Unexplainable

Solve me a river

37 min
Oct 29, 20256 months ago
Listen to Episode
Summary

This episode of Unexplainable or Not is a game show where listeners guess which of three river-related mysteries has been recently solved. The three mysteries involve freshwater mussels dying in rivers, why rivers dramatically change course, and which river is longest. The episode reveals that scientists have solved the mystery of river evulsions using NASA satellite data.

Insights
  • River evulsions (dramatic course changes) can be predicted using LIDAR satellite data by measuring sediment super-elevation and gradient advantage, enabling better hazard mapping and infrastructure planning
  • Freshwater mussels provide critical ecosystem services by filtering water and removing pathogens, but mass die-offs remain unexplained despite epidemiological investigation
  • Measuring natural phenomena like river length involves fundamental scientific challenges (coastline paradox) that make definitive answers impossible without arbitrary measurement standards
  • Climate change is increasing flood risk globally, making understanding of river behavior and predictive modeling increasingly critical for infrastructure and public safety
  • Scientific knowledge advancement often involves discovering new measurement techniques and tools (like space-based LIDAR) that reveal previously hidden patterns in natural systems
Trends
Use of satellite-based LIDAR technology for environmental monitoring and hazard predictionGrowing focus on ecosystem services provided by freshwater organisms in water quality managementClimate change driving urgency in understanding and predicting river behavior and flood riskInterdisciplinary approaches to environmental problems combining epidemiology, geology, and engineeringDevelopment of hazard mapping and risk assessment tools for vulnerable populations in flood-prone areasRecognition that infrastructure failures (levees, dams) require rethinking of water management strategiesExploration and scientific discovery continuing to reveal unknowns in well-studied natural systemsImportance of measuring and monitoring river systems as climate impacts intensify
Topics
River evulsions and course changesFreshwater mussel ecology and die-offsSediment transport and river dynamicsSatellite-based environmental monitoring (LIDAR)Flood risk assessment and hazard mappingWater quality and ecosystem servicesClimate change impacts on hydrologyRiver infrastructure and engineering (levees, dams, spillways)Coastline paradox and measurement challengesPathogen detection in aquatic ecosystemsFloodplain management and spillway designGeographic information systems and mappingMonsoon flooding and extreme weather eventsSediment super-elevation in river systemsSource identification in river systems
Companies
NASA
Used LIDAR satellite technology to measure river surfaces and detect evulsions worldwide over past 30 years
Guinness Book of World Records
Referenced as official source listing the Nile as the world's longest river, now questioned by scientists
US Government
Official position that the Nile is the longest river in the world, challenged by recent research
Army Corps of Engineers
Built floodgate on Mississippi River in 1960s to prevent it from changing course and joining the Atchafalaya
Minnesota Department of Natural Resources
Created time-lapse video demonstrating freshwater mussels' water filtration capabilities
People
Tony Goldberg
Professor at University of Wisconsin Madison studying pathogens in freshwater mussels and investigating mass die-offs
Douglas Edmonds
Professor at Indiana University who coauthored paper explaining why river evulsions occur using satellite data
Yuri Sonata
Explorer planning expedition down entire length of Amazon River to measure its actual length
John McPhee
Author of essay 'Atchafalaya' about Mississippi River control and floodgate engineering
Sally Helm
New team member and host of History This Week, guest on game show episode
Bird Pinkerton
Co-host of Unexplainable who presented freshwater mussel mystery on game show
Neil Dineshia
Science reporter and co-host who presented river evulsion mystery on game show
Quotes
"The US is actually a hotspot of muscle diversity. So we have all kinds of amazing species."
Tony Goldberg
"Evulsions have caused some of the biggest river floods in the history of our planet."
Douglas Edmonds
"It's like you're going to have to approximate like what level are you approximate?"
