
Michel MeybeckSorbonne University | UPMC · metis
Michel Meybeck
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Publications (284)
Degassing maar lakes were thought to be a new natural hazard until the Nyos Lake catastrophe (1986). Historical degassing events published for Lakes Pavin (France, 1785), Monticchio (Italy, 1770–1820), Albano Lake (Italy, 1829), combined with those of Monoun (1984) and Nyos (1986) in Cameroon, allow to propose a grid of degassing descriptors, on la...
Ce chapitre revient sur les catastrophes limniques (lac d’eau douce) survenues au Cameroun en 1984 et 1986, à un moment où des savoirs scientifiques sont presque inexistants sur ce risque, entraînant un exceptionnalisme des lacs maars (lacs de cratère d’explosion) camerounais. Suite à ces catastrophes, de nombreuses études sont menées sur des lacs...
This book gives positive examples how humans and rivers have been, and are still in some places, living in harmony. It analyses how this knowledge can be transferred into modern river management schemes and thereby it attempts to mitigate the deplorable trend of the decline of biological and cultural heritages and diversities in and along rivers. A...
River basins were identified very early on as a key component of chemical fluxes from continents to oceans, driven by weathering and biogeochemical cycles in their basin. Fifty years ago, important riverine changes attributed to human impacts started to be studied at the global scale, an evolution which has been the foundation for Anthropocene stud...
The accomplishments of the UNEP's GEMS/Water Programme over its 50 years of operation are summarized and an outlook for the Programme's future is presented. A list of GEMS/Water publications is included
Rivers of Europe, Second Edition, presents the latest update on the only primary source of complete and comparative baseline data on the biological and hydrological characteristics of more than 180 of the highest profile rivers in Europe. With even more full-color photographs and maps, the book includes conservation information on current patterns...
The Seine River and its basin (70 000 km², 500 m³/s mean annual discharge) are studied since 1989 by an interdisciplinary research programme (https://www.piren-seine.fr/). The river receives the effluents of about 17 M inhab (70% from Paris conurbation) and from industries. Intensive agriculture using agrochemicals is another cause of water quality...
The Seine River and its basin (70 000 km2, 500 m3/s mean annual discharge) are studied since 1989 by an interdisciplinary research programme (https://www.piren-seine.fr/). The river receives the effluents of about 17 M inhab (70% from Paris conurbation) and from industries. Intensive agriculture using agrochemicals is another cause of water quality...
Mountain areas provide disproportionally high runoff in many parts of the world, but their importance for water resources and food production has not been clarified from the viewpoint of the lowland areas downstream. Here we quantify the extent to which lowland inhabitants potentially depend on runoff contributions from mountain areas (39% of the g...
Sedimentary archives provide long-term records of particulate-bound pollutants (e.g. trace metal elements, PAHs). We present the results obtained on a set of selected cores from alluvial deposits within the Seine River basin, integrating the entire area’s land uses upstream of the core location, collected upstream and downstream of Paris megacity a...
The Seine River basin (France) is representative of the large urbanised catchments (78,650 km²) located in Northwestern Europe. As such, it is highly impacted by anthropogenic activities and their associated emissions of pollutants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). These compounds, originating from household heating and road traffic,...
The Seine River basin in France (76,238 km², 17 million (M) people) has been continuously studied since 1989 by the PIREN-Seine, a multidisciplinary programme of about 100 scientists from 20 research units (hydrologists, environmental chemists, ecologists, biogeochemists, geographers, environmental historians). Initially PIREN-Seine was established...
The aim of this chapter is to provide a critical assessment of the approaches and production of tools within the PIREN-Seine programme over the past 30 years, as well as their use for river basin management and river quality improvement, and to analyse the challenges for the future. Three types of tools used in the PIREN-Seine programme are present...
Large lakes of the world are habitats for diverse species, including endemic taxa, and are valuable resources that provide humanity with many ecosystem services. They are also sentinels of global and local change, and recent studies in limnology and paleolimnology have demonstrated disturbing evidence of their collective degradation in terms of dep...
The quantification of solute and sediment export from drainage basins is challenging. A large proportion of annual or decadal loads of most constituents is exported during relatively short periods of time, a “hot moment,” which vary between constituents and catchments. We developed a new framework based on concentration-discharge (C-Q) relationship...
Mountain areas provide disproportionally high runoff in many parts of the world, but their importance for lowland water resources and food production has not been clarified so far. Here we quantify for the first time the extent to which lowland inhabitants potentially depend on runoff contributions from mountain areas (39% of land mass). We show th...
The Seine River basin (65,000 km²) is extremely rich in cartographic documents generated over the past two centuries: general maps describing the territory, fiscal land registries, navigation charts (e.g. bathymetric profiles and maps), etc. After 1830 river engineers (Ponts et Chaussées) started to develop a huge network of waterways, which were c...
