A2 · Elementary
9 min
environmentsciencearmed conflictafrica
The Vanishing Lake: Science, Water, and Conflict
El lago que desaparece: ciencia, agua y conflicto
This week, Boko Haram militants attacked a Chadian military base on the shores of Lake Chad, killing 23 people. But behind the attack lies an extraordinary scientific story: one of Africa's largest lakes has lost 90% of its surface area in just sixty years.
Esta semana, militantes de Boko Haram atacaron una base militar chadiana a orillas del lago Chad, matando a 23 personas. Pero detrás del ataque hay una historia científica extraordinaria: uno de los lagos más grandes de África ha perdido el 90% de su superficie en apenas sesenta años.
6 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| el lago | the lake | El lago Chad es muy pequeño ahora. |
| desaparecer | to disappear | El agua puede desaparecer si no hay lluvia. |
| mandar | to send / to be in command | Mando un mensaje a mi amigo. |
| el clima | the climate / the weather | El clima cambia mucho en el Sahel. |
| la señal | the signal / the sign | El planeta manda señales importantes. |
| el pescador | the fisherman | Los pescadores no tienen peces en el lago. |
Here's a number that genuinely stopped me when I first encountered it.
Ninety percent.
That's how much of Lake Chad has simply vanished since 1963.
Sí.
Yes.
El lago Chad es muy pequeño ahora.
Lake Chad is very small now.
Antes era enorme.
Before, it was enormous.
And this week it's back in the news for the worst possible reason.
Boko Haram attacked a Chadian military base right on the shores of that lake, killed 23 soldiers.
And I keep thinking, you cannot separate that violence from what's happened to the water.
El lago es importante para mucha gente.
The lake is important for many people.
Treinta millones de personas viven cerca.
Thirty million people live nearby.
Thirty million people.
And the lake is disappearing under their feet.
That's the story I want to dig into today, because I think most people hear 'Boko Haram' and think terrorism, religion, politics.
But underneath all of that is a science story.
Es verdad.
That's true.
El agua y la violencia están juntas.
Water and violence go together.
No es una coincidencia.
It's not a coincidence.
Walk me through the basics first.
When I looked at old maps of Lake Chad, I had to check twice that I was reading the right country.
In the 1960s it was the sixth largest lake in the world.
What happened to it?
Hay dos problemas grandes.
There are two big problems.
El clima cambia, y los humanos usan mucha agua.
The climate changes, and humans use a lot of water.
Right, and both of those things are happening at the same time, which is really the brutal part.
Let's start with the climate piece, because it's not simple.
En el Sahel, la lluvia es muy importante.
In the Sahel, rain is very important.
Pero ahora llueve menos.
But now it rains less.
The Sahel is that band of semi-arid land just below the Sahara Desert, running east to west across the continent.
And Lake Chad sits right in the middle of it.
The lake has no outlet to the sea, so it only survives if rainfall and river inflow keep coming in faster than the water evaporates.
Change that balance even slightly and the lake just...
shrinks.
Y la temperatura sube.
And the temperature rises.
Más calor significa más evaporación.
More heat means more evaporation.
There's a term scientists use here, a positive feedback loop.
The lake shrinks, which means less water evaporates locally, which means less rain forms over the region, which means less water flows into the lake, which means it shrinks further.
You get the idea.
It feeds itself.
Sí.
Yes.
Y los agricultores necesitan agua para sus cultivos.
And farmers need water for their crops.
Usan los ríos.
They use the rivers.
This is the human side of the equation.
The population around Lake Chad has roughly tripled since the 1960s, from about 10 million to over 30 million people.
All of those people need to eat.
Irrigation canals pull water from the rivers that feed the lake.
Less water arrives.
The lake shrinks faster.
Es un círculo.
It's a circle.
Más personas, menos agua, más problemas.
More people, less water, more problems.
A vicious circle.
And here's the thing that really gets me, the lake itself sits at the intersection of four countries: Chad, Niger, Nigeria, and Cameroon.
So when resources disappear, you don't just have poor communities competing with each other.
You have poor communities across national borders competing with each other.
That's a different kind of pressure entirely.
Cuatro países, un lago.
Four countries, one lake.
Es muy complicado.
It's very complicated.
Cada país quiere el agua.
Every country wants the water.
There's actually a body called the Lake Chad Basin Commission, set up in 1964, which in theory manages all of this.
Four countries, one shared resource, one commission to negotiate.
In practice, when you have farmers, fishermen, pastoralists, and armed groups all fighting over a shrinking pool of water and fish, a commission doesn't do much.
Los pescadores no tienen peces.
The fishermen have no fish.
Los ganaderos no tienen agua.
The herders have no water.
Están muy enojados.
They are very angry.
And this is where Boko Haram enters the picture.
Not because they caused the environmental collapse, but because they are extraordinarily good at recruiting people whose lives have been destroyed by it.
I spent time in the region years ago writing about food insecurity, and the thing that struck me most was how rational desperation looks when you're standing in it.