Sally Helm
"The best sort of solve for a volgens, if you're going to go down the engineering route is making spillways"
Douglas Edmonds
"Science too is this thing that is constantly carving new channels for itself and finding new directions"
Bird Pinkerton
Full Transcript
The world moves fast. You work day, even faster, pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work, built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create, and summarize. So you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more at Microsoft.com slash N365 Copilot. This week on Network and Chill, we're live from South by Southwest with California Governor Gavin Newsom, the politician behind viral TikToks and one of the most talked-about figures in American politics. After years of leading the country's most populous state, Governor Newsom is getting candid about why rent is too high, why groceries cost too much, and how the government is and isn't showing up for everyday Americans. Get ready for an unfiltered conversation about the wealth gap, housing, AI's impact on the economy, and what it'll actually take to build a better financial future. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash your rich BFF. This is Unexplainable or Not, the game show where we finally get some answers. Today, we wanted to introduce you to one of the newest members of our team, Sally Helm. Sally has worked on all kinds of shows you probably listened to. She's the host of History This Week from the History Channel, and she's done tons of amazing reporting for Planet Money. Welcome, Sally! Hello! I'm so happy to be here. It's a delight. It's an honor. And I'm scared. It's a game show, so I'm in the hot seat. Okay, Unexplainable or Not is a game show where you have to guess what we know and what we don't. You're gonna hear three scientific mysteries, and you're gonna hear them from me, from my co-host, Bird Pinkerton. That's me. And from longtime friend of the show, science reporter Neil Dineshah. Hello. Two of these mysteries are still unexplainable, but one of them has recently been solved. After you hear all three mysteries, you're gonna get a chance to guess which one you think scientists have actually recently explained. Okay. And this week, I want to start with a question we got from a listener. Hi, team. Love the podcast. But there's one thing that's been bothering me for a while now. Where does your cover art come from? I'm really excited we got this question because we do have new artwork, and we've been wanting to talk about it for a while on the show. New-ish. Yeah, new-ish, Bird is right. Okay, you're talking about like the podcast tile, the thing that shows up next to Unexplainable. Yeah, and it's a river map from 1944. And we figured the best way to explain why we chose a river map was with an entire game show all about rivers. Obviously, the easiest possible thing. What else would you do? Talk about it? The least amount of work possible. So first up, you're gonna hear a mystery from Bird. Sally, hello. Hi, Bird. Hello. Sally, we've known each other for a while at this point ever since we were- I've known Lo these many years. Interns at NPR, the same intern class. But I realized I've never asked you an important question all this time, which is, are you a fan of mussels? Mussels. Okay, since we're talking about rivers, I'm gonna assume we mean the kind that has shells that come together. We are indeed talking about freshwater mussels. Okay. So the unsung heroes of rivers, as some might say. Oh my God. I love an underdog. I'm already on board. So basically, freshwater mussels are in all kinds of rivers in the US. And this researcher, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, this guy named Tony Goldberg, he told me that the US is actually a hotspot of muscle diversity. So we have all kinds of amazing species. We have one called the heel splitter that looks- It looks kind of like a clam, but then it has this really sharp edge. So the name is sort of- Oh, ouch. So heel splitter arhills when you step on it. Yes. And then there's a kind of muscle that makes part of its little fleshy bit, essentially look like a tiny fish. And then a bigger fish will come and try to eat the fake fish. And the muscle will explode eggs at the big fish. So it carries the eggs somewhere else. Pretty cool. And honestly, I just wanted to take a minute with some of the amazing names we've given to these mussels. So you have the purple wartyback. We got the pocketbook, the flat pig toe, the mucket, the golden riffle shell, the stirrup shell, and my favorite, the turgid blossom pearly mussel. That is a poem in itself. That's a good name. I agree. And I think these mussels are just delightful in and of themselves. But Tony was telling me that they are also fairly vital for river ecology. So they essentially filter water like it is their job. They suck in the water. They pull out particulates so that can be food, but also pathogens like E. coli, herbicides, just like chemicals in the stream. And then whatever remains, they just kind of like poop out. And are they doing this to like eat and get nutrients for themselves? But then as a byproduct, they clean the water. Yeah. And there's this video from like the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. It's just like a little time lapse. And so they start with like two containers of like dirty kind of brownish, orange, just muck. One has mussels in it. One doesn't. And over the course of literally like a few hours, you watch the dirty tank, right? It remains filthy, brown. And the mussel tank just like cleans up essentially. The water becomes see