How Republicans Ruined the Intelligence Community

Karen De Young of the Washington Post informs us that the reforms to America's intelligence community initiated by President Bush and the Republicans in Congress in 2004, the legislation which created the National Counterterrorism Center, were the primary factor in the failure of the Intelligence Community to identify and deter the "underwear bomber."

That can't be true, can it? After all, everyone knows (or at least Republicans do) that it was Obama who made us less safe by de-prioritizing the "War on Terror."

Still, Ms. De Young does cite some damning evidence that suggests the all consuming desire to collect any and all intelligence on everyone may have made it extremely difficult to, in the jargon of the counterterrorism experts, "connect the dots" to legitimate threats to our security:

The failure of U.S. authorities to detect a plot to bomb a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day has reignited long-simmering concerns that intelligence reforms implemented five years ago remain inadequate to prevent terrorist attacks. [...]

Ihe most intense scrutiny has been directed toward the centerpiece of the 2004 intelligence reorganization: the National Counterterrorism Center. [...]

As the central repository for "all-source" intelligence on international terrorism, the NCTC is tasked with connecting the dots and advising the government on threats. [...]

Several officials and experts said the failure to uncover the plot confirmed fears that the massive amounts of terrorism-related information being gathered since the 2001 attacks might outgrow the capacity to manage it. The CIA, the FBI, the military, and numerous Cabinet departments and independent agencies are flooded every day with new data from the field that is available to the NCTC.

"The single biggest worry that I have is long-term quality control," Russell E. Travers, in charge of the NCTC database of terrorism "entities," said in a 2007 interview as his list topped 400,000 and continued to expand. "Where am I going to be, where is my successor going to be, five years down the road?"

Travers is still there, and the database has grown to about 550,000. Beyond connecting the dots, "the challenge we now face is that we are collecting so much information," Rep. Peter Hoekstra (Mich.) said last week of the system he helped devise as the top Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Yes, you heard that right. A senior Republican in Congress actually admitted that the reforms to our intelligence community which he "helped devise" may have made things worse. Of course back in 2004, Hoekstra wasn't just the "top Republican" on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, he was its Chairman. He rubber stamped whatever the Bush/Cheney White House wanted back then. Now he's having buyer's remorse apparently.

Well, I guess his statement is one small step toward accountability. Not much of one, but with Republicans, you take what you can get.

Some of the finger-pointing centers on claims and counterclaims about who should have flagged what for others to pay attention to and who should have looked where without being prompted. Travers, the TIDE chief who also serves as deputy director of the NCTC, predicted the problem even earlier than his 2007 expression of concern about the volume of terrorist information.

"If an organization posts something to its webpage, it can claim to have shared information,"he wrote in the forward to a 2005 book published by the Joint Military Intelligence College."Whether the right people know the information/analysis is there, and actually make use of it, is entirely another matter.

"Indeed, we'll almost certainly be dealing with precisely this problem in the post mortems of our next intelligence failure; the relevant intelligence will have been posted, but the right analysts never found it among the terabytes of available information."

That's correct folks, he said "terabytes" of information has been collected on God knows who about God knows what. So much information that the Intelligence community can't handle it all. I don't know how big a terabyte is, but these people do:

A terabyte is a SI-multiple (see prefix tera) of the unit byte for digital information storage and is equal to 10¹² (1 trillion short scale) bytes or 1000 gigabytes. [...]

In standard SI usage, 1 terabyte (TB) equals 1000000000000bytes = 1000⁴ or 10¹² bytes.

To give you an example, the entire Library of Congress has collected 100 terabytes of data for its digital archive of Internet websites.

I'm just guessing here, but I bet the number of terabytes of data the NSA, CIA, DIA, ad nauseam , have collected far more than 100 terabytes of information. Indeed, according to this article, the NSA alone is constructing a facility in Nevade to store Yottabytes of surveillance information!

[T]he NSA is constructing a datacenter in the Utah desert that they project will be storing yottabytes of surveillance data. And what is a yottabyte? I’m glad you asked.

