Riversphere

Nitrogen Levels Drop In Groundwater

2010-12-09T08:04:00.000-08:00

Animal farms and fertilizers add huge amounts of nitrogen pollution to the environment across the developed world. But regulations on agricultural use and disposal of the vital nutrient in Denmark may have successfully curbed nitrogen in groundwater, according to new research published in Environmental Science & Technology.

Excess nitrogen has caused environmental problems such as dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay and Gulf of Mexico estuaries. Groundwater, which is recharged by rainfall and water flowing over the Earth's surface, also carries nitrogen pollution. Since groundwater is a source of drinking water, such pollution also causes concern about human health because of its potential to form carcinogenic compounds called nitrosamines.

In Europe, countries must monitor their nitrogen levels and aim for strict limits set by the European Union Water Framework and Nitrates Directives. To meet these directives' goals, Denmark established a monitoring program 20 years ago. Now researchers from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland and from Aarhus University have put its groundwater data to use.

They started by using the groundwater's levels of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) to estimate the date when each pocket of water sampled seeped into underground rocks: because atmospheric CFC levels have changed over time in a known pattern, the researchers could determine the age of each water sample. The researchers then measured nitrate concentrations in the samples and used those findings to estimate how much nitrogen trickled into groundwater from agricultural use over the past 60 years. The nitrogen inputs to groundwater increased between 1950 and 1981, rising from 60 to 180 kg of nitrogen per hectare. Concentrations stagnated until 1995, when levels started to drop. By 2007, the average nitrogen inputs dipped to 117 kg per hectare.

Lead author Birgitte Hansen, a senior scientist at the geological survey, comments that Danish government initiatives enacted in 1985, including limits on how much nitrogen farmers can apply to different crops, seem to have worked. Despite decades-long growth in Denmark's milk and pork production, accompanied by the increases in nitrogen use, less of the nutrient has found its way into groundwater. Hansen speculates that decreases in nitrogen that the team reported to have occurred before 1985 could have stemmed from widespread changes in agricultural practice like reducing the runoff from manure heaps or livestock sheds.

more from Chemical and Engineering News

Drought Drops Lake Mead To Lowest Water Level Since 1937

2010-10-21T09:03:00.000-07:00

Lake Mead, the massive reservoir that supplies water to millions of people across the southwestern U.S., has reached its lowest levels in nearly 75 years. Water levels dropped to 1,083 feet above sea level on Oct. 17, the lowest elevation since 1937, when the lake was first filled with the completion of the Hoover Dam. The dropping water level — which beats a previous record set in the 1950s — underscores the effects of drought and increased water demands on the Colorado River. “Everyone needs to know when we turn on the tap, it drains water out of the river and it has ecological consequences,” Gary Wockner, a campaign coordinator for the conservation group Save the Colorado, told the Arizona Republic. If water levels fall another eight feet, officials would have to implement water restrictions for Arizona and Nevada.

from Yale 360

Water Use in Southwest Heads for a Day of Reckoning

2010-09-28T10:42:00.000-07:00

A once-unthinkable day is looming on the Colorado River.
Barring a sudden end to the Southwest’s 11-year drought, the distribution of the river’s dwindling bounty is likely to be reordered as early as next year because the flow of water cannot keep pace with the region’s demands.

For the first time, federal estimates issued in August indicate that Lake Mead, the heart of the lower Colorado basin’s water system — irrigating lettuce, onions and wheat in reclaimed corners of the Sonoran Desert, and lawns and golf courses from Las Vegas to Los Angeles — could drop below a crucial demarcation line of 1,075 feet.

If it does, that will set in motion a temporary distribution plan approved in 2007 by the seven states with claims to the river and by the federal Bureau of Reclamation, and water deliveries to Arizona and Nevada would be reduced.

This could mean more dry lawns, shorter showers and fallow fields in those states, although conservation efforts might help them adjust to the cutbacks. California, which has first call on the Colorado River flows in the lower basin, would not be affected.

But the operating plan also lays out a proposal to prevent Lake Mead from dropping below the trigger point. It allows water managers to send 40 percent more water than usual downstream to Lake Mead from Lake Powell in Utah, the river’s other big reservoir, which now contains about 50 percent more water than Lake Mead.

In that case, the shortage declaration would be avoided and Lake Mead’s levels restored to 1,100 feet or so.

more from the NY Times

Bad water? It's the cheese.

2010-09-13T07:50:00.000-07:00

A century ago, a band of Swedish families settled in California’s Central Valley, attracted by land that cost $25 an acre and life-sustaining water from the gushing San Joaquin and Merced rivers.

The Mords, the Ahlems, the Nymans and the Wickstroms started dairy farms, milking cows and growing oats and corn for feed. The settlers, joined by Portuguese immigrants, relied on one another to tend irrigation canals and survive choking dust storms and crop-stripping plagues of jackrabbits and grasshoppers. In 1984, to add value to their milk, descendants created an enterprise that grew into Hilmar Cheese Co., one of the world’s largest cheese producers.

Now, much of the well water around the cheese plant, located in the agricultural heart of California, isn’t fit to drink.

New documents show that the cheese is the likely culprit in spoiling at least 18 water wells – probably more – in and around Hilmar. High in nitrates, arsenic, barium and salts, the well water tastes bad and violates federal health standards, increasing the risk of cancer and other health problems.

more from Environmental Health News

On China’s Beleaguered Yangtze, A Push to Save Surviving Species

2010-08-23T11:35:00.000-07:00

In the early 20th century, fishers on the Yangtze River regularly snared what may have been the biggest freshwater creature of modern times: the Chinese paddlefish. The behemoth once reached 23 feet in length, a third of that being a paddle-like snout that it used presumably to stir up the river bottom to flush out food. A single paddlefish could feed a village and was especially prized for its caviar. But decades of industrialization in China’s heartland have sounded a death knell for the king of the Yangtze. The last time one was caught was in 2003, and it hasn’t been seen since.

The paddlefish is not the only Yangtze creature to have become the stuff of legend. The last confirmed sighting of the Yangtze river dolphin, or baiji, was in September 2004. The Yangtze giant soft shell turtle, perhaps the largest freshwater turtle on Earth, is apparently extinct in the wild. The last two known individuals, a male and a female, have been united in a Suzhou
Yangtze River
Andrew Wong/Getty Images
About 40 percent of China’s 1.3 billion people live in the Yangtze River basin.
zoo but may be too old or too frail to mate. The Chinese alligator and the Chinese giant salamander are both critically endangered. The Chinese puffer fish and the Yangtze sturgeon are rarely spied these days. The Chinese sturgeon is on life support thanks only to hatcheries that release tens of thousands of fingerlings into the Yangtze each year.

Overfishing, pollution, and habitat fragmentation from dams — including the massive Three Gorges Dam — have brought the Yangtze to its current state. With more dams planned and Chinese officials intoxicated with unbridled economic growth, the future looks just as grim for the Yangtze’s vanishing species. Much of the river basin “will soon be a mere semblance of its natural state, offering few prospects for persistence of what remains of the river’s unique biodiversity,” says David Dudgeon, an aquatic ecologist at the University of Hong Kong.