through and probably not like lovely, but certainly more lovely than it was before. So these mussels, right? They are doing all this invisible work. And then on top of that, they're helping stabilize the river bed. They're feeding animals. They're like dead shells provide habitats. So they're just this like amazingly helpful, delightful creature that we have the privilege of having in our rivers. Except unfortunately for a while now, some specific mussels have been struggling. So actually some of the species that I told you about like the flat pig toe, the stirrup shell. Also, unfortunately, the turgid blossom pearly mussel. No bird. Yes. I am very sorry to say. They were all declared extinct actually in 2023 because I hadn't been seen for decades. Some other species are endangered. But also Tony says sort of more recently, researchers have started seeing these massive mussel die offs. A whole bunch of mussels will just like die over the course of even just one season. So he calls it like an ecological emergency. And Tony is an epidemiologist. So he studies like pathogens and animals, everything from monkeys, robins, fish, mussels. And he joined like a whole team of people that wanted to investigate this. He said they called themselves the Delta Strike Force of Mussel Interested Scientists. But in Tony's case, he's looking to see if the problem could be a pathogen of some kind, a bacteria or a virus or a parasite. Makes sense. Mussels dying, maybe they're getting sick from something in the water. Exactly. And so they kind of had to start from scratch, he told me in some ways. He said they had to figure out how to identify even that a mussel was sick. If you just look at its shell, you're like, oh, that's a mussel and you'd have to see its. Well, yeah, they kind of just like open and close and like hang out. So they had to sort of figure out like, how do you identify like sickness in a muscle? And there were a lot of viruses in these muscles, for example, but he had to figure out like, where are any of those a problem? Are there viruses or bacteria or parasites that are in the sick or dead muscles, but not in the healthy ones? And so basically, in order to kind of preserve our rivers as we know them, right, in order to keep these incredible animals in them that literally keep them clean for us, researchers like Tony are still hunting for the culprit here, right? The smoking gun that is killing off these muscles in these big die offs. And they have not found it yet. Okay. Unless they have. Please tell me that we know what is after our dear muscles. What do you think, Sal? Do you think we know or do you think it's still a mystery? You know, I feel so much like I want us to know that I'm wondering if we don't, you know, like I'm wondering if I just have optimism and hope in my heart that we have figured it out and it seems like we should be able to, but I'm intrigued that it's hard to even know what a sick muscle looks like. That makes me worry that maybe we don't know enough about muscles to really answer this question. So I'm going to say maybe as emotional self-protection that we don't, we don't know. I love the way you're thinking about it. So no need to lock in your answer yet. Just have it float around in the back for now. Great. As if on a river. Neil is up next. He's got another mystery for you about rivers. All right. Hello. We were not interns at NPR and this is the first time I'm meeting you. I've never met you before. Hi. Well, since I've never met you, I also don't know where you live. Do you live near a river? You know, I live in Brooklyn. So kind of near the Hudson and I grew up in Los Angeles, which is like, you know, ocean country. So rivers are a little less known to me overall. So I also live in Brooklyn. And I think one thing I've taken for granted in Brooklyn is that the East River and the Hudson River stay where they are. Like the amount of water in them might change. Like there might be like a flood or a drought and that could sort of affect how much water is in the river. But the course for the most part is pretty stable and they're so stable that we build entire cities around them, right? Like New York exists and these two waterways have sort of been a major part of the shape of the city. But sometimes rivers can dramatically change course by as much as hundreds of miles. And it's not like just a river meandering one way or the other a little bit and then coming back to where it was before, it like fully moves and it leaves a dry channel behind where it was before. What? I know, right? So imagine if the Mississippi River, when it hit Louisiana instead of going East and then down to Baton Rouge in New Orleans, it went West. Like Zoink different course. Exactly. And, you know, it would completely transform these cities like New Orleans would be in a lot of trouble. I mean, the entire state would. And this actually almost happened back in the 1960s. The Army Corps of Engineers built this huge floodgate on the Mississippi so that it wouldn't change course and join another river called the Achivalaya. Okay. It was trying to change course and the Army Corps of Engineers was like, we can't allow this. They were kept apart by the Army? They got kept apart by the Army Corps of Engineers. This tale of river love was stopped. Okay, yeah. It's a Star Cross love story. I'm hooked. Question, would they have had to rename one or the other of their rivers if they merged? That's a good question. Do they hyphenate? But that just kicks the can down the road. What if that river meets another river bird? Come on. Exactly. You know what? So anyway, these like dramatic changes in