There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB. Are you paranoid yet?

Heck, we know that AT&T alone was sued for allegedly collecting at least 312 terabytes of information for the NSA between 2001 and 2005 as part of the NSA's warrantless surveillance program. And that was just one tele-communications company.

The Salt Lake City Tribune ran an article back in October 2009 in which it openly questioned whether the information already collected by the various US intelligence communities was simply too extensive to be of any real benefit in identifying critical information in time to prevent threats to our security:

The enormity of information being collected by American spy agencies is staggering -- and there simply aren't enough human analysts to go around. [...]

[O]nly a very small slice of the information stored at the center in southern Salt Lake County will ever be scanned by human eyes. And that's the reality for most of what is collected by the nation's other spy agencies as well.

In a report commissioned by the Department of Defense last year, the Jason defense advisory group warned that the millions of terabytes of data coming into U.S. spy agencies through ever-improving sensors are being wasted.

"As the amount of data captured by these sensors grows, the difficulty in storing, analyzing, and fusing the sensor data becomes increasingly significant," the report concluded. It cited Massachusetts Institute of technology defense expert Pete Rustan, who complained that "70 percent of the data we collect is falling on the floor." [...]

That's a problem that Utah Guard commander Brian Tarbet is all too familiar with. [...]

"We simply vacuum up more information today," Tarbet said. "That's more information from which you have to separate the wheat from the chaff. But how much of that is good intelligence? That's the trick."

When your own experts are telling you that 70% of everything you collect is never going to be processed, read, understood, or examined, doesn't that suggest to you that our vast intelligence community is engaged in the greatest exercise in the theater of the absurd humankind has ever attempted?

So, in other words we (i.e., our Government) collect so much information that there is no way to discern what reliable, important data on terrorist threats is and what is merely random noise or garbage. To put it in blunter, less polite, terms, it’s hard to find a few valuable pearls when you spend all your time looking for them in an ocean of bullshit.

This is the system that Dick Cheney and his fellow Republican paranoids put in place. I don't think it takes a genius to realize that not only were these immense stores of often unconstitutionally information a dangerous violation of American civil liberties, but, in addition, they have made it more difficult to protect our nation from terrorist threats. So, the truth of the matter is that it isn't President Obama who is to blame for the failure of our intelligence community to identify one crazed jihadi recruit who attempted to down a plane by using a concoction of chemical explosives concealed in his pants. No, the fault lies with the very same Republican critics (most prominently Dick Cheney himself) who have been so quick to point the finger at a Democratic President rather than accept any responsibility for their own mad cap schemes to collect more and more data at the expense of taking advantage of the greatest resource we have available to quickly detect real threats to our national security: a human mind trained to know what is relevant information and what is not.

You can collect all the information you want these days thanks to technological advances in computer and telecommunications, but all that information is useless unless you have a process in place where trained individuals can have the means to both control what data gets collected (so that we don't simply amass a huge store of information that is primarily irrelevant) and the analytical skills necessary to effectively "connect the dots" in a timely manner to prevent terrorist threats. It's about time someone in the media pointed that fact out.

Keith Olbermann: "Ruined Senate Bill Is Unsupportable"

Psychiatry's civil war

How DSM-V is written will ultimately affect patients

Editorial: Psychiatry's bible: Its time has passed

Since this article was first posted, the American Psychiatric Association has announced that the publication of DSM-V will be delayed until May 2013. "Extending the timeline will allow more time for public review, field trials and revisions," says APA president Alan Schatzberg.

When doctors disagree with each other, they usually couch their criticisms in careful, measured language. In the past few months, however, open conflict has broken out among the upper echelons of US psychiatry. The focus of discord is a volume called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, which psychiatrists turn to when diagnosing the distressed individuals who turn up at their offices seeking help. Regularly referred to as the profession's bible, the DSM is in the midst of a major rewrite, and feelings are running high.

