Day 3: Tuesday – A Word on the Work

Today was the second day of class, so I thought I’d say just a little bit about why I am here. My buddy Cam and I are teaching a hydraulic modeling class with representatives of the 4 downstream countries with riparian stretches of the Mekong River: Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.
The Mekong is one of the most interesting rivers in the world, hydrologically[1], ecologically and politically. It is either the second or third most biodiverse river in the world[2] with an enormous fishery.[3] Until recently, it was also one of the largest undammed rivers in the world. No longer.

There are approximately 130 dams in various stages of planning, construction or early use in the watershed. This will generate electricity for growing economies (e.g. Thailand) and revenue for poorer countries (e.g. Laos) but will impact the ecology and fisheries which are a resource downstream countries (e.g. Cambodia) are dependent upon. The Lower Mekong countries[4] have formed the Mekong River Commission (MRC) to help plan and negotiate management of this system at a regional level.

These are sovereign nations making difficult trans-boundary choices that will be driven by a range of social and technical considerations that are outside of my expertise. But they invited us here to help build capacity in hydraulic and sediment modeling. And I’m thrilled to be involved. But as most of my friends and family have a threshold of ‘sediment related content’ they are interested in, we’ll move on.
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[1] Even the watershed shape is unique, with a very thin upper watershed following a deep fault out of the Tibetan Plateau. The river basins of South East Asia tend to be idiosyncratic as they are driven by tectonic geology since the peninsula of South East Asia is essentially the part of the Asian content that squirted out when India collided with the shield. In undergrad I saw a film in which pre-collision Asia was modeled with jello and when India hit it, an appendage squirted out that approximated the size and shape of the South East Asian peninsula.

[2]Depending on how you measure (and estimate) biodiversity. This is actually a pretty interesting topic in its own right. “Diversity” is actually a pretty difficult thing to quantify because any metric of diversity embeds a system of values. But the other top three are (unsurprisingly) the Amazon and the Congo.
[3]More fish are caught in the river than the US eats in a year. And river nutrient subsidies also supports a marine fishery that many think is almost as large.
[4]Myanmar and China, the upstream countries, do not come to the table.