course are called evulsions and they can be pretty catastrophic. I talked to Douglas Edmonds, who's a professor at Indiana University, and he told me, evulsions have caused some of the biggest river floods in the history of our planet. There's a really recent tragic example of this when the Indus River in Pakistan moved west by 30 to 60 miles back in 2010. That flooding affected about 20 million people and almost 2,000 people died. I know. It's really brutal. Right, because we don't expect rivers to change in this way. Like you said, we've built whole cities and whole neighborhoods and people have their lives in a place where they didn't expect a river to be. You want to be right up against the river to use it as best as you can. Right. There have historically been so many benefits to being on a river. It's great for trade. It's also good water source. If it's not super polluted, it's also just kind of nice to be by a river. That particular instance in Pakistan, it happened during a really heavy monsoon storm. It was especially quick. But most evulsions, Doug told me, are slower. They take decades or even centuries. If you notice it in time, we can build things like that floodgate in Louisiana, which is called old river control. If anyone's interested in reading more about that, there's a great essay by John McPhee called Atifalaya. I love it so much that I talk to people about it unbidden all the time. But the point is that in either case, whether it's the slow gradual evolution or the fast moving one caused by a storm like in Pakistan, the stakes are really high. But it's still kind of a mystery. We don't really know what causes these evulsions to happen unless we do. We can do something about it. On this one, I'm going to say we do. I just feel like we know. I feel like rivers are so big, the stakes are so high. I mean, it is crazy that this happens. Imagining the Zoink, the turning left instead of right or right instead of left, it does feel like a magical thing. Yeah, I'm going to say we figured this one out. I'm going to say someone knows why. Okay. But you do have to remember that this was unexplained for a long time. No, it's so true. As I was saying that, I was like, we've had rivers. We've had rivers all the time. Like the end of this one was not that long ago. Hold your thought for now. There might be another mystery coming where actually there is another mystery coming from me right now. And mine starts with a seemingly simple question. What is the longest river in the world? Uh, I don't, I don't, the Nile. The Nile, great answer. That is basically what everyone would say. It's what the US government says. It's what the Guinness Book of World Records says. It's what Wikipedia says. But scientists are starting to wonder whether the Amazon might actually be longer. That was my number two. They're very good on river length, just intuitive river length. So when I heard about this, I was sort of surprised that it was even a question. Right. Like can't we just measure? Can't you just measure the river? Very big tape measure to the Amazon. We see where the river is. Just measure it. Uh, so I called up this explorer, Yuri Sonata. Explorer. An explorer. I, I'm so excited to just like interview an explorer, especially because he has this expedition that he is planning to go the entire length of the Amazon on a boat. Wow. And, and it has really big tape measure on it. Yes. It's going to just leave one end at the beginning of the Amazon. And then the snapback is just really dangerous. But he told me there's two things that make answering this question really hard. So one is deciding how to measure it. And two is deciding where it starts and ends. So let's just start with how to measure it. Yeah. Do you mean like what tool to use or like, do we go with meters or feet? So it's related to something called the coastline paradox. Basically, like rivers, coastlines are really tough to measure. So if you look at Norway and compare it to Russia on a map, Russia looks like it has this huge coastline. Norway is just this little country hanging out at the top of Europe. But when you zoom in, you'll see that Norway has all of these things kind of etching into the land, these fjords. And when you follow every little nook and cranny into Norway, it turns out Norway actually has the second longest coastline in the world, much longer than Russia, longer than the entire European Union. And it's because when you zoom in, these squiggly lines get longer. And it's the same thing with rivers. So from above the twists and turns, they get smoothed out. You see like, okay, the river is just this kind of line. But when you zoom in, you see it takes all of these little twists and turns. And the question is, how far should you keep zooming in? Should you zoom in to where you'll be measuring every twist and turn with a ruler or whether you'll be measuring every twist and turn with a microscope? The further you zoom in, the longer the river gets. It's honestly almost like a fractal. You could zoom in to the point that this question becomes absurd and there's a situation where it could become like an infinitely long river. That's probably beyond where we need to go. Rivers are actually the same. Trick question. And then also like rivers are changing, they're moving. It's tough to get a consistent measurement, just like Neil was saying. It's like you're going to have to approximate like what level are you approximate? Exactly. Any, any way you measure it is an approximation. Right. You just have to decide what approximation you're comfortable with. But that's only one of the big issues. The next one is