Two eminent retired psychiatrists are warning that the revision process is fatally flawed. They say the new manual, to be known as DSM-V, will extend definitions of mental illnesses so broadly that tens of millions of people will be given unnecessary and risky drugs. Leaders of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which publishes the manual, have shot back, accusing the pair of being motivated by their own financial interests - a charge they deny. The row is set to come to a head next month when the proposed changes will be published online. For a profession that exists to soothe human troubles, it's incendiary stuff.

Psychiatry suffers in comparison with other areas of medicine, as diseases of the mind are on the whole less well understood than those of the body. We have, as yet, only glimpses into the fundamental causes of the common mental illnesses, and there are no biological tests to diagnose them. This means conditions such as depression, schizophrenia and personality disorders remain difficult to diagnose with precision. Doctors can only question people about their state of mind and observe their behaviour, classifying illness according to the most obvious symptoms.

We have only glimpses into the causes of mental illnesses and there are no biological tests for them

First published in 1952, the DSM has its origins in a book used by the US military to determine if recruits were mentally fit for combat. The difficulty of separating mental disorders from normal variation in behaviour made it controversial from the start. Over the years, the book's influence has grown, and today it is used by doctors across the globe.

The wording used in the DSM has a significance that goes far beyond questions of semantics. The diagnoses it enshrines affect what treatments people receive, and whether health insurers will fund them. They can also exacerbate social stigmas and may even be used to deem an individual such a grave danger to society that they are locked up.

Some of the most acrimonious arguments stem from worries about the pharmaceutical industry's influence over psychiatry. This has led to the spotlight being turned on the financial ties of those in charge of revising the manual, and has made any diagnostic changes that could expand the use of drugs especially controversial. "I think the DSM represents a lightning rod for all kinds of groups," says David Kupfer of the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who heads the task force appointed by the APA to produce the revised manual.

Few would claim that the DSM's current version is perfect. With each revision, the number of conditions it defines has swelled, many surrounded by bewildering lists of symptoms that must be checked to assign a diagnosis. Using current DSM checklists, for example, 114 different combinations of symptoms can lead to a diagnosis of schizophrenia. At the same time, many patients prove hard to fit into the framework.

One aim of the work groups compiling DSM-V is to cut through this chaos. They are streamlining diagnoses by removing various subtypes of schizophrenia, for example, and intend to address the confusion created by the fact that many people with one condition meet criteria for other disorders as well. The DSM-V task force is expected to propose a series of "dimensions" to be considered with a patient's main diagnosis. So as well as deciding whether someone has, say, bipolar disorder, doctors would determine whether they are suffering from problems such as anxiety and sleeping disturbances, and assess them on a simple scale of severity.

Grandiose claims

This is widely seen as a first step towards a future in which psychiatric diagnosis has a more scientific base, where sprawling checklists of symptoms are replaced by sliding-scale measurements of the underlying determinants of mental health. Yet critics worry that even a limited embrace of this "dimensional" approach is running ahead of the science. Until we understand more about the biological basis of psychiatric disease, this approach will not be helpful, they say.

Some of the harshest criticisms have come from those who led previous revisions of the DSM, in 1980 and 1994. In July, Robert Spitzer and Allen Frances, both now retired, wrote a stinging letter to the APA, accusing it of planning unworkable changes and making grandiose claims. In a separate editorial in the magazine Psychiatric Times, Frances complained that most of the authors are university-based researchers who are cut off from typical doctors and patients.

Spitzer and Frances also criticise the fact that members of the various DSM-V work groups have had to sign confidentiality agreements. "The main problem is that we don't know what they're doing," says Spitzer. The APA says the confidentiality agreements are to stop the manual's authors writing their own diagnostic handbooks alongside the official manual. Kupfer points out that discussion does go on: work groups proposing major changes debate their ideas in papers and at meetings. "We've done everything we can to encourage it," he says.

Another focus for Spitzer and Frances's concern is the suggestion that DSM-V could include new categories to capture milder forms of illnesses such as schizophrenia, depression and dementia. "The result would be a wholesale... medicalization of normality that will lead to a deluge of unneeded medication," Frances said in his editorial.

