Tag Archives: lake tanganyika

Questions for Jim Russell: Declining fishery production in critical African lake pinned to climate change

Warming water over the past 150 years is causing declining fish stocks in Lake Tanganyika, a large freshwater lake that supplies food for millions of Africans.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A new study finds that a decrease in fishery production in one of the largest freshwater lakes on Earth is a consequence of human-caused climate change rather than just overfishing. (more…)

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Enormous scale of Nile ‘mega lake’ revealed

The eastern Sahara Desert was once home to a 45,000 km2 freshwater lake similar in surface area to the largest in the world today.

A study led by the University of Exeter has revealed that the mega lake was probably formed more than one hundred thousand years ago in the White Nile River Valley in Sudan.

Dr Tim Barrows of the University of Exeter and colleagues used a dating approach based on exposure to cosmic rays to measure the amount of the isotope beryllium-10 in shoreline deposits. Its abundance can be used to calculate how long rocks or sediments have been exposed at the surface of the earth. (more…)

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