[Zhang Fei]

Now that I’ve looked a Google map, the scary part is that Chungking is upstream of the Three Gorges Dam. I can’t imagine how low the Yangtze’s water level must be for red tide to be a problem upstream of the dam. Ultimately, the Chinese will have to limit the amounts used to irrigate crops, meaning shut down a big chunk of agriculture that taps the Yangtze, until the drought is over. I am beginning to understand why grain prices are near record highs. This three-year Chinese drought can’t be helping matters. (The ethanol mandate isn’t helping, of course).

[muawiyah]

China has Great Droughts pretty much on the same cycle as North America. We were having one in the Southern Plains quadrant for a couple of years and this year it expanded to the Northern plains and the Midwest.

It touched the Eastern Quadrant, so that meant this was just short of the worst kind of drought.

Currently the drought is breaking as hurricanes spin up and onto the continent!

China's drought should also break this year.

The WORST we had that anyone saw personally and wrote about was in the Eastern Quadrant for a 70 year period ~ ending about 1609 or thereabouts. 17 years in the last half saw no precipitation at all and may have influenced Spanish thinking about how to carve North America up in the Treaty of London (1604).

[piasa]

It could be dust from bare red soil if there has been drought an dust storms upstream. Any areas out there with soil the color of Georgia clay?

[piasa]

It could be dust from bare red soil if there has been drought an dust storms upstream. Or it could be mud from red clay if there's been flooding. Any areas out there with soil the color of Georgia clay?

Or it could be something leached out from layers of ground that had long been dry before being inundated by the construction the dams.