The Atlantic

A Giant Blob of Floodwater From Harvey Is Still Moving Through the Gulf

Scientists aren’t sure exactly what happens when so much freshwater gets into the ocean at once.
Source: NASA

The rain began on August 25, and it would fall, remarkably, for four more days. We know now that Hurricane Harvey dumped as much as 60 inches of rain over parts of Texas. Twenty trillion gallons in all. The equivalent of the entire Chesapeake Bay. Enough to push the Earth’s crust down two centimeters.

All of that water eventually had to go somewhere. It made its way to the Gulf of Mexico, and its volume was so massive that it, an oceanographer at Texas A&M University.

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