All is not yet lost, however. Seasonal fishing bans have given some species a breather. “We can save the remaining ecology of the Yangtze,” argues Xie Songguang, an ecologist at the Institute of Hydrobiology in Wuhan. The potential savior that he and others are counting on is a 10-year fishing moratorium. Such a ban may seem drastic, but it would have a tiny effect on fish markets, as the Yangtze supplies less than 1 percent of China’s freshwater fish production, including aquaculture. A ban is feasible — if the political willpower can be summoned to implement it. With the Yangtze’s ecological health in obvious decline and the economic toll of a ban manageable, the prospects for a moratorium are looking better and better, experts say.

more from Yale 360

In China, Three Gorges Dam's image showing some cracks

2010-08-16T09:44:00.000-07:00

White-haired Zhao Chengmu lives just below the Three Gorges Dam, China's largest construction project since the Great Wall. If the colossal structure fails, the fragile 77-year-old shop owner will be one of the first to die.

But that's never going to happen, he says.

"This dam will be here for eternity," Zhao boasts. "Even if this dam is hit by a U.S. missile, it won't break — it'll just shake once."

Like Zhao, most Chinese herald their government's monumental enterprise to defy the mighty Yangtze River, choke off its devastating annual floodwaters and harness its raw power to provide cleaner energy. Such a mammoth engineering feat, they say, only serves to underscore mankind's supremacy over nature.

Critics consider the dam in less lofty terms: as Beijing's boondoggle. With an official price tag of $25 billion — and some estimates claiming three times that much — the costliest hydropower project in history demonstrates China's sheer arrogance in trying to tame nature's whims, they say, never mind the 3,000 tons of garbage that have been flowing every day into the reservoir recently.

A year after the dam went into full operation, cracks are already showing in the public image of the project. This year's torrential rains, the nation's worst in a decade, have severely tested the project's capacity to control the surging Yangtze, the world's third-longest river.

Last month, when floodwaters poured into the dam's 400-mile-long reservoir at 565,000 cubic feet per second, a government official acknowledged that "the dam's flood-control capacity is not unlimited" and hinted that more severe flooding could even risk the structure's collapse.

That's a far cry from the highfalutin claims of just a few years ago. In 2003, officials boasted that the dam could withstand the worst flood in 10,000 years. In 2007, the estimate was reduced to 1,000 years. In 2008, it was dropped yet again, this time to just 100 years.

more from the LA Times

Kids in Punjab villages losing sight to polluted drinking water

2010-08-16T09:37:00.000-07:00

Shankar Singh, 22, lost his eyesight a decade ago. His younger brother, Visakha Singh, who had no vision problem when he was born, too, lost his sight as he grew up. Welcome to Dona Nanka, a village on the Indo-Pak border where children are going blind apparently after drinking contaminated water.

At least a dozen children were either born blind or have been gradually losing sight within a few years of birth. "I started losing my sight when I was studying in the fifth standard. Gradually, I turned completely blind," Shankar says.

It's the same story in several villages nearby. At Teja Ruhela and Noor Shah villages, scores of children are similarly going blind. Residents say together these villages have at least 50 children and adults who have lost their vision to contaminated water.

At Teja Ruhela, Veena, now 7, lost sight in one eye when she was barely two years old. Veena's father Gurnam Singh took her to Sriganganagar in Rajasthan to restore her eyesight. She underwent an operation but it was not successful.

Shimla Bai, who will turn 11 this year, was born blind. She cannot keep her eyelids open for long as it hurts. Thirteen-year-old Saroj and her friend Jyoti have also been losing sight slowly. These villages drink groundwater hoisted to the surface by several hand-driven pumps.

Shankar's father Mohinder Singh draws water from a hand pump and pours it into a glass.

In about 20 minutes, the water turns yellowish.

"This is what we have been drinking for years," he says.

"There is no other source from which we can draw clean drinking water," he adds.

The government, on its part, has simply painted warnings on the walls of houses that the groundwater is unfit for human consumption.

India Today

Prince of Tides: A Mammoth Turbine

2010-08-14T09:17:00.000-07:00

What is being described as the world’s largest tidal power turbine was unveiled this week in Scotland. Dubbed the AK1000 by its developer, the Atlantis Resources Corporation, the one-megawatt turbine weighs 1,430 tons, stands nearly 75 feet tall and has six 60-foot diameter blades that can produce enough electricity to supply more than 1,000 homes.

The turbine will be installed later this summer at the European Marine Energy Center in the far north of Scotland, where it will be used to power a computer data center.

“Today is not just about our technology, it is about the emergence of tidal power as a viable asset class that will require the development of local supply chains employing local people to deliver sustainable energy to the local grid,” Timothy Cornelius, chief executive of Atlantis, said in a statement on Thursday. “The AK1000 takes the industry one step closer to commercial scale tidal power projects.”

Tidal power represents just a tiny fraction of the renewable energy produced worldwide, mostly because of the significant technical hurdles of deploying large turbines in flowing water. The majority of turbines in operation are experimental prototypes deployed in Europe.

Yet as the unveiling of the AK1000 clearly shows, the allure of producing clean, reliable power from the daily in-and-out flux of the tides continues to attract significant investment. And Atlantis faces substantial competition in the race to develop affordable commercial-scale tide power, with dozens of other companies developing a variety of turbine designs.

Flowing water can be tapped for power just as wind is, but because water is far denser than air, its movement contains far more potential energy. Tidal energy has other benefits: as turbines are placed underwater, they are silent and out of sight. And many tidal inlets with significant energy potential are found close to the densely populated urban areas where electricity demand is highest.

Rough and cold seas can cause heavy wear and tear on tidal turbines, but Atlantis says its machines are designed specifically to withstand the rigors of the North Atlantic.

“In order to get a robust turbine, we have had to make what we call ultimately the dumbest, simple but most robust turbine you could possibly put in such a harsh environment,” Mr. Cornelius told BBC Scotland.

from the NY Times

Pakistan floods 'hit 14m people'

2010-08-06T11:56:00.000-07:00

The worst floods in Pakistan's history have hit at least 14 million people, officials say.

Twelve million are affected in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab provinces, while a further two million are affected in Sindh.

In Indian-administered Kashmir, at least 113 people died in mudslides.

Meanwhile, it has emerged that a charity connected to a group with alleged al-Qaeda links has been providing flood relief.

Gen Nadeem Ahmed, of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), said 12 million people had been affected in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab provinces, where 650,000 houses were destroyed.

The cost of rebuilding roads there was put at some 5bn Pakistani rupees ($59m, £38m), while the bill for fixing damage to power infrastructure and dams would come to another 2.5bn rupees.

"In my opinion, when assessments are complete, this will be the biggest disaster in the history of Pakistan," the general said in Islamabad.

Anger is growing at the absence of President Asif Ali Zardari, who left the country to visit Britain for talks with Prime Minister David Cameron.