For example, one work group is considering whether it is possible to catch people in the early stages of schizophrenia or other psychotic illnesses before they have their first full-blown psychotic episode (Schizophrenia Bulletin, vol 35, p 841). Some doctors prescribe antipsychotic drugs at this early stage in the hope of stopping the illness from progressing.

Libido loss

These medicines can have serious side effects, such as loss of libido, weight gain and distressing tremors and spasms, so no one would want to take them without good reason. Yet it's hard to separate distressed people who will go on to develop a psychotic disorder from the "false positives" - those who will recover or develop a different illness. The available evidence suggests that only about 30 per cent of people identified as being at risk of psychosis will go on to develop it within two years.

These medicines can have serious side effects so no one wants to take them without good reason

Nevertheless, William Carpenter, a psychiatrist at the University of Maryland in Baltimore who chairs the DSM-V work group on psychosis, believes the needs of the "true positives" are so great that adding a diagnostic category to cover "psychosis risk" would, on balance, be a good thing. Frances brands this proposed diagnosis as "the most worrisome suggestion entertained".

Given the controversy, psychosis risk may not make it into the DSM proper, and may instead appear in the appendix, as a condition needing more research. But even that designation might boost prescribing.

Frances and Spitzer are not the only ones with concerns, and there are other flashpoints (see "Hebephilia", "Transgendered" and "Bereavement"). In March, Jane Costello of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, resigned from the work group on disorders in childhood and adolescence, worried about what she saw as a lack of scientific rigour across the whole DSM revision. "I felt that there was not enough empirical work being achieved or planned," she says.

The disputes are getting ugly. Senior APA figures have even suggested that Spitzer and Frances are motivated by a desire to safeguard their flow of royalties from clinical guides linked to the current DSM. "The fact that Dr. Frances was informed... that subsequent editions of his DSM-IV associated products would cease when the new edition is finalized, should be considered when evaluating his critique," leading APA figures said in a response to Frances's editorial.

Spitzer and Frances reject this charge. "To suggest that I have no concern other than the royalties is a little absurd," says Spitzer. "My annual royalties from DSM-IV related books are $10,000 per year," notes Frances. "These have nothing to do with concerns I expressed."

Attention has also turned to the financial interests of those working on DSM-V. The APA has ruled that members of the task force and work groups may not receive more than $10,000 per year from industry while working on DSM-V, and must keep their stock holdings below $50,000. This doesn't satisfy Lisa Cosgrove of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who studies financial conflicts in psychiatry (New Scientist, 29 April 2006, p 14). She notes that the APA's ruling places no limit on industry research grants, and has found that the proportion of DSM-V panel members who have industry links is exactly the same as it was for DSM-IV, at 56 per cent (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 360, p 2035).

The final version of DSM-V is scheduled to be published in 2012, but given the level of controversy and the need to test whether psychiatrists can reliably use the proposed diagnoses, that date seems certain to slip.

For now, there is an uneasy ceasefire, but next month the work groups will post their proposed changes on the APA's website. Stand by for renewed hostilities.

Editorial: Psychiatry's bible: Its time has passed

Hebephilia

How young is too young?

You may have never heard of "hebephilia", but this obscure diagnosis has huge significance in the courts. If it becomes accepted it could lead to hundreds of sex offenders who have served their jail time being locked up indefinitely - on grounds that some say are spurious.

Hebephilia refers to when adults are sexually fixated on teenagers around the time of puberty. This sets it apart from paedophilia, which refers to a focus on pre-pubescent children. The DSM-V work group on sexual disorders is likely to call for paedophilia to be renamed paedohebephilia, and include a hebephilic subtype.

The justification is the research of one work group member, Ray Blanchard of the University of Toronto in Canada. Working with sex offenders, Blanchard used a device that records blood flow in the penis to measure their arousal while they were listening to sexual material. He concluded that some men have a disorder that causes them to fixate on girls aged 11 to 14 (Archives of Sexual Behavior, vol 38, p 335).

