A 2020 Climate story

Meteorological phenomena we are witnessing aren’t entirely due to climate change, but climate change is accentuating them. It’s been 60 years since Spain hasn’t witness such strong impact from a weather event, as when the Atlantic storm Gloria reached its shores, eventually covering all its territory between 19 and 22nd of January 2020.

Four days after storm passed, I took the below pictures into Mediterranean sea resort of Estartit. Badly located neighborhoods were basically underwater…complete human error, by allowing their constructions in the first place…

Girona‘s province largest river, Ter, has normally a small delta, but that grew to considerable size during the storm days, bringing mud into the blue waters of the sea, and all left-overs of the upstream civilization…Even the natural parc around Isles Medes, an underwater paradise, was also reached by the muddy waters!

As expected, aside from material damages and human victims, there were also wildlife victims, caught unaware by the rage of waters! Sweet water fish pushed into salty water, drown wild bores and birds and insects…

The entire beach around river Tar delta was covered by left-overs of an invasive plant, the American-cane, which in fact reached Spain from Asia, and which is now suffocating other local plants, and it is cut (without much success) by local population, along rivers and wet lands, but which eventually reaches the sea.

Natural beach is lost under sea waters every year, except for few places where ground is still hold by vegetation, unfortunately these places are now rare (see the 2 photos below)…Such vegetation would protect the beach and its ecosystem, if there was only wisdom to allow their free service…

In the aftermath of the storm, local populations gathered by hundreds to clean the beach, I was one of the volunteers. I was surprised to see that number one plastic item in the sea are the ears cleaning cotton sticks, I could have collected entire bags of them!…In any case, first wave of people did a great job cleaning all the plastic, rubber and other materials from the entire beach, in just few hours…

After plastics were collected, also on the touristic side of the beach, the wood and the cane were collected, to be removed at later stage by local authorities. The beach around the delta is probably still not cleaned, would take much more human power to clean such a large territory were you were stepping on wood only, not on sand anymore…

One thing is for sure, we will witness more such events in future, in more places of the globe. Hope you learn from it, once you see its impact with your own eyes, and not through TV or smartphone screen, and will contribute either pro-actively to stop climate change (some tips on the ECO page of this blog), and/or by volunteering retroactively to help your community, the ecosystem clean-up or wildlife rescue.

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