With flood victims bitterly accusing the authorities of failing to come to their aid, the disaster has piled yet more pressure on an administration struggling to contain Taliban violence and an economic crisis.

Flooding has submerged whole villages in the past week, killing at least 1,600 people, according to the UN.

And the worst floods to hit the region in 80 years could get worse, as it is only midway through monsoon season.

According to the federal flood commission, 1.4m acres (557,000 hectares) of crop land has been flooded across the country and more than 10,000 cows have perished.

more from the BBC

Determining dangers of DEET

2010-08-06T07:06:00.000-07:00

DEET may be safe to spray on your skin, but not to swallow in drinking water.

To see how safe or unsafe it is, the Minnesota Department of Health has picked the popular insect repellent ingredient as the first of seven "chemicals of emerging concern" to assess during the next year.

"We shower, it goes down the drain, and it ends up in wastewater that goes into rivers," said state toxicologist Helen Goeden.

Like many compounds, there are no state or federal standards for DEET, yet it has been detected in water samples nationwide, including Minnesota.

Examining DEET is part of a broader state effort to track dozens of chemicals in the environment, such as synthetic hormones, pesticides, pharmaceuticals and personal care products. Little is known about their potential effects on the environment or human health, so researchers must piece together whatever information is available, chemical by chemical.

For DEET, they will assemble data about where it has turned up in Minnesota waters and at what concentrations.

Goeden said there's no evidence of DEET in drinking water here, but it may be only a matter of time.

more from the Star-Tribune (MN)

Mississippi River pours as much dispersant into the Gulf of Mexico as BP

2010-08-05T12:21:00.000-07:00

Every day during the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster, contractors sprayed an average 140,000 pounds of Corexit dispersant onto oil slicks on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico and into the oil being released a mile below.

But what few in the public understood was that an equivalent amount of similar surfactant chemicals -- the active ingredient in Corexit and in household soaps and industrial solvents -- enters the Gulf each day from the Mississippi River, with more flowing in from other rivers and streams along the coast.
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Surfactants are only one of a myriad of potentially harmful chemical substances delivered by the Mississippi and other rivers and streams to the Gulf each day, scientists say.

"We have abused the Gulf for years," said George Crozier, executive director of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab and associate professor of marine science at the University of South Alabama. "We have our own versions of the dead zone in Mobile Bay. The most famous is the Jubilee, which is certainly caused by nutrient-fed algae blooms and low-oxygen driven."

The surfactants in the Mississippi and other rivers are the ingredients in dishwasher detergent and industrial solvents that cause oils to disperse. They get into the Mississippi from the disposal of wastewater to sewage treatment plants and directly to the river.

According to a 1996 U.S. Geological Survey report, the median concentration of surfactants in the river was .05 parts per million. Based on the river's average flow rate, that would result in 140,000 pounds of surfactant entering the Gulf each day, said David Dzombak, director of the Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research at Carnegie Mellon University and chairman of a National Research Council committee that authored a 2008 study of Mississippi River water quality.

Based on information released by federal officials Wednesday, an average of 140,000 pounds of dispersant a day has been used during the first 104 days of the spill.

The 2008 study Dzombak chaired, like many others, pointed at nutrients as the most obvious threats to the Gulf's ecological health, as evidenced by this week's announcement by Louisiana Marine Consortium Director Nancy Rabalais that this summer's annual low-oxygen dead zone created by those nutrients ranks among the largest ever, almost as large as the state of New Jersey.

During the past 20 years, however, researchers with the Geological Survey also have identified a variety of what they refer to as "emerging contaminants" that may also be harming organisms in the Gulf.

These include a long list of pharmaceutical and household chemicals, ingredients used to make plastics, and new herbicides and pesticides.

Former Tulane University chemical engineer Glen Boyd found that the river's water contained measurable amounts of estrogen compounds from birth control pills and of the aspirin substitute naproxen.

more from the Times Picayune

Growing Shortages of Water Threaten China’s Development

2010-07-31T23:04:00.000-07:00

On a recent visit to the Gobi desert, which stretches across China’s western Gansu province, I came upon an unusual sign. In the midst of a dry, sandy expanse stood a large billboard depicting a settlement the government intended to build nearby — white buildings surrounded by lush, green, landscaped lawns, and in the center a vast, gleaming blue reservoir. The illustration’s bright colors were quite unlike the actual surroundings, which consisted of dull sky that faded into a horizon of undulating, parched-brown hillsides.

Still, the billboard’s promise was clear: Through feats of engineering and willpower, specifically the planned construction of a series of aqueducts to bring water from a tributary of China’s Yellow River, the government pledged to build new homes and remake nature. Let there be water.

My companion, the young Chinese environmentalist Zhao Zhong, founder of the nonprofit group, Green Camel Bell, was dubious. He pointed out that not only has the water level of the Yellow River been declining in recent years, in some months no longer reaching the Pacific Ocean, but that the river is now an estimated 10 percent sewage by volume. Watering the desert seemed to him, quite literally, a pipe dream.

Yet the sign conjuring an oasis in the desert does point to a very real dilemma: In order to sustain its rapid development, China needs a lot of water. It can only build as many cities as it can supply with clean water. And the country’s water supply is precariously limited: The Middle Kingdom is home to 20 percent of world’s population, but just 7 percent of its available freshwater resources. Rapid urbanization is quickly increasing demand for fresh water, while climate change threatens to further reduce availability.

Wang Rusong, an expert in urban ecosystems at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an environmental advisor to Beijing’s mayor, told me when I visited his offices in May that China’s most worrisome environmental challenge is not what it has too much of — pollution, sewage, carbon emissions, etc. — but what it doesn’t have enough of: “The limiting factor in Beijing’s development is water,” he said. And Beijing is hardly alone.

more from Yale 360

A river again?

2010-07-31T22:44:00.000-07:00

Behind the parking lot of a dilapidated casino in the city of Compton, Calif., runs a few miles of earthen-bottom creek, a tributary to the Los Angeles River, where blue herons alight on graffitied lamp posts and red-winged blackbirds feed among the cattails. Environmentalists have long fought to save this rare patch of urban nature from development, dredging and dumping, not just for the sake of open space in this park-poor neighborhood, but for water quality: Those cattails, for example, consume nitrogen from fertilizer runoff bound for the ocean.

But the creek's defenders have had scant legal basis for their fight: In 2008, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decided that only four miles of the Los Angeles qualified as "navigable" under the Clean Water Act, meaning the eight major tributaries of the concrete trapezoidal channel L.A. stubbornly insists on calling a river remained stranded outside the protection of the federal law.

That changed on July 8, when EPA administrator Lisa Jackson stood on Compton's banks and declared all 51 miles of the Los Angeles River a "traditional navigable river." That means Compton and the other tributaries now pass "the Rapanos test" -- named for the Michigan scofflaw in U.S. v. Rapanos who paved a wetland to put up a shopping mall and, thanks to a landmark 2006 U.S. Supreme Court decision, got away with it. Rapanos limited Clean Water Act protection to waterways that have "a significant nexus" to navigable U.S. waters. That the Los Angeles River's tributaries now count among them won't stop every attempt to alter a creek, but it imposes an extra layer of pollution limits, subjecting development plans in the creek beds and floodplains to more lengthy and costly review processes.