The proposed diagnosis has been condemned by critics as dangerously blurring the boundary between paedophilia and normal male attraction to teenage girls - which isn't necessarily acted upon. Karen Franklin, a forensic psychologist in El Cerrito, California, argues that the diagnosis makes a disease out of preferences that have been shaped through human evolution. "People didn't used to live so long and mating started earlier," she says.

The work group is also considering whether some men are specifically turned on by rape - a proposed condition termed paraphilic coercive disorder. Again, the evidence is based largely on measurements of penile blood flow in response to sexual images and stories, and the validity of the condition is hotly contested.

The rows over hebephilia and paraphilic coercive disorder aren't academic, because 20 US states have passed laws that allow sex offenders who have served their sentences to be detained indefinitely in a secure hospital if they are deemed "sexual predators" (New Scientist, 24 February 2007, p 6). This can only be done if the offenders have a psychiatric disorder that increases their risk of reoffending - which few do, according to DSM-IV.

Franklin says that if hebephilia and paraphilic coercive disorder make it into DSM-V, they will be seized upon to consign men to a lifetime of incarceration. This argument cuts little ice with Blanchard, however. "The clinical facts are what they are," he says.

Transgendered

We are who we say we are

Is history repeating itself? That's the question facing psychiatrists considering how gender identity should be defined in DSM-V. The APA has a legacy of uneasy relations with the lesbian, gay and transgender community, having included homosexuality in the DSM's list of psychiatric disorders until 1973. Some transgender activists want issues of gender identity kicked off the list of mental illnesses too.

These activists are up in arms over the membership of DSM-V's sexual and gender identity disorders work group, in particular the selection of Kenneth Zucker of the University of Toronto, Canada, as its chair. Zucker is reviled by some transgender activists for his work on therapy to reorient children who feel that they were born into the wrong sex. An online petition objecting to the work group's composition has more than 9500 signatures.

The group is nevertheless likely to recommend changes that could actually ease tensions. One of these is a change in the name of a diagnosis that as currently phrased is inherently offensive to transgender people. "'Gender identity disorder' falsely implies that the gender identities of gender variant people are in themselves disordered," says Kelley Winters, founder of GID Reform Advocates.

The work group has not yet revealed its proposed name, but "disorder" will be dropped. "We're sensitive to issues of language," says Zucker. One possibility is "gender dysphoria", which focuses on the inherent distress of people living in a body that doesn't match their identity.

That would not satisfy those transgender activists who want issues of gender identity removed from the DSM altogether. But others argue for the retention of a renamed condition to make it easier for those distressed by the mismatch between their identity and their bodies to seek assistance, and also to help those who need sex-change surgery to get it paid for. Even now, many transgender people face problems when insurers refuse to recognise the treatment as a legitimate medical expense.

Bereavement

When does grief become an illness?

Losing a loved one is the most devastating event that most people ever experience, yet the official diagnosis of depression specifically excludes people who have recently been bereaved. Now there may be a major shift.

Not only is bereavement a known trigger for depressive symptoms, but bereaved people respond just as well to antidepressant treatment as others with similar symptoms, says Jan Fawcett of the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, who heads the DSM-V work group on mood disorders. He thinks it may be time to class people who are severely distressed due to a recent bereavement as depressed.

For most people time proves at least a partial healer. But about 10 per cent of bereaved people are still debilitated by their loss more than six months later - and they can remain locked into this loop of grief for many years. Acknowledging their plight, the proposals for DSM-V are expected to include a new diagnosis of "complicated grief" or "prolonged grief syndrome".

The impetus for this comes from a team led by Holly Prigerson of Harvard Medical School in Boston, who has shown the condition can be reliably diagnosed (PLoS Medicine, vol 6, p e1000121). Katherine Shear, now at Columbia University in New York, has also found that the condition responds well to a form of psychotherapy designed to help bereaved people begin resuming their lives (Journal of the American Medical Association, vol 293, p 2601).

