River deltas face risk from straying cyclones
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River deltas face risk from straying cyclones
The growing tendency for cyclones to change their paths means river deltas risk being starved of the vital sediment the storms deliver.
By Tim Radford
LONDON, 31 October, 2016 – Some of the world’s great river deltas could be at risk, not because of increased cyclone hazard but paradoxically because, as climates change, the track of the cyclones has begun to shift away from them.
And although typhoons, hurricanes and tropical cyclones – three names for one storm phenomenon – bring with them destruction, they also deliver prodigious quantities of water to wash billions of tonnes of silt and sediment downstream to create that marshy, meandering and immensely fertile pattern of rich soil and waterways known as a delta.