"The EPA's decision could set a different paradigm for conservation here," says Meredith McCarthy, the director of programs at the nonprofit Heal the Bay and a key defender of Compton Creek. "We could be moving in the direction of valuing nature in urban centers."

That seemed to be the point Jackson was trying to make, too, in concert with other federal officials accompanying her on a national tour for President Obama's "America's Great Outdoors" initiative. She frankly assailed Rapanos and its companion, U.S. v. Carabell, another Michigan wetland case in which the court ruled in favor of a developer. "Those decisions made it such that we couldn't tell whether a creek like the one we stand before in an urban area was water," she told her listeners. "(But) ladies and gentlemen, this is a watershed."

After her talk, Jackson ventured down to the water. "She put on yellow waders and followed us in," says Miguel Luna of the nonprofit Urban Semillas, who teaches middle- and high-school students to test water in city streams. "The kids got a chance to explain to her what kind of data they were collecting and why."

more from High Country News

Delaware Drinking Water at Risk: Filtering strongly recommended

2010-07-26T15:00:00.000-07:00

Kim Furtado filters every drop of water her family drinks, using an on-tap fixture.

Then she filters it again with a countertop model.

Her drinking water comes from "one of those shallow wells," said Furtado, a naturopathic health practitioner from Millsboro. "It's 60 feet deep and I'm not very comfortable with it."

Sixty miles north, Richard F. Davis, a former state representative and a DuPont Co. chemist, relies on a whole-house filter in his Mariners Watch neighborhood, three miles west of the Delaware City Refinery. Artesian Water supplies the community and, by law, routinely tests its supplies, taken from some of the state's deepest aquifers.

Davis, who said he considers his water safe, still wanted something extra.

"Since all of the water systems are interconnected," Davis said, "it's impossible to know where all the water comes from."

It's also difficult to get an absolute answer about just what is, or isn't, in Delaware's water -- difficult enough that some real estate agents routinely suggest water-filter installations even in the absence of known problems.

Although most residents are supplied by regularly tested public drinking water systems, thousands of unregulated substances can be found in the environment and water. Thousands of homes, meanwhile, take water directly from the ground, with testing left up to the owners.

Testing is a critical routine for most of the state's water suppliers. Filtering is ubiquitous.

"If people aren't asking about them, they should," said Pauline Murray, a real estate agent with Murray Realty in Newark. "A filter system would probably be an advantage. City water is loaded with stuff just as much as anywhere else."

more from Wilmington News Journal

Streams Of Noxiousness

2010-07-23T09:08:00.000-07:00

Long after crews have cleaned up a chemical spill on the ground, the contaminants persist underground and eventually make their way through the soil and rock to groundwater that supplies drinking wells and sustains aquatic ecosystems. Now scientists have developed an easier way to monitor groundwater contamination in cities, which should allow for more proactive screening (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI: 10.1021/es101492x).

In urban areas, spills from manufacturing plants and underground gasoline storage tanks "can act as long-term sources of groundwater contamination, lasting from decades to centuries," says hydrogeologist James Roy at Environment Canada, the nation's environmental regulation agency. But monitoring urban groundwater is patchy at best, because it often depends on sampling from observation wells. In cities, drilling these wells is costly, time-consuming, and sometimes unfeasible due to land ownership issues.

Roy and his colleagues wanted to develop an approach that avoided these wells. So they decided to sample from urban streams, which often run through public land and receive discharge from groundwater.

The researchers collected groundwater beneath streams in three Canadian cities: Angus, Ontario; Amherst, Nova Scotia; and Halifax, Nova Scotia. The team used a device that consisted of a steel tube attached to a drive head, which they could drill into the sediment at the stream's bottom. Holes in the drive head allowed the researchers to pump water from below the streambed into collection tubes for analysis. They collected multiple samples along several-hundred-meter stretches of the streams to perform a complete survey of the area's groundwater.

In these test streams, the researchers detected previously-identified chlorinated solvent contaminants from nearby dry-cleaning shops and an aerospace facility. But they also identified a broad range of unexpected contaminants, such as petroleum, arsenic, and chemical signatures consistent with sewage and lawn-care products. The technique is only semi-quantitative, so the scientists could not measure exact quantities of these pollutants.

Still Brewster Conant, a hydrogeologist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, says that by sampling below streambeds, this new approach offers "a good reconnaissance method for determining contamination problems in a watershed."

from EST news

Map Illustrates Extent of World’s Marine Dead Zones

2010-07-23T09:03:00.000-07:00

A new NASA map illustrates the significant expansion of the world’s marine dead zones, deepwater regions where dissolved oxygen is so low marine species cannot survive. Many of these dead zones occur off densely populated coastlines, particularly along the eastern United States and in Northern Europe. Scientists produced the map using data from satellites that can detect high concentrations of particulate matter, an indicator of overly fertile waters that can create dead zones. The zones arise when fertilizers applied to crops wash into streams and rivers, eventually reaching coastal waters, where the excess nutrients trigger massive algae blooms. When the algae die, they sink to the ocean’s depths, where they essentially become fertilizer for microbes that decompose the organic matter and consume oxygen, suffocating marine life. In 2008, a study found that dead zones had spread exponentially since the 1960s, affecting more than 400 ecosystems and a total area of more than 152,000 square miles (245,000 square kilometers).

from Yale 360

Dams for Patagonia

2010-07-23T08:48:00.000-07:00

In rolling hills at the foot of a basalt massif, the people of this compact, ordered town live mainly by fishing and cattle ranching. For many, life is not dramatically different from that experienced by the pioneers who first cleared the valley nearly a century ago and built timber homes. But graffiti around town reveal a new disquiet. "Patagonia Sin Represas!" ("Patagonia Without Dams!") is perhaps the politest of the slogans sprayed across the walls and buildings of this place, the capital of the Aysén region in Patagonia. They reflect anger over plans to build at least seven major hydropower dams in the area.

Home to condors and alpaca-like guanacos, puma, and blue whales, Patagonia is the tail end of the Americas, one of the last accessible nowhere lands on the planet. It contains the Southern Ice Field, the world's third most important reserve of freshwater after Antarctica and Greenland. And in its untamed wilderness of glaciers and mountain peaks, companies are preparing to raise not just hydrodams but also a 70-meter-high transmission line to transport power more than 2400 kilometers north to Santiago, Chile's capital, and the energy-hungry mines beyond. The line would require one of the world's biggest clearcuts, a 120-meter-wide corridor through ancient forests—fragmenting ecosystems—and the installation of more than 5000 transmission towers.