"Oh Lord, come to our Senators to stop Health Reform"

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Obama's Most Creative Speech Yet

One of the greatest things about being president is the ability to paint broad strokes. The man in charge can usually get by with expounding large themes like “vision” or “hope” or the “challenge of humanity.” Less visible executive staffers are the ones who sort out particulars of a new policy or diplomatic agreement after the motorcade departs.

But that won’t cut it for President Obama when he speaks to delegates Friday at the U.N.-sponsored climate conference in Copenhagen. When Obama agreed to attend the negotiations last month, he planned his speech to be the icing on an otherwise bland cake. Or, at the most, give one final push to an agreement hammered out by delegates. That, however, was before talks nearly deteriorated this week, hitting a stalemate just days before finishing. (Large countries have agreed only to small steps, while small countries refuse to accept anything less than giant leaps.) The result is an Obama forced to transform rather dramatically from America’s grand orator to its top negotiator.

Developing countries and the hordes of demonstrators at the talks have wanted to know one thing from the U.S. since the conference began: will it agree to sweeping emissions-reduction targets? The answer until now has been no, not without further economic analysis and assurance that other large countries like China and India will also play ball. The U.S. has, for good measure, thrown a bone to critics at the talks. Early Thursday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton agreed to a $100 billion transfer of mitigation funding to poorer countries to deal with local effects of climate change. That's a drop in the bucket for those small countries, which have asked for at least a trillion. And so the bickering has continued.

So when Obama arrives in Denmark on Friday, the American president will be forced to deliver his most creative speech yet. At the risk of the negotiations utterly collapsing, he’ll have to agree to further emissions cuts without overpromising what the Senate may agree upon next year. He’ll have to offer large sums for deforestation mitigation and adaptation for small countries without knowing exactly how much Congress will authorize. And he’ll have to make a repeated case for urgency in the face of the world’s environmental challenges while admitting that his country has, in fact, been one of the biggest foot-draggers of them all.

Obama’s no amateur when it comes to polished speaking, and his speechwriters will undoubtedly draft some shiny lines. But in the open plenary session that will follow, he’ll be asked for specifics. He’ll be asked to offer firm numbers on exactly what the U.S. will put in writing by a conference full of international delegates who won’t know or care just how slow the U.S. Senate actually works.

Never unprepared, the president will have some numbers in his pocket. Last month the White House announced that Obama would propose cutting emissions 83 percent by 2050, which would entail a 30 percent reduction below 2005 levels by 2025. But still, that's not nearly enough for the other frustrated parties around the table. One of Obama’s most valuable weapons will be the EPA findings released last week that too much carbon in the atmosphere can cause unhealthy lungs, essentially authorizing his administration to cut domestic emissions on its own.

But if Obama goes out on a limb, so as to say “If Congress doesn’t take up this issue, I will,” the delegation of senators and congresspeople in the audience may remind him that they don’t have to fund the effort.