The Seine River basin (France) is representative of the large urbanised catchments (78,650 km2) located in Northwestern Europe. As such, it is highly impacted by anthropogenic activities and their associated emissions of pollutants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). These compounds, originating from household heating and road traffic,...
Sedimentary archives provide long-term records of particulate-bound pollutants (e.g. trace metal elements, PAHs). We present the results obtained on a set of selected cores from alluvial deposits within the Seine River basin, integrating the entire area's land uses upstream of the core location, collected upstream and downstream of Paris megac...
In 1852 a new machine to provide greater volumes of Seine River water to Versailles was decided. The new Marly Machine was operated by the Versailles Water Service (VWS), a 150-year old state-owned institution supervised by state ministries, managing the water supply over a vast domain that covered 32 towns in 1903. The VWS provided financial, tech...
River quality trajectories are presented for (i) organic pollution, (ii) eutrophication, (iii) nitrate pollution, and (iv) metal contamination over the Longue Durée (130 to 70 years). They are defined by a quantified state indicator (S) specific to each issue, compared to drivers (D) or pressures (P) and to social responses (R) that reflect the com...
Fine sediment transport in rivers is exacerbated during flood events. These particles may convey various contaminants (i.e. metals, pathogens, industrial chemicals, etc.), and significantly impact water quality. The exceptional June 2016 flood of the Seine River (catchment area: 65 000 km2, France), potentially mobilized and deposited contaminated...
This exciting volume presents the work and research of the Rivers of the Anthropocene Network, an international collaborative group of scientists, social scientists, humanists, artists, policymakers, and community organizers working to produce innovative transdisciplinary research on global freshwater systems. In an attempt to bridge disciplinary d...
The Water Framework Directive (WFD) has provided the means of standardizing the way surface water bodies are monitored throughout the European Union (EU), using a common evaluation measure, the percentage of surface water bodies at good status, based largely on the structure and functioning of aquatic ecosystems. However, the evaluation of good sta...
Public authorities in charge of preparing and implementing the 1964 French water law and the 2000 European Water framework Directive similarly relied on inventories. In order to justify public action, they needed to objectify a situation which was either poorly known or informed by heterogeneous criteria. We show that political considerations are e...
The European Water Framework Directive uses the average, median, 90th and 95th percentiles of concentration (C*, C50, C90, C95) as key metrics to assess the water quality status in streams. The fact that most pollutant concentrations vary widely with changes in discharge on seasonal and event-scales throws doubt on the reliability of these water qu...
Lake Pavin is located in the Auvergne Mountains, central France, at 1300 m a.s.l. This small lake (0.44 km2), partially fills an explosive volcanic crater in the Cezallier, a young volcanic area south of the Mont Dore. Its deepest part, from 65 to 92 m, is permanently anoxic, a very rare limnic phenomenon termed meromixis. Pavin is the cradle of Fr...
The legends, miracles and fantastic stories of Pavin and around are numerous, although the key ones are so far not attributed to it. The current legend, that of the Sunken City, common to many lakes, was created in the late XIXth century. The Thrown Stone and the Whirl and storm stories reported in the XIXth century are the transposition of the des...
“Pavin Stories”, told to the lake’s visitors seeking its wild beauty, were reported throughout the nineteenth century by famous scholars such as Pierre Larousse, an encyclopedist, and Elysée Reclus, a geographer: Pavin had no depth, no fish, could trigger furious storms and no boat could sail on it. Pavin history before 1770 was not established. Th...
Water is an essential building block of the Earth system and a nonsubstitutable resource upon which humankind must depend. But a growing body of evidence shows that freshwater faces a pandemic array of challenges. Today we can observe a globally significant but collectively unorganized approach to addressing them. Under modern water management sche...
Trends and seasonality analysis from 1980 onward and longitudinal
distribution,
from headwaters to estuary, of chlorophyll a, nitrate and phosphate were
investigated in the eutrophic Loire River. The continuous decline of
phosphate concentrations which has been recorded since 1991 both in the main river and in
the tributaries has led to the conclus...
Daily total suspended solids concentrations (TSS, mg L-1), yields (Y, kg day-1 km-2) and runoff (q, L s-1 km-2) in world rivers are described by the median (C50), the upper percentile (C99), the discharge-weighted average concentrations (C∗), and by their corresponding yields (Y50, Y99, Y∗) and runoff (q∗, q50, q99). These intra-station descriptors...
Décrit comme élément remarquable de l’Auvergne dans une Cosmographie universelle dès 1575 avec le lac Pavin, tout proche, le Creux de Soucy, près de Besse, est l’objet de fascination de la part des habitants. Il est une des très rares cavités, en Europe continentale, située en milieu volcanique. Sa profondeur est mesurée pour la première fois en 17...
Cet article fait revivre les différents explorateurs qui ont contribué à la découverte et à la connaissance du Creux de Soucy. Il présente aussi une de leur réalisation : la station biologique de Besse.
