Word: silting
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...improved matters much. In June, responding to demands by the IMF, the government raised the price of wheat flour and reduced subsidies on nonessential goods. Angry citizens have taken to the streets to protest food shortages, lack of jobs and a 50% inflation rate. Although the rich silt deposited by the flood should give farmers a temporary boost after the waters subside, the economy's larger problems will not go away easily...
...southern slopes of the Himalayas in northern India, Nepal and Bhutan, where the hillsides have been ravaged by deforestation. With the denuded soil no longer able to absorb monsoon rains, the savage runoff increases year by year in speed and volume, bringing with it ever larger loads of silt that end up on the river bottoms of Bangladesh...
...water recedes, the river bottom emerges, providing clues to a lost past. On an ugly beach of sand and clay in Arkansas, just downstream from Memphis, archaeologists have struck what they consider gold: large chunks of riverboats built in the late 1800s and long buried in silt...
Trying to reproduce a cherished past is difficult when so much has changed. Larry's childhood swimming hole long ago was filled with silt from the mines. The movie house is gone too, displaced by cable television and the VCR. The Nelsons have both. Out of fear for their safety, the Nelsons do not allow their kids to explore the woods by themselves, as Larry did, or even walk or ride their bikes too far from home alone. "There was a lot more they was allowed to do back then, like go out in the woods and not be afraid...
Jetties can cause beach larceny on an even grander scale. Long concrete or rock structures, they jut out into the water to keep inlets and harbors navigable by keeping sand and silt from drifting in. Like groin fields, jetties can keep sand from replenishing beaches down current. The construction 90 years ago of a pair of jetties to improve the harbor at Charleston, S.C., altered currents and natural sand drift so drastically that there is no beach left at high tide at nearby Folly Beach. In Florida an estimated 80% to 85% of the beach erosion on the state...