A wet prehistory

THE Chinese call the Yellow River their “joy and sorrow” because its
life-giving waters so easily turn to killer floods. But the floods were once
much worse, says Ge Yu of the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology. He
compared the sediments left by recent floods with those laid down over the past
9000 years. He found that the “cataclysmic” 1843 flood—the worst in 2400
years of recorded history—was exceeded four times between 6000 and 8000
years ago (Geomorphology, vol 33, p 73).