Proponents of the dams argue that hydroelectricity is a clean source of energy, that Chile needs the 3500 MW/yr of power to meet its development goals and, lacking oil or coal reserves, has no viable alternative (see sidebar, p. 384). But more than 50 international environmental groups have come together to try to block dam construction under the umbrella organization that uses the slogan "Patagonia Sin Represas" as its name.

more from Science

Does Egypt Own The Nile? A Battle Over Precious Water

2010-07-22T06:27:00.000-07:00

A simmering dispute over who owns the waters of the River Nile is heating up. From its headwaters in Ethiopia and the central African highlands to the downstream regional superpower Egypt, the Nile flows through 10 nations. But by a quirk of British colonial history, only Egypt and its neighbor Sudan have any rights to its water.

That is something the upstream African nations say they can no longer accept. Yet as the nations of the Nile bicker over its future, nobody is speaking up for the river itself — for the ecosystems that depend on it, or for the physical processes on which its future as a life-giving resource in the world’s largest desert depends. The danger is that efforts to stave off water wars may lead to engineers trying to squeeze yet more water from the river — and doing the Nile still more harm. What is at risk here is not only the Nile, but also the largest wetland in Africa and one of the largest tropical wetlands in the world — the wildlife-rich Sudd.

Built in the 1960s, the High Aswan dam allows Egypt to control the flow of the Nile.
In May, five upstream Nile nations — Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda — signed a treaty declaring their rights to a share of the river’s flow. They said they would no longer be bound by a treaty drawn up by the British in 1959. That treaty had given Egypt 55.5 cubic kilometers of the river’s flow and Sudan 18.5 cubic kilometers, but no formal entitlements for any nation upstream.

In essence the five nations were calling Egypt’s bluff. Egypt entirely controls the river’s flow from the moment it crosses the border from Sudan and is captured by the High Aswan dam, built by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser with Russian help in the 1960s. But Egypt’s control depends on what comes downstream, over which it has no control. In the past, Egypt has frequently said any attempt by upstream nations to take what it regarded as Egyptian water would result in war.

more from EHN 360

Parched California: Severe water shortages loom

2010-07-21T20:17:00.000-07:00

Over 1,100 U.S. counties— more than one-third of all counties in the lower 48 states — now face higher risks of water shortages by mid-century as the result of global warming and more than 400 of these counties – many within the Central Valley -- will be at extremely high risk for water shortages, based on estimates from a new report by Tetra Tech for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The report uses publicly available water use data across the United States and climate projections from a set of models used in recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) work to evaluate withdrawals related to renewable water supply.

The report finds that 14 states face an extreme or high risk to water sustainability, or are likely to see limitations on water availability as demand exceeds supply by 2050.

These areas include parts of Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. In particular, in the Great Plains and Southwest United States, water sustainability is at extreme risk.

The more than 400 counties identified as being at greatest risk in the report reflects a 14-times increase from previous estimates.

more from the NY Times

China Three Gorges dam faces major flood test

2010-07-19T05:55:00.000-07:00

China's massive Three Gorges dam is facing a major test of the flood control function that was one of the key justifications for its construction, as torrential rains swell the rivers that feed it, state media said Monday.

Much of China has been suffering flooding and landslides after weeks of torrential downpours. At least 146 people have died since the start of this month, as a result of the rains, and another 40 are missing.

The peak flow of water hitting the giant reservoir on the Yangtze River, China's longest, will be higher than in 1998 when devastating floods killed over 4,000 people and forced some 18 million to relocate, the official China Daily said.

Engineers have raised the rate at which water is being sluiced out of the reservoir, to make room for new waves of floodwaters expected this week.

"The levels of this flooding will be higher than the historic floods of 1954 and 1998," Wei Shanzhong, Head of the Flood Control and Drought Administration office for the Yangtze River, told state Television.

"The rain in the gorges area will have an immediate affect on the water flow, to around 70,000 cubic meters (per second)."

Overall however, the flood this year is expected to be shorter than the 1998 disaster.

When the flood-tide hits, locks that allow shipping on the reservoir up to the city of Chongqing, a southwestern hub, will be closed if the water comes faster than 45,000 cubic meters per second, the China Daily report added.

The dam was given the go-ahead by the government in 1992, against unusually visible domestic opposition -- with environmentalists warning the reservoir could turn into a cesspool of raw sewage and industrial chemicals trapped behind the dam, and feared silt could also cause problems.

The government justified its decision to push ahead by citing massive clean power generation and flood control were cited as the reasons it was pushed through. If it fails in the latter task it will add to concerns about the dam's overall cost and impact.

more from Reuters

The Gulf of Mexico's Dead Zone is among the world's largest—and corn is one of the culprits

2010-07-08T08:16:00.000-07:00

For the hundreds of thousands of people in the Gulf of Mexico who depend on commercial and sport fishing, directly and indirectly, the assault on sea life from the BP oil disaster has been a serious blow. But it's hardly unfamiliar.

That's because even before the spill, up to 8,000 square miles of gulf waters would turn every year into dead zones—vast areas of the coast so depleted of oxygen that shrimp, crabs and other marine animals could no longer live.

Now scientists fear the BP spill will make a bad situation worse. Despite blithe predictions that the gulf fishing industry will bounce back like Alaska's after the Exxon Valdez disaster, the already-expanding Gulf Dead Zone presents a uniquely dangerous scenario that many fear poses a long-term threat to ocean life.

First noted by scientists in the 1960s, dead zones are formed when huge amounts of nutrients—such as those found in agricultural fertilizers, municipal sewage and other wastes—overload the water, leading to explosive algae growth that ultimately robs oxygen from marine life below.

A 2008 study found more than 400 dead zones around the world, and the Gulf of Mexico's is one of the largest. Snaking along the Louisiana and Texas coasts, the expanding Gulf Dead Zone has drastically reduced seafood stocks and pushed fishers further out to sea.

The primary culprit? Nitrate-laced runoff from agricultural operations along the Mississippi River, which eventually drain into gulf waters. One study found that 51 percent of the Mississippi's nitrogen load was from commercial fertilizer, with livestock manure, human sewage and runoff from other crops contributing to the mix.

Fall weather brings cooling air and churning waters that dampen algae growth, but scientists are now seeing a "legacy" effect where lingering decomposed organic matter continues to steal away oxygen. This means that even if nitrate levels hold steady or decline, past pollution can still cause dead zones to expand in the future.

Now add the BP disaster. Gushing oil is the most immediate threat to marine life, but scientists see another looming danger: methane, which BP itself has estimated constitutes 40 percent of what's flooding out of the Deepwater Horizon drill site.

more from Durham (NC) Independent Weekly

China launches armada to head off algae plume

2010-07-08T08:13:00.000-07:00

Chinese authorities have dispatched a flotilla of more than 60 ships to head off a massive tide of algae that is approaching the coast of Qingdao.

The outbreak is thought to be caused by high ocean temperatures and excess nitrogen runoff from agriculture and fish farms.

Scientists involved in the operation say the seaweed known as enteromorpha needs to be cleaned up before it decomposes on beaches and releases noxious gases.

According to the domestic media, the green tide covers an area of 400 sq km. Newspapers ran pictures of coastguard officials raking up the gunk as soon as it reached the shore.

