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Geographyin the

News™

Neal G.

Lineback

THE BROWNDANUBE

Austrian composer JohannStrauss wrote his famous waltz “Onthe Beautiful Blue Danube” in 1887,but he romanticized when namingthe music. As one of Europe’s mostheavily used rivers, the Danube’swater is never clear and usuallybrown. Although a robust river, afterEurope’s hot and dry summer of 2003,the Danube’s waters fell in October tothe lowest levels in more than 100years.

The Danube is Europe’s longestriver after the Volga in Russia, whichis only 417 miles (671 km.) longer.The Danube arises in Germany’s BlackForest and flows for 1,777 miles (2,859km.) eastward before emptying intothe Black Sea on the Romanian andUkrainian border. Its drainage basinis 315,000 square miles (815,800 sq.km), two-thirds as large as the NileBasin. The Danube drains parts of 15countries, five more than does theNile.

The Danube has long served as apolitical boundary, one of the oldestbeing the northern border of the Ro-man Empire. It still serves as a bound-ary between Slovakia and Hungary,Romania and Yugoslavia, Romaniaand Bulgaria, and Romania and theUkraine.

The Danube has been a majoreast-west transportation route acrossEurope for hundreds of years. Someof Europe’s Crusaders traveled downthe valley on their way to the HolyLand in the 12th century. The Otto-man Turks used the valley in the 14thcentury to invade Central and West-ern Europe. Trade on the Danube hasconsistently increased throughouthistory. Motorized vessels carryingboth goods and passengers ply the

river nearly its entire length.On a normal day, river traffic is

constantly in view on the Danube, asit is one of the world’s busiest rivers.More than 35 major ports are locatedalong its banks and the Danube isconnected by canals to several otherwaterways, including the Main-Danube Canal to the Rhine River. Thisallows unbroken water transportationbetween the Black Sea and the NorthSea.

The recent low-water problemson the Danube are a serious concern,as ships and barges have becomestranded in shallow water. This hasreduced or halted the intense com-mercial and passenger traffic that nor-mally plies the river. According to areport in the Christian Science Monitor(Oct. 2), the river is so low that illegalimmigrants are wading across theborder between Bulgaria and Roma-nia. Unexploded World War II bombs,military tanks and even sunken ves-sels have been exposed in the river’schannel.

But there are related concerns, aswell. The summer’s record heat anddrought all across Europe caused rag-ing wildfires, failed crops and hun-dreds of deaths from heat exhaustion.The heat wave and drought also re-duced precipitation runoff, raisedevaporation rates and reducedgroundwater reserves, influencing

normal flows of streams all acrossEurope.

Some of the normal flow in theDanube’s headwaters comes fromglacial melt in the Alps. Throughoutthe latter half of the past century,glaciers around the world have beenmelting. Continuing warm, dry sum-mer conditions in Europe may bringeven greater loss of glacial ice and,consequently, further impact theDanube’s normal flow.Although un-usual heat and drought may be short-term weather phenomena, scientistsare worried that the past four years inEurope have witnessed warmer thanusual temperatures and about 20 per-cent less precipitation. If this trendcontinues, then there may be longer-term climatic change that could haveeffects on long-term navigation onthe Danube and other European riv-ers.

The Danube is a vital artery forCentral Europe. Anything that dis-rupts its use for transportation andgenerating hydroelectricity, as wellas general water use, can create majoreconomic problems for the region.

And that is Geography in theNews™. November 7, 2003. #701.

(The author is a Geography Professorat Appalachian State University, Boone,NC. For more information about the au-thor and Geography in the News™, go tohttp://www.geographyinthenews.com.)

The Danube River Basin

Geography in the News 11/07/03

©2003

Source: ESRI P. Larkins

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ViennaBudapest

Belgrade

Bratislava

BlackSea

AdriaticSea

Danube River

Danube River

ROMANIA

UKRAINE

MOLDOVA

BULGARIA

HUNGARY

POLAND

ITALY

YUGOSLAVIA

BOSNIA -HERZEGOVINA

CROATIA

AUSTRIA

GERMANY

CZECHREPUBLIC

SLOVAKIA

SLOVENIA

SWITZ.