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Not Flying South

Backyard feeders plus a strange sense of direction may have begun to split one bird species into two.
In southern Germany, some 10 percent of blackcaps (Sylvia atricapilla) fly not south, toward warmth, but rather northwest for the winter, says evolutionary biologist H. Martin Schaefer of the University of Freiburg in Germany. This novel journey, on record since the 1960s, probably became survivable thanks to the rise of backyard bird feeding in Britain, he says. Enthusiasts setting out seed and suet have kept the birds from starving until it’s time to wing back to Germany to nest.
The returnees from Britain nest in the same German forests as the more conventional migrators that fly to Spain. Yet the two groups now show subtle but distinct genetic and visible physical differences, Schaefer and his colleagues report online December 3 in Current Biology.
“It’s a good example of how humans can influence evolutionary trajectories,” Schaefer says.“The really cool thing here is that it seems to be driven by migration,” says behavioral ecologist Jeff Podos of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Other researchers have looked for these kinds of genetic differences between populations with different migration destinations, but have not found any, he says.
One or just a few genes are thought to control the migration direction for blackcaps, Schaefer notes. A classic study showed that offspring of parents that flew in divergent directions for winter grew up to migrate in an intermediate direction.
Migratory genes would, of course, differ between differently migrating populations, but Schaefer and his colleagues wanted to look for other genetic differences as well. Northwesters and southwesters varied slightly in parts of their genome that don’t involve migration. Small as that difference was, it was greater than the difference between southwest migrators hailing from far-flung parts of Germany, says Schaefer.
Northwester birds also had slightly rounder wings than the southwesters, the researchers said. Rounder wings improve flight maneuverability but don’t perform as well on long hauls. The northwester birds fly only two-thirds the distance the others do, so the slight shift in wing shape might be the beginning of adaptation to their new route.
Likewise, beaks on Anglophile blackcaps tended to take on a different shape, one more like the narrow beaks on generalist feeders. Schaefer speculates that winter feasting on olives and other big, fruity mouthfuls encourages wider beaks in the Spanish migrators. These blackcaps are more likely to choose mates that have similar winter tastes, thus preserving migratory differences in their offspring. The two bird groups aren’t new species yet, Schaefer says. But they’ve taken a few flights in that direction. More than 50 species that have recently rerouted their migrations may be experiencing similar changes, Schaefer says.

Sediment dynamics in the Rhine catchment :

Quantification of fluvial response to climate change and human impact
Dissertation
Publisher: www.knag.nl
Author: Erkens, Gilles

Pointer's birth place
Fluvial systems are strongly respon- sive to changes in climate and land use — but take their time to show it. Accurate prediction of the timing and degree of future fluvial response requires comprehensive understanding of fluvial response in the past. This PhD-thesis studied the response of the river Rhine over the last 20,000 years, as recorded in the morphology, composition and volumes of its sediment. Borehole data and various dating techniques were combined to time-slice cross-sections and to construct a series of palaeogeographic maps. A method to calculate amounts of sediment carried both in suspension and as bed load during millennia-long time slices was developed. This research shows that only climate changes during the glacial-interglacial transition and the strong rise of human land use during the late Holocene were large enough to trigger response and overwhelm ongoing autogenic behaviour of the river and the buffering capacities of the Rhine catchment. The climatic changes at the glacial-interglacial transition triggered incision and abandonment of the Pleniglacial braidplain terrace along the entire Rhine valley. This was accompanied by a shift from a braided to a meandering fluvial style, but it took several millennia to complete the transition to a single meandering channel. As a result, the Rhine was a multi-channel river during the Late Glacial and most of early Holocene. The last phase of fluvial response to the glacial-interglacial transition consists of increased delivery of fine sediment during the first half of the Holocene (until ~ 6000 years ago). This sediment had been stored in the upstream tributary valleys since the full glacial, and was released by incision of the Rhine and its tributaries when they adapted to the interglacial climate conditions.



Overall, this study shows that sizable fluvial catchments adapted slowly to large scale climatic changes, in both spatially and temporally complex ways. During the Holocene other external factors than climate change became important for the development of the Rhine system. In the Rhine delta, the combination of eustatic sea level rise and subsidence provided in large accommodation space for sediment delivered from upstream. Release of bed load by the meandering and incising Rhine in the trunk valley forms the source for bed load delivery to the delta. Both the Rhine trunk valley and delta are sinks for suspended sediment, and the amount of stored sediment in these areas was used to reconstruct fine sediment transfer through the lower Rhine. Following the aforementioned increased delivery of fine sediment during the first part of the Holocene, sediment transfer stabilised during the middle Holocene. During the last 2000 years the delivery of fine sediments to the sinks is up to 150 % higher compared to the directly preceding millennia. This can only be explained as the result of progressive deforestations for agricultural land use since the late-Neolithic (6300 years ago). The timing of the increased delivery of fine sediments suggests that pre-Roman land use was already extensive. Hence, prehistoric land use should be regarded as a drainage basin-wide forcing factor for fluvial systems.