Trends and seasonality analysis since 1980 and longitudinal distribution from headwaters to estuary of algal pigment, nitrate and phosphate were investigated in the eutrophic Loire River. The continuous decline of phosphate concentrations recorded since 1991 both in the main river and in the tributaries led to a significant reduction in algal bioma...
The Anthropocene is characterised by a worldwide spread of hypoxia, among others manifestations, which threatens aquatic ecosystem functions, services and biodiversity. The primary cause of hypoxia onset in recent decades is human-triggered eutrophication. Global warming has also been demonstrated to contribute to the increase of hypoxic conditions...
The coastal typology contained in theses files is decribed in
details in Dürr et al. (2011) and attributes geomorphological
estuarine types to the entire global coastline.
It consists of a ribbon of grid cells at half-degree resolution,
located along the entire global coastline at the exit (mouth)
points of the global rivers. The typology was...
The human influence on the global hydrological cycle is now the dominant force behind changes in water resources across the world and in regulating the resilience of the Earth system. The rise in human pressures on global freshwater resources is in par with other anthropogenic changes in the Earth system (from climate to ecosystem change), which ha...
Data on riverine fluxes are essential for calculating element cycles (carbon, nutrients, pollutants) and erosion rates from regional to global scales. At most water‐quality stations throughout the world, riverine fluxes are calculated from continuous flow data (q) and discrete concentration data (C), the latter being the main cause of sometimes lar...
Carbon dioxide (CO2) transfer from inland waters to the atmosphere, known as CO2 evasion, is a component of the global carbon cycle. Global estimates of CO2 evasion have been hampered, however, by the lack of a framework for estimating the inland water surface area and gas transfer velocity and by the absence of a global CO2 database. Here we repor...
Carbon and total suspended sediment (TSS) loads were investigated from April 2006 to March 2008 in the mountainous watershed of the Isère River, French Alps (5570 km2). The river bed has been highly impounded for hydroelectricity production during the last century. Hydraulic flushes are managed every year to prevent TSS storage within upstream dams...
In discrete water quality surveys, riverine fluxes are associated with unknown uncertainties (biases and imprecisions). Annual flux errors have been determined from the generation of discrete surveys by Monte Carlo sorting for monthly sampling, from 10 years of daily records (120 records). Eight calculation methods were tested for suspended particu...
The Loire River basin is very sensitive to eutrophication due to its multiple-channel morphology, summer low flows, high water temperatures, and high exposure to nutrient inputs from agriculture and urban sources. The seasonal variation of nutrients and chlorophyll-a from the river headwaters to the estuary (1012 km) was studied by harmonic analysi...
Since the early 19th century, important agricultural, mining and
industrial development has been active in Western Europe. The Loire
River Basin (117,800 km2, total population of 8.4 Mp) presents a long
history of human pressures, reflecting temporal evolution of
technological and urban activities (Grosbois et al, 2012). Hence,
sediments of the Loi...
Global-scale water issues such as its availability, water needs or stress, or management, are mapped at various resolutions and reported at many scales, mostly along political or continental boundaries. As such, they ignore the fundamental heterogeneity of hydroclimates and natural boundaries of river basins. Here we describe the continental landma...
Metal contamination (i.e. a deviation from the natural content) of river particulates is closely associated with human history. Natural contents of Cd, Cr, Cu, Hg, Ni, Pb, Sn and Zn in pristine streams depend on basin lithology. Their quantile distributions (C10%, C50%, C90%, in parts per million) in French pristine streams are similar to those obs...
Hydrobelts divide the global landmasses into eight hydrological regions with resolution of 0.5°, based primarily on the annual average temperature (T) and runoff (q). The interbelt differences were maximised and intrabelt variability minimise. These hydrobelts are decomposed on continents as 26 hydroregions. The main aim of the dataset is to provid...
The Loire River basin (117,800km(2), France) has been exposed to multiple sources of metals during the last 150years, originating from major mining districts (coal and non-ferrous metals) and their associated industrial activities. Geochemical archives are established here from the analysis of a 4m sediment core in the downstream floodplain and the...
Questions related to water such as its availability, water needs or stress, or management, are mapped at various resolutions at the global scale. They are reported at many scales, mostly along political or continental boundaries. As such, they ignore the fundamental heterogeneity of the hydroclimate and the natural boundaries of the river basins. H...
The variability of water chemistry on a daily scale is rarely addressed due to the lack of records. Appropriate tools, such as typologies and dimensionless indicators, which permit comparisons between stations and between river materials, are missing. Such tools are developed here for daily concentrations (C), specific fluxes or yields (Y) and spec...
The GEMS-GLORI register, circulated by UNEP for review in 1996, lists 555 world major rivers discharging to oceans (Q > 10 km**3/year, or A > 10 000 km**2, or sediment discharge > 5Mt/year, or basin population >5M people). Up to 48 river attributes are listed, including major ions and nutrients (C, N, P) in both dissolved, particulate, organic and...