Boko Haram dice: 'Ven con nosotros.
Boko Haram says: 'Come with us.
Tenemos comida, tenemos dinero.'
We have food, we have money.'
Exactly.
And if you're a 19-year-old who watched your father's fishing boat end up beached on sand because the lake receded half a kilometer, that offer starts to sound different than it does from a comfortable chair somewhere.
Los científicos dicen que el lago puede desaparecer completamente.
Scientists say the lake can disappear completely.
Es posible.
It's possible.
Wait, completely?
That's not hyperbole?
No, no es exageración.
No, it's not an exaggeration.
Los modelos climáticos muestran esto.
Climate models show this.
Es muy serio.
It's very serious.
There's actually a historical precedent that should terrify everyone.
About 10,000 years ago, during what geologists call the African Humid Period, there was a lake called Mega-Chad.
It covered an area roughly the size of the Caspian Sea.
It dried up almost entirely.
What we call Lake Chad today is a puddle compared to what was there.
And it could happen again.
La historia del planeta es larga.
The history of the planet is long.
Los lagos van y vienen.
Lakes come and go.
They do.
But the difference now is the speed.
Natural lake cycles happen over millennia.
What we're watching with Lake Chad is a 90% reduction in sixty years.
That's basically one human lifetime.
A person born in 1963 who is alive today watched most of a major lake disappear.
En sesenta años.
In sixty years.
Mi padre tiene setenta años.
My father is seventy years old.
Es su vida entera.
It's his whole life.
That's a good way to put it.
And there have been proposals to reverse it.
The most audacious one has been floating around for decades: diverting water from the Congo River, which carries roughly 13% of the world's freshwater discharge, northward into the Lake Chad basin.
The engineering involved would be staggering.
El plan existe desde los años noventa.
The plan has existed since the nineties.
Pero es muy caro.
But it's very expensive.
Nadie paga.
Nobody pays.
The estimated cost runs to billions of dollars.
And then there's the political problem: the Congo River flows mainly through the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has its own enormous water needs and its own catastrophic political situation.
You're essentially asking one of the most unstable countries on earth to lend water to its neighbors indefinitely.
Es un problema muy grande para la política internacional.
It's a very big problem for international politics.
Y el lago espera.
And the lake waits.
The lake doesn't wait, unfortunately.
It keeps shrinking.
And the scientists who study it most closely say that small-scale interventions, better irrigation efficiency, replanting vegetation along the banks, managing groundwater, those things can slow the decline.
But they won't reverse it without addressing the fundamental climate reality.
Para mí, el lago Chad es un símbolo.
For me, Lake Chad is a symbol.
Muestra el futuro de muchos lugares.
It shows the future of many places.
I think you're right.
Aral Sea.
Dead Sea.
Lake Urmia in Iran.
There's a list of lakes around the world following the same trajectory, and Lake Chad is just the one happening fastest and in the region least equipped to absorb the consequences.
The scientific community has been raising this for thirty years.
I covered a story in 1998 about the warning signs.
Nobody moved.
Cuando el agua se va, las personas se van también.
When the water goes, the people go too.
O pelean.
Or they fight.
Migrate or fight.
That's the choice scarcity gives you.
And we're seeing both.
There are millions of displaced people in the Lake Chad basin right now, and there are armed groups that have turned the instability into a permanent operating environment.
23 soldiers killed this week.
That number will not be the last.
El planeta manda señales.
The planet sends signals.
Nosotros no escuchamos bien.
We don't listen well.
Eso es el problema.
That's the problem.
Actually, hold on, I want to come back to something you just said, because you said it in a way I haven't heard before.
'El planeta manda señales.' The planet sends signals.
That verb, mandar, I know it from Madrid, where it means something slightly different depending on context, doesn't it?
Sí.
Yes.
'Mandar' tiene dos usos.
'Mandar' has two uses.
'Mandar' es 'enviar' y también es 'controlar'.
'Mandar' means 'to send' and also 'to control.'
So when you say 'el planeta manda señales,' you could almost read it two ways.
The planet sends signals, or the planet is in charge and it's telling us so.
Both of those readings feel pretty accurate right now.
Exacto.
Exactly.
'El jefe manda.' El jefe controla.
'El jefe manda.' The boss is in charge.
Y 'mando un mensaje.' Envío un mensaje.
And 'mando un mensaje.' I'm sending a message.
That's genuinely useful, and I'd never thought about it that way.
In English we have 'order' pulling double duty in a similar way: I'll order the fish, or I'm in order, or the general gave his orders.
One word, multiple layers.
Fletcher, tú siempre comparas el español con el inglés.
Fletcher, you always compare Spanish with English.
No es necesario.
It's not necessary.
Fair.
I'll take the correction.
This is why Octavio has me on the show, to be humbled on a regular schedule.
Anyway, 'mandar': send it, command it, use it both ways.
The planet is definitely doing both right now with Lake Chad.
Thirty million people are living that sentence.