Global change impacts on hydrological processes in Alpine catchments
As writer Louis Bromfield said, "As soils are depleted, human health, vitality and intelligence go with them." Though he wrote this back in the early 1900s, it would inevitably be a truism in the world we live in: that global change would affect almost every facet of our lives, from the way we drive to the water we drink. Often, we forget the world outside of our busy lives and where, inevitably, our resources come from. Ultimately, there resources are getting jeopardized by the increasing man-made threats made to natural areas and resources. Only through education and further study we can hypothesize what, exactly is happening to our natural resources, specifically, in terms of water and soil. As a result of that we can not only educate, but also remedy the dire situation we have gotten into, as a planet.
We must depend on many observations to get a true picture of what global warming and other changes in the climate do to our planet. Changes in our earth’s climate can be due to a variety of circumstances both including internal variability and also in response to external factors, both natural and anthropogenic (the result of human contact and or interaction). This paper will be specifically focusing on these external factors that pose a threat to our precious alpine catchments.
What, exactly, do we know about these precious processes? One portion of our earth that is most affected is our hydrological processes, or how we study the movement, distribution, and quality of water throughout our earth. Alpine catchments make up a huge portion of the area where we study hydrological processes and collect water, so it is important that we have a sense of what global changes are happening to these invaluable areas. It is my argument that, though my collected data, global temperature fluctuations are negatively affecting the hydrological processes in alpine catchments, in terms of...