where are you measuring from? So you might think, okay, just go to the beginning of the Amazon, right? But there's no one beginning. There's a bunch of little rivers that come out of the Andes and feed into the Amazon. You know, people used to think the furthest was the Maranjon River in Northern Peru. But then a few years ago, explorers followed another tiny river from the Amazon and they realized it went further away. This was the Montaro River. And Yuri says that at the source of the Montaro River, it just looks like some water dripping from a rock in the mountain. That feels like the beginning. I mean, it could be, but this is just the furthest source they've got so far. There could be another river that they haven't found. That's just really tiny and twisty that could actually go longer and start even further away. But it's so remote. It's so high up. We're talking like 15,000 feet up in the Andes. It's so high up that Yuri said that for the entire first month of his expedition, he's going to be whitewater rafting down the mountain. For a month. This is why we get to have explorers. Yes. This is why we still in 2025, we need explorers. And then the same issue happens at the end of the Amazon. It's less complicated, but when the Amazon hits the Atlantic, it runs through a series of islands right at the Atlantic where the land kind of starts to break up. And there's this question, does the river follow along the side of the islands or does the river end when the islands start? And so we're left with this situation where right now, most people think the Nile is the longest. One African scientist got in touch with Yuri because he heard about his expedition and was like, please, please don't take the record from us. But Yuri is plowing ahead on his expedition. Unless he's already done his expedition and we do know what is the longest river and I am pulling a fast one on you. I'm going to say, and I don't think Yuri would agree with me, but I'm going to say this is not an answerable question at all. You've convinced me that all rivers are the lengths infinity. It's all an approximation anyway. Oh, so your answer is there's no longest river. My answer is there's no longest river. I, yeah, I mean, one of my high school teachers once told me the difference between physics and math is if you're walking towards a wall in math, you never get there. Like if you're going halfway towards the wall, you just always go halfway again. But, you know, in physics, eventually you get there. Zeno's river. Zeno's river. Exactly. I mean, it's a creative explanation. You will have to ask yourself, did we choose to answer this question with math or with physics? Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think we don't know. I think we don't know this one. Okay. You got three mysteries. You got the mystery of muscles. You got the mystery of rivers changing course. And then you got the mystery of the longest river. They're all unexplainable, or at least they all were unexplainable at one point. One of these mysteries has recently been figured out, and you're going to have a chance to make your final guess after the break. There's a reporter named Emmanuel Fabian, who's been covering the war in Iran for the times of Israel. Recently, he got a ton of feedback about a tiny article he wrote, but he couldn't figure out why. It was about a missile that exploded just outside the Israeli city, Beit Shemish. I'd appreciate it if you could update your article. As in its current form, it does not reflect reality. Someone wanted him to say it was a missile fragment instead of a missile. Weird, because it was a missile, not a fragment. If you could correct this tonight, you'd be doing me and many others a great favor. Eventually, the messages got more threatening. You have exactly half an hour to correct your attempt at influence. You will pay the full price for your irresponsible act. Emmanuel finally figured out why people were getting so aggressive. They had bet money on how bombings in Israel would play out on polymarket. After you make us lose $900,000, we will invest no less than that to finish you. Betting on the Iran War on Today Explained. Support for Unexplainable comes from Shopify. Every worthwhile journey starts with a handful of granola and a brain full of dreams. Dreams like, what if I discover a new species? Or a new genus? Dreams like, what if I paint a masterpiece that whispers some eternal truth to everyone who sees it? Dreams of winning the big race car trophy with your big, fast race car. Or dreams of building your own thriving business. That last one is a dream Shopify can help you with. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. And according to their data, at least 10% of all e-commerce in the United States. Start with your own design studio and choose from hundreds of ready to use templates to make your online store. You can use their AI tools to help you with copywriting and glimping up your product photos and then use the platform to build a marketing campaign. You can turn those what ifs into a thriving business with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com. Slash unexplainable. Go to Shopify.com slash unexplainable. That is Shopify.com slash unexplainable. For a brief period of time in the beginning of the pandemic, a time that I'm very sorry to make you have to remember, there was this hot new app that promised to reinvent the way that we thought about social media forever. Clubhouse was going to be the thing. And this week on version history, our chat show about the most interesting and important and best and worst products in tech history. We're