaranteed for maybe 10 years owing to the flooding.
As an interesting aside, last year’s and this years’ heavy rain was pretty much predicted well in advance of it happening, according to the regular 7-year flood, 7-year drought cycle in most of Australia. There wont be a serious farmer surprised at the rains coming when they did. It’s now in the 7-year rain cycle that’s been known about by the farmers since the 1800’s. The Aboriginal and traditional farmers will also tell you that the 40 year cycle is now on the place too, meaning, more rain in general across the shorter cycles. Interesting that even the national farmers news never refers to the cyclical nature of the weather and the expected weather patterns, but people working on the land base everything on them.
If there was weather manipulation, and I think there probably was, considering the offshore hurricanes that brought the weather on, they were either pushing on an open door, if it was intentional, or were happy to have the natural cycles in the south obfuscate the blowback from the weather manipulation in the northern hemisphere that took place there.
