Mississippi River System

Men who had hitherto accepted without protests presidents from the seaboard expressed a new spirit of dissent in 1824 by giving only three electoral votes for John Quincy Adams.

And four years later, they sent a son of the soil from Tennessee, Andrew Jackson, to take Washington's chair as chief executive of the nation, the first of a long line of presidents from the Mississippi Basin.

References W.G. Brown, The Lower South in American History.

B.A. Hinsdale, The Old Northwest, two volumes.

The other species we have is a spotted gar.

I think it's mainly native to our west facing slopes, like going out towards the Mississippi Basin.

So all those things that are over the continental divide in the very far western part of our state.

It doesn't get as big as the longnose.

Men who had hitherto accepted without protests presidents from the seaboard expressed a new spirit of dissent in 1824 by giving only three electoral votes for John Quincy Adams.

And four years later, they sent a son of the soil from Tennessee, Andrew Jackson, to take Washington's chair as chief executive of the nation, the first of a long line of presidents from the Mississippi Basin.

References W.G. Brown, The Lower South in American History.

B.A. Hinsdale, The Old Northwest, two volumes.

[ on-hold music] Hello, Water Talk listeners.

We are going to be talking about the Mississippi River, and the Mississippi River Watershed today, also known as the Great River.

And, you know, before we get going, we just wanted to, to, to provide a little bit of information about the Mississippi River.

It drains 41% of the land area of the United States.

So this is a pretty big problem, and sometimes people will refer to Gulf hypoxia as the dead zone in the Gulf.

So people will talk about the dead zone or many different dead zones in the Gulf.

The hypoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico is very much related to the practices and to the different human uses, specifically agriculture, in the Mississippi River Watershed.

So you'll hear us talk about Gulf hypoxia and agriculture as an interlinked problem, [laughs] and it's because it is an interlinked problem.

Not scattered randomly across the country, but clustering in specific regions with a precision that suggested pattern rather than chance.

The Ohio Valley, the Mississippi River Basin, the Great Lakes region, the areas densest with burial mounds, with earthworks, with the architectural remnants of whatever civilization had occupied this landscape before European settlement.

And here's where the official explanation begins to collapse under the weight of its own inadequacy.

We're told these reports were misidentifications.

And so they don't have any arteries.

We have arteries, the Mississippi River Basin and all that jazz.

We need to build similar arteries with energy across our country, and then we need to build similar arteries with information.

Power generation is really important.

Mm-hmm.

Again, like, you have to go through the federal agencies because it touches the coast, and it touches the Intracoastal Waterway, and it touches the Mississippi system, so the Army Corps of Engineers is going to get a say, and it's adjacent to wildlife refuges, so, like, National Parks is going to get a say, and then the state's going to get a say, and, like, by the time...

even even at elon speed it may take a long time to get the thumbs up to really start moving on that you think so

i kind of feel like he you know if i think about the infrastructure projects that elon has said that he's going to start i can't think of a single one that didn't maybe hyperloop uh might be one where he kind of said like he didn't do

And so that's the amount of water you have available to carry solutes through the soil column and down eventually to groundwater.

And in agricultural systems like the upper Mississippi basin in the United States, that amount of water is equivalent to about 250 millimeters a year, a little bit less.

And so you can say, okay, what would my dissolved carbon or my alkalinity concentration have to be in order to export five or ten tons of CO2 per hectare per year as some of the numbers that have been proposed? And it turns out your concentration would have to be enormously higher than anything we ever see because you would precipitate minerals out at that point.

So typically we see one, two, or three millimoles of alkalinity And in order to transport five gigatons per hectare, you would need something on the order of 25 or 30 millimoles per liter, which is something you never see because you're going to precipitate long before you get to that high concentration.

Okay, so you're basically limited by the temperature-related solubility of a lot of the chemicals involved, right? And as you change the temperature, you're also not only changing the transport, because when you've got water...

the world gets warmer, the hydrological cycle increases.

Yeah, that's a bit tricky because, and there are people who have studied this pretty extensively in various parts of the world, including, and I'll come back to the upper Mississippi Basin in the US because I'm more familiar with that.

Projections are for increased rainfall, because of climate change, but also for increased evapotranspiration.