talking about why clubhouse took off and then ultimately why it went away. That's on version history available on YouTube and wherever you get podcasts. Why? Unexplainable. Okay. It's unexplainable or not. Sally welcome back. Hello. Business like. One word. We're so happy to be here. No, I feel like Sally's got her game face on, you know, she's ready. She's ready to go. Sally is the person who you're playing part cheesy and she's like, this is actually not a joke and I am mad at you. That your go to game there was part cheesy. I don't even think I've ever played part cheesy. What is part cheesy? No, it was like one of the most if you go, I went to like a board game mix of it and like half the board games were for cheesy. It's the most classic game and also I've never seen it. This is what I'm saying, Sally. Right. Well, later as team bonding, we're all playing part cheesy. Okay. And it will probably start a fight, presumably with Sally because she takes games very seriously, apparently. Anyway, so we've got three mysteries for you to choose from. Only one of them has been solved. Mystery one, what is killing freshwater mussels? Mystery two, why do rivers change course sometimes by hundreds of miles? And mystery three, what is the longest river in the world? So Sally, without making your final guess just yet, what are you thinking? What's going on in your head? I mean, as we know, my initial impression was we know about the rivers. We don't know about the mussels. We know about the Evolgens. We don't know about the muscle killer. And the question of the longest river has become a philosophical one in my mind that is unanswerable. I think what I'm feeling now is that maybe actually we know about the mussels because bird is right. The river question has been unsolved for so long that maybe it's still unsolved. Maybe it's still just like a giant geological mystery. I would say that when you're playing a game show, you might not want to take advice from the person trying to trick you. That's true. That's a great point. This is high level part easy. I'm playing Jackers. Birds playing part easy. I'm playing four dimensional part easy. Okay. I'm going to say that we have found why the mussels are dying. We know the answer to that. Okay. Mussels dying. Final answer. Yes. Okay. Here's the answer. It's almost as if you live in New Orleans, but over the course of a month, the river has disappeared. It's run dry. The river channel is still there, but the water is gone. Okay. I wish people could see Sally's face looking like just and bird just dancing. Wow. Okay. So we've solved this long running geologic mystery that we've been struggling with for centuries. Neil, what do we know? Yeah. Why does this happen? So the person you just heard is Doug Edmonds, who's that professor at Indiana University I mentioned earlier. He's one of the coauthors of a paper about why evulsions happen. So there are really two competing ideas for why river evulsions occur. One is simple when one is a little more complex. The simple idea is that water likes to go downhill. And so if the water finds a steeper slope than the one it's currently on, it'll go that way instead. Doug calls that gradient advantage. So the more complex explanation has to do with the fact that especially near the coastlines where a lot of evulsions tend to occur, rivers are depositing sediment on their beds. They're full of sediment. They're carrying it downstream. Some of it settles to the bottom of the river as it goes along. If you imagine just like you jack up a car with a jack, that sediment kind of brings the river up above its surrounding floodplain. That is what Doug calls super elevation, which is just one of those fantastic scientific names that everything should have. And we've known for a while that sediment can cause super elevation. We've known that since I think the 1940s or so, but it's been historically really hard to measure super elevation. Kind of related to what no one was talking about earlier, there's like all kinds of factors that makes it hard to measure what the surface of the river actually is like. But that is exactly what Doug and his team did. And they did it with space lasers. Yet space lasers. No. I did not know space lasers were coming. I, you know, I didn't either. Yeah. They used LIDAR from these NASA satellites to do two things. First, they actually measured the surface of rivers as they are now. All over the world. But they also use the satellites to find evidence of a volgens that happened over the past 30 years. And they found a bunch that they had no idea existed before. We ended up realizing that both super elevation and gradient advantage actually worked together to create the best predictor we now have of when a river evolution will occur. Wow. And, you know, I think like in, in a lot of the US and Europe, our rivers are really engineered. We have things like dams and levees and that floodgate I mentioned earlier, but we also have seen how they fail. You know, 20 years ago, very famously, the levees on the Mississippi failed when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. And similarly in the Indus River in Pakistan, part of the reason that the evolution happened is because a levee failed. So what Doug says actually is that the best sort of solve for a volgens, if you're going to go down the engineering route is making spillways, which essentially divert the flow of the river when it's in flood and sort of send some of that water and sediment into like a flood plain or somewhere else that like, you know, you can safely sort of just dissipate some of the force. But, you know, that kind of