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| FLOOD OF DATA
Nicholas Pinter, an SIUC geologist who’s a respected expert on Midwestern floods, will spend the upcoming months applying lessons learned on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to increasingly flood-prone rivers in Europe. "We hope to look at a number of European rivers—the Rhine, Oder, Elbe, Danube, Tisza, Meuse, and perhaps others," Pinter explains. "All of these rivers experienced record-breaking floods last summer and the Rhine was in major flood mode again in January. "We will examine rivers, climate, and other data in hopes of discovering why floods on many rivers worldwide appear to be larger and more frequent than in the past—and determine if humans are contributing to this worsening flooding." A prestigious $96,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation partially supports Pinter's work. He is teaming up on the project with German colleague Rienk van der Ploeg, an internationally recognized professor of soil science who teaches at the University of Hanover in Germany. The two will use the German university as their research base for initial data collections. Rounding out the science team are graduate students from the United States, Germany, and Hungary. Assistance with much of the ground-floor research—on the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers—came from then?master's student Russell Thomas, says Pinter. Thomas has since completed his geology degree and now works for Schlumberger Information Solutions in Houston. In 2001, Pinter, Thomas, and U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist Joseph Wlosinski concluded that floods had grown worse along the middle Mississippi River (the stretch from St. Louis to Cairo, Ill.) and that engineering structures to improve navigation, such as wing dams, were largely to blame. The team reached that finding after analyzing historical data on the middle Mississippi River dating back, in some cases, to the mid-1800s. This project was featured in the Fall 2001 issue of Perspectives; see www.siu.edu/~perspect/01_fall/flooding.html. Pinter's research on European rivers is part of a MacArthur Foundation initiative on technological change and global security and sustainability. The grant runs through the end of May 2004. Pinter also won a Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), only of only 10 given to scholars worldwide, to support his work. —Paula Davenport
For more information, contact Dr. Nicholas Pinter, Dept. of Geology, at npinter@geo.siu.edu. |
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