Water: vital and vicious - cancelled!

When's a pint not a pint? When the pint glass has a bunch of other stuff at the bottom of it.
In many places, river channels are like clogged up pint glasses. They're nature’s guttering system, but don’t just convey water. They also move vast quantities of sediment around. Downstream of big mountain ranges, such as the Himalaya, rivers deposit large amounts of sediment which can choke river channels, affecting flood risk and nearby communities. We'll look how different parts of the landscape further upstream contribute to this, and the development of these ‘risky’ rivers and floodplains.

It is well known that forests store carbon dioxide, helping to regulate levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. However, they also have other impacts on the climate through other processes, such as their interactions with sunlight and water. For example, medium scale deforestation within the Guiana Shield to the north of Amazonia in South America may impact rainfall patterns 4000km away, through vegetation-land-atmosphere interactions, that disrupt a major atmospheric river (a filament of concentrated moisture in the atmosphere), potentially threatening food production.