infrastructure is expensive. And for most of the rest of the world, which might not have the capacity to build that infrastructure or the time, frankly, these hazard maps could help people figure out where the most urgent places to build the most targeted kinds infrastructure could be. Or at the very least educate them on the risks, which is especially relevant now because climate change is making flooding worse. There's more water in the atmosphere. When storms happen, they dump more water on things like rivers that then could flood in the way that the Indus River did. And so that data could just save a whole lot of lives. Wow. So we know why rivers change course and we can do something about it. This is good news, Neil. So just to circle back to that initial question we got at the beginning, we started the show with this question from a listener about why did we pick our cover art and our cover art is a map from 1944 of all the courses that Mississippi River has taken over thousands of years. Wow. It's an evolution map. It's called something like the Mississippi meander map. It's basically the map of Neil's mystery. And the basic reason I wanted to do a game show just to answer this question is to show how many mysteries there are in rivers, these things that maybe we take for granted, how much we still don't know. But Bird, you were the one who found this specific 1944 river map. And I wonder if you could say a bit about what got you so excited about it. Yeah. I think we were looking at a lot of really beautiful old scientific imagery that is just at the crux of science and art, which is where I would like to hope that our show is. But I think what I really loved about this as we were all talking about it was this idea of science too is this thing that is constantly carving new channels for itself and finding new directions and new spaces and is both shaped by the environment around it and shaping the environment around it. And so this particular image just sort of felt really representative of just some of the themes of our show. I don't know. For me, I guess it reminds me that all the stuff that we take for granted, all of these things that you just, you look in the world and you see a river there and you think that that just must be where it's always been. And it's kind of like the scientific knowledge we tend to take for granted that it's just that way because we figured out the right thing. And when you see the map that the Mississippi River has taken over thousands of years and you see that it's sort of gone in different ways and traced different patterns, to me, it tells you how hard it is to get to where we are today in terms of scientific knowledge and also rivers. And it also tells me that like so many of the things that we take for granted are not written in stone and are kind of always evolving. I also like that Joey, the graphic designer we were working with, changed the colors such that it sort of also looks like guts and worms, but that is perhaps the last. We do like worms. Theoretically advanced. Take on the logo. Okay. One last thing before we leave. Sally. Yes. Even though you didn't win, you were so close though. I was so close. Until Bird sabotaged you. Even though you didn't win, we do have a consolation prize for you. We have a tradition on our game shows that I write a song about the revealed mystery. In this case, rivers changing course. So I'm going to play it for you. When I was young, it was paradise. Growing up right by the river side, by the river side. But one day I looked for tilapia and I couldn't find where the river was, where the river was. How'd my river abandon me? Maybe lasers from space will see the evulsions of yesterday. How my river curved away. When I was young, it was paradise. But I've made my tilapia sacrifice. No tilapia. Anymore. I love this so much. No one, were you like, did you write this while waiting for dinner? What is this? What is the tilapia? I call it no tilapia. Into the canon of river songs it goes. That's it for unexplainable or not. Thank you to our guest Sally Helm. You. To our presenters Bird Pinkerton. That's me. And Neil Dineshia. That's me. And thanks to our audience for joining us. If you have a mystery or a solved mystery you want us to tell on an upcoming game show, let us know. You can write us at unexplainable at vox.com. We read all the emails and that is it for unexplainable or not. Goodbye. Woohoo. This episode was reported by Bird Pinkerton, Meredith Hodnott and me. No, I'm Hassan Fowlde. I also wrote the music. Production from Meredith, who also runs the show. Editing from Joanna Salotaroff. Guessing from Sally Helm. Thank you, Sally. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala. Fact checking from Melissa Hirsch and Jorge Just and Julia Longoria are our editorial directors. Special thanks this week to Kim Moss for turning Bird onto freshwater mussels and to Joey Sendai Diego for designing our artwork. Thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show along with me and Bird. And if any of you out there have thoughts about the show, send us an email. We're at unexplainable at vox.com. You can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. Which really helps us out. And if you're into supporting the show even more and all of vox in general, you can join our membership program. You can go to vox.com slash members to sign up. And right now there's a sale 30% off on an annual membership. Check it out. Unexplainable is part of the vox media podcast network. And we'll see you next time. When I was young, it was paradise, but I've made my tilapia sacrifice. No tilapia anymore.