As well as the 66 vessels sent to intercept the approaching algae, a net has been stretched offshore as an extra defence. Ten forklift trucks, seven lorries and 168 people were clearing up the many tonnes of seaweed that still got through.

Li Delin, the engineer in charge of the beach clearance, estimated that his team had collected about 3,900 tonnes as of today. The seaweed has been taken away to be processed, possibly for use as natural fertiliser or animal feed.

And more is on the way. Northern China has been experiencing the hottest week of the year – in some areas, such as Beijing, temperatures have reached highs not seen in decades – which was accelerating the growth of the algae.

Green and red tides have become increasingly common across the world since the 1970s. Usually they occur in coastal water near densely populated areas or where there is large-scale runoff of agricultural chemicals from farmland.

more from the Guardian (UK)

A river's reckoning

2010-07-07T12:43:00.000-07:00

Chicago likes to think of the filth flowing in its namesake river as nobody's business but its own, and for most of the last century that might have been true. But today that dirty water has become a problem for all the Great Lakes - the world's largest freshwater system and a drinking water source for 40 million people.

Blame the Asian carp.

More than a century ago, the city reversed the Chicago River to carry its sewage away from Lake Michigan and into a Mississippi River-bound canal system. Today, those canals have become a flashpoint in the battle to protect the Great Lakes from the leaping carp that can devastate prized fish populations and inflict brutal blows on unsuspecting boaters.

With the invaders finning their way up the canal waters toward the Lake Michigan shoreline, a push is on to reconstruct the natural barrier between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi basins that the Chicago canals destroyed so long ago.

It is a project that would almost surely mean that Chicago's river - and some of the city's wastewater - would again flow into Lake Michigan.

This itself would be an ecological disaster - if Chicago sewage officials can't figure out how to clean up sewage discharges that are among the nastiest in the nation.

Chicago has a rare distinction among major American cities: It does not employ a disinfection stage at its three main sewage treatment plants.

The result is a river and canal system running so thick with fecal coliform that signs along the banks warn that the contents below are not suitable for "any human body contact."

It is poison, basically.

Even before the carp arrived, conservationists had been pushing the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago to not just do basic sewage treatment, but also to disinfect its discharges, a step nearly every other major American city takes. That's something the district boss dismisses as not worth the expense, which would be no more than $2 to $3 per household per month according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The reclamation district shows no signs of budging on the issue, even as pressure mounts to do whatever it will take to safeguard the Great Lakes - and its $7 billion fishing industry - from what biologists call a menacing invader.

That's not what reclamation district boss Richard Lanyon calls the fish.

He calls them "these stupid Asian carp."

more from the Journal-Sentinel

A Vital River Is Withering, and Iraq Has No Answer

2010-06-12T19:06:00.000-07:00

The Shatt al Arab, the river that flows from the biblical site of the Garden of Eden to the Persian Gulf, has turned into an environmental and economic disaster that Iraq’s newly democratic government is almost powerless to fix.

Withered by decades of dictatorial mismanagement and then neglect, by drought and the thirst of Iraq’s neighbors, the river formed by the convergence of the Tigris and the Euphrates no longer has the strength the keep the sea at bay.

The salt water of the gulf now pushes up the Faw peninsula. Last year, for the first time in memory, it extended beyond Basra, Iraq’s biggest port city, and even Qurna, where the two rivers meet. It has ravaged fresh-water fisheries, livestock, crops and groves of date palms that once made the area famous, forcing the migration of tens of thousands of farmers.

In a land of hardship and resignation and deep faith, the disaster along the Shatt al Arab appears to some as the work of a higher power. “We can’t control what God does,” said Rashid Thajil Mutashar, the deputy director of water resources in Basra.

But man has had a hand in the river’s decline. Turkey, Syria and Iran have all harnessed the headwaters that flow into the Tigris and Euphrates and ultimately into the Shatt al Arab, leaving Iraqi officials with little to do but plead for them to release more from their modern networks of dams.

The environment problem became particularly acute last year when Iran cut the flow entirely from the Karun River, which meets the Shatt south of Basra, for 10 months. The flow resumed after the winter rains, but at a fraction of earlier levels.

In the 1980s Iran and Iraq fought over the Shatt al Arab, which forms the southernmost border between the countries and is still littered with the rusting hulks of sunken ships from that war. Now, despite improved relations after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the river has once again become a source of diplomatic tension.

“The water is from God,” said Mohammed Sadoon, a farmer and fisherman in the village of Abu Khasib, who sold two water buffaloes last year because he could no longer provide them with potable water from the Shatt. “They shouldn’t seize it from us.”

more from the NY Times

Drilling Makes Upper Delaware Most Endangered River in U.S., Group Says

2010-06-03T17:03:00.000-07:00

Natural gas drilling in the Delaware River Basin has made the Upper Delaware River, the water source for 17 million people, the most threatened river in the United States, according to the annual report of the conservation group American Rivers. The rapid growth of hydro fracturing, or “fracking” — a drilling method used to extract natural gas from shale — poses a serious threat to the Upper Delaware and its tributaries, according to American Rivers. During hydro fracturing, drillers inject a mixture of water, chemicals, and sand at high pressure down a well bore and into the surrounding rock, creating fractures that release natural gas reserves. In its annual listing of the nation’s 10 most endangered rivers, American Rivers, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, says that not only do the chemicals used in fracking pose an environmental hazard to groundwater, but the process itself uses huge amounts of water, which then needs to be treated. The group urged tighter government control over hydro fracturing, including federal legislation that would monitor fracking under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Among the other rivers on the list is the Gauley River in West Virginia, which is threatened with pollution from mountaintop removal mining operations.

From Yale 360

Dying rivers: Washed away by our sins

2010-05-15T18:43:00.000-07:00

Geetika Narang walks around Connaught Place in Delhi, asking random people two simple questions: "Where do you get your water from and where does your shit go?" She is assisting Pradip Saha make a documentary: Faecal Attraction. It's on the death of the Yamuna. "My water? I guess, from Yamuna," says a slightly embarrassed middle-aged man caught by a TV camera. "And the shit?" Geetika persists. "Hmm, there only," he says, as he shies away from the question. Most others are less sure. "Hain, shit? I don't know, man, all of that happens automatically, I don't know." "Goes in the air." "Goes into water." "How do I know where it goes from the sewer?" Geetika records some of the answers and laughs over them later. But where does it really go? Most of it flows directly into our water systems — our rivers, ponds and lakes, seeping down into the groundwater. India generates a massive 38,000 million litres of sewage every day. Even for the record, the government has the capacity to treat only about 12,000 million tonnes, that's less than onethird of the muck. The 35 metropolitan cities of India alone produce 15,644 million litres of sewage daily.

In Delhi, where the government has over the decades spent the maximum amount of resources to clean the Yamuna, 40 per cent of the mess generated flows untreated into the river. The Supreme Court may have been seized of the matter for a decade but nearly half of the population in the Capital does not have a sewage system and the Delhi stretch of the Yamuna remains the most polluted river section in the country.

