05/20/2026
Rivers Are Dying!
by Ellie Cabell
Imagine rivers around the world becoming dead zones - areas in which life cannot be sustained. That may be a little overly dramatic, but scientists are quite concerned, and climate change is the driving force behind this alarming situation.
Researchers from the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and from Tongji University used a “machine-learning stacking algorithm” to investigate information from 21,439 rivers around the world collected between 1985 and 2023. They found an alarming trend: “River oxygen levels declined at an average rate of -0.045 mg L-1 decade-1, and 78.8% of the rivers included in the study showed signs of deoxygenation.” They found that tropical rivers suffered the greatest oxygen losses, which seems odd since rivers at higher altitudes are warming more quickly than tropical ones. It turns out that tropical rivers generally have lower oxygenation rates to start with. They also discovered that dams affect oxygenation loss differently, but that dams in deeper rivers have less deoxygenation.
Researchers also found that “declining oxygen solubility caused by climate warming was the primary driver behind the global oxygen decline, accounting for 62.7% of the observed changes.” Looking at the trends they identified, they say that moving forward, oxygen levels will fall 1.5 to 2.5 times faster in the future.
Warming and deoxygenated waster threaten fish, biodiversity, and the general health and well-being of water ecosystems. It could also lead to increased greenhouse gas emissions while suffocating oxygen breathing aquatic life.
What can we do about it? For starters, we could support innovative companies developing solutions for water cleanup, remediation and treatment like IX Power Clean Water. visit: ixWater.com