According to the National Family Health Survey-3 (NFHS-3 ), conducted in 2005-2006 , a mere 26 per cent of rural India has sanitation. The urban sanitation coverage is 83.2 per cent and the all-India coverage is an abysmal 44.6 per cent.

So this is what we do — load water systems close by with our sewage and all sorts of pollutants and then go further out to get water. And because water in the backyard is too dirty, we either dig underground or draw it from a source far up in the hills. Water for Delhi, for instance, comes from the Ganga and Beas rivers 400 km away. It is piped all the way to fulfill the need of millions in its unending sprawl. Bangalore has to get it from the Cauvery 90 km away; Indore from the Narmada 75 km away, and Hyderabad from the Krishna 116 km away. It costs 10 times more than we pay in some cases. But someone does pay, upstream or downstream of us.

The end result: we slowly kill our rivers, literally throttle them, even as the groundwater keeps depleting at a matching pace. In the hills, we dam the rivers — drawing water for irrigation, power and direct use. Downstream, once the river hits the plains, it becomes a dumping ground. It's a double whammy for the river and a tragedy for the people who live along it.

Degrading catchment areas make it worse. With the reduction in forests and the disappearance of natural recharge zones in the mountains, less and less water seeps into the rivers. In fact, almost all Indian rivers seem to be going through these calamitous changes. Large stretches of key rivers have become so polluted that they are not even safe to bathe in. More than half the length of the Ganga is now considered unfit by the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB). It's the same story with the Mahanadi, with a little over 500 km of its stretch rotting. For the Godavari, it is 1,700 km, for the Narmada 480 km, and the Tapi 400 km.

Take the case of the Sutlej, in which tonnes of dead fish were recently found floating on the surface, their underskin darkened, bellies putrid. This occurrence has, shockingly, recurred in the past four years in what once used to be the lifeline of the state. Industrial pollution, clearly, has taken its toll. Punjab witnesses major aquatic mortality in the rainy season because industries store their potent and untreated water in huge pits and, under the cover of the monsoon and flash floods, release the toxic waste into the river. Skin diseases are common among people who come in contact with the water. Though yet to be proved scientifically, many also link certain forms of cancer and mental diseases to harmful chemicals seeping into the drinking water system. And if life in a river dies, can the river itself survive?

more from the Times of India

Turning on the Tap

2010-05-14T10:48:00.001-07:00

Officials this week unveiled the latest step in a multi-organization effort to tap into the “world’s largest reservoir,” the Pacific Ocean, for drinking water that would serve residents in San Clemente, Dana Point, San Juan Capistrano, Laguna Beach and Laguna Niguel.

The newest phase of the $150-million project is in a trailer at Doheny State Beach, but the simple structure hides a complex set of equipment that will suck water from beneath the sea floor, pump it through membranes and filters and make it ready for consumers to drink.

Water officials are launching an 18-month test phase that is critical to the future of the project.

“This phase gives us the information to design the plant correctly,” said Dick Dietmier, the director of South Coast Water District. “That’s the critical part of building the desal plant, to get the design right the first time.”

Ultimately, the system could supply up to 25 percent of San Clemente’s water needs. The city uses 10.5 million gallons of water a day. The vast majority of San Clemente’s water—85 to 90 percent—is imported from elsewhere, although the city does get about 7 percent of its supply from two local wells, and another 8 percent by recycling water.

But the amount of money the city is charged to bring in outside water has steadily climbed over the years, and the politics of water statewide has seen reductions in the amount available.

“It would be nice to have an additional local supply and become less reliant on imported water, especially with some of the challenges in the water supply in Northern California,” City Assistant Engineer David Rebensdorf said.

more from the San Clemente Times

Cocaine, Spices, Hormones Found in Drinking Water

2010-05-03T09:52:00.000-07:00

How's this for a sweet surprise? A team of researchers in Washington State has found traces of cooking spices and flavorings in the waters of Puget Sound. (See map.)

University of Washington associate professor Richard Keil heads the Sound Citizen program, which investigates how what we do on land affects our waters.

Keil and his team have tracked "pulses" of food ingredients that enter the sound during certain holidays.

For instance, thyme and sage spike during Thanksgiving, cinnamon surges all winter, chocolate and vanilla show up during weekends (presumably from party-related goodies), and waffle-cone and caramel-corn remnants skyrocket around the Fourth of July.

The Puget Sound study is one of several ongoing efforts to investigate the unexpected ingredients that find their way into the global water supply.

Around the world, scientists are finding trace amounts of substances—from sugar and spice to heroin, rocket fuel, and birth control—that might be having unintended consequences for humans and wildlife alike.

more from National Geographic

Shampoo, Cosmetics May Form Cancer-Causing Substance in Water Supplies

2010-05-03T09:49:00.000-07:00

Your shampoo may seem harmless, but it could be contributing to the formation of a mysterious, cancer-causing substance, a new study says.

New research reveals that common household products such as shampoo can interact with disinfectants at U.S. wastewater treatment plants to form a little-studied class of cancer-causing substances. These substances, called nitrosamines, can end up in drinking water, experts say.

(Related: "Cocaine, Spices, Hormones Found in Drinking Water.")

Several nitrosamines, including the chemical NDMA, a focus of the new Yale study, are classified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as probable human carcinogens.

Nitrosamines form in small amounts when exposed to chloramine, the disinfectant of choice at the nation's wastewater treatment plants. The chemical—a combination of chlorine and ammonia—has been used increasingly in drinking water disinfection since the EPA set limits for better-known toxic substances that can arise from the use of chlorine, the traditional disinfectant.

Though inconclusive, the study suggests "it's entirely possible that we're producing more problems—and maybe even worse problems—with chloramines," said David Reckhow, an environmental engineer at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst who was not involved in the new study.

more from National Geographic

Brazil's huge river diversion project divides opinion

2010-04-12T09:35:00.000-07:00

Outside his house by the Sao Francisco river, Emanoel de Souza toys with the skin of a crocodile he hunted a month earlier.

"There are plenty out there. You leave a cow's heart on a hook by the river, and by morning a crocodile will have bitten," he smiles.

The meat makes for a good meal and the skin provides an amusing decoration.

But Mr de Souza gets much more than crocodiles from the Sao Francisco.

The river also provides water for him to farm fish and rice. The profits of the last harvest alone paid for a new motorbike.

This makes him one of the lucky ones. Just a few kilometres away, out of reach of the Sao Francisco's water, Raquel Torres has lost a crop of beans and maize due to lack of rain.

"This is the second consecutive year. There is no irrigation here," she says.

The water she uses for drinking, cooking and washing arrives every few weeks by lorry. Like many residents of Brazil's dry north-east, she knows that water can be the scarcest commodity.

The national government's solution is to divert part of the Sao Francisco - the only major river that starts and finishes in Brazil - through the sertao, the semi-arid backlands.

Two large canals, one of 400km and another of 220km, will deliver water to cities and to agriculture.

more from the BBC

Threats to Mangrove Species Growing Rapidly Worldwide, Report Says

2010-04-12T09:27:00.000-07:00

One in six mangrove species faces extinction as coastal ecosystems are being destroyed or damaged by development, aquaculture, logging, and climate change, according to a new study. Following an extensive survey of coastal ecosystems, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Conservation International placed 11 of 70 mangrove species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Mangrove forests, which grow in tropical and subtropical regions where salt water meets the land, protect coastal environments from erosion and storms, and serve as a nursery for marine species. On the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Central America, as many as 40 percent of mangrove species are threatened, the report said. “The potential loss of these species is a symptom of widespread destruction and exploitation of mangrove forests,” said Beth Polidoro of Old Dominion University and lead author of the study, which is published in the journal PloSONE. “Mangroves form one of the most important tropical habitats that support many species, and their loss can affect marine and terrestrial biodiversity much more widely.”

from Yale360

Rising U.S. water usage worries experts

2010-03-30T06:34:00.000-07:00

Rising U.S. water usage is worrying experts who will gather April 15 at this year's intelligent water summit in Washington.

Ironically, water consumption has risen because of the drive toward renewable energy. Solar power generation consumes huge quantities of water, as does production of other forms of energy.

Despite educational programs and official exhortations, waste remains a major issue in water usage for landscaping and gardens, experts who are to attend the summit said ahead of the meeting.

While inefficient use of sprinklers and other devices for landscaping and gardening is an old problem, federal land managers have raised concerns that some types of solar energy projects in the western United States consume far too much water.

The Bureau of Land Management recently warned Nevada officials it wasn't in the public interest to go ahead with solar energy plants that used water-cooled components to produce electricity under the state's abundant sunshine.

Power generation companies favor the water-cooled solar electric plants because they are the most cost-efficient while air-cooled plants use 90 percent less water but are far more expensive to run.

The problem is worse in Arizona, where there are greater pressures on available water resources outside the state's urban centers.

Added to the emerging correlation between solar power generation and water resources is the industry prognosis that solar plants are here to stay, while all traditional projects dependent on hydrocarbon resources eventually will run out of the fuel and shut down, as has happened with coalmines, analysts said.

Rain Bird, the water efficiency company behind the summit, said a global audience of media and consumers will be able to view and participate in the Intelligent Use of Water Summit: State of the Union via a live streaming webcast from the Smithsonian Institution.

more from UPI

Disputed Bay of Bengal island 'vanishes' say scientists

2010-03-24T10:40:00.000-07:00

The uninhabited territory south of the Hariabhanga river was known as New Moore Island to the Indians and South Talpatti Island to the Bangladeshis.

Recent satellites images show the whole island under water, says the School of Oceanographic Studies in Calcutta.

Its scientists say other nearby islands could also vanish as sea levels rise.

Beneath the waves

The BBC's Chris Morris in Delhi says there has never been a permanent settlement on the now-vanished island, which even in its heyday was never more than two metres (about six feet) above sea level.

In the past, however, the territorial dispute led to visits by Indian naval vessels and the temporary deployment of a contingent from the country's Border Security Force.

"What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming," said Professor Sugata Hazra of the School of Oceanographic Studies at Jadavpur University in Calcutta.

Anyone wishing to visit now, he observed, would have to think of travelling by submarine.

Professor Hazra said his studies revealed that sea levels in this part of the Bay of Bengal have risen much faster over the past decade than they had done in the previous 15 years.

more from the BBC

World Water Day: Thirsty Gaza residents battle salt, sewage

2010-03-23T11:27:00.000-07:00

Activists around the world are marking World Water Day today with school campaigns, films, and concerts – all designed to draw attention to the fact that access to safe drinking water is something 1 in 5 people don't enjoy, while 40 percent of the world's population doesn't have adequate sanitation.

An acute example of the human cost can be found in the densely populated Gaza Strip, where experts say a potent mix of politics and geography are pointing toward the onset of a full-blown water crisis. In the small coastal territory, resources are either scarce or contaminated, sewage goes largely untreated, and already ailing infrastructure buckles under an Israeli economic blockade in place since Hamas took over in 2007. According to the United Nations (UN), the current environmental damage could “take centuries to reverse.”

“If the situation continues like this any longer, we’ll be faced with a very serious water crisis in the Gaza Strip,” Stéphane Beytrison, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Gaza, told the Monitor recently. “And any real efforts at developing the water and sanitation system, whether by the local authorities or by aid agencies, are hampered completely by the closure. It’s a real and very crucial problem.”

more from Christian Science Monitor

U.S. Bolsters Chemical Restrictions for Water

2010-03-23T10:24:00.000-07:00

The Environmental Protection Agency announced on Monday that it would overhaul drinking water regulations so that officials could police dozens of contaminants simultaneously and tighten rules on the chemicals used by industries.

The new policies, which are still being drawn up, will probably force some local water systems to use more effective cleaning technologies, but may raise water rates.

“There are a range of chemicals that have become more prevalent in our products, our water and our bodies in the last 50 years,” the E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, said in a speech on Monday. Regulations have not kept pace with scientific discoveries, and so the agency is issuing “a new vision for providing clean, safe drinking water.”

Along with its other steps, Ms. Jackson said the E.P.A. was readying stricter regulations on four carcinogens often detected in drinking water, including a chemical commonly used in dry cleaning.

The announcements come amid growing complaints that systems across the nation are delivering tap water that poses health risks to residents. Government and other scientists have identified hundreds of chemicals that are linked to diseases in small concentrations and that are unregulated in drinking water, or policed at limits that still pose serious risks.

In some instances, laws are sufficient, but they have been ignored: More than 20 percent of the nation’s water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years, according to an analysis of federal data by The New York Times. And the other major water law — the Clean Water Act — has been violated more than half a million times, though few polluters were ever punished.

more from the NY Times

India's urban poor suffer water crisis as cities grow

2010-03-22T09:18:00.000-07:00

There's no escaping urban India's growth.

In the capital, hundreds of migrants arrive daily at railway and bus stations, densely populated slums burgeon at the seams and building complexes, shopping malls and industrial plants are sprouting up in every direction.

But as industrialisation takes effect and growing numbers of rural populations move to towns and cities like New Delhi, experts say the inability to provide clean and safe drinking water - especially to the urban poor - has reached crisis point.

"Higher demand for water, increased pollution by humans and industry and the mismanagement of water is most of all impacting the poorest people in the country's towns and cities," said Sushmita Sengupta of a Delhi-based think-tank, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE).

"Cities are already water-stressed and with increasing urbanisation, we need to learn to stop wasting vital resources."

According to India's last census in 2001, around 286 million - 28 percent of population - live in towns and cities.

This is projected to reach around 575 million people in 2030, which will mean around 40 percent of India's total population will be urban.

Yet no major cities and towns have a 24x7 water supply. Most households receive water twice daily - in the morning and evening - with many middleclass families relying on water storage tanks.

Water cuts that last days are becoming increasingly common in the scorching summer months, and water protests and reports of violence over water scarcity are on the rise in urban centres.

more from Reuters

The Secret of Sea Level Rise: It Will Vary Greatly by Region

2010-03-22T08:59:00.000-07:00

For at least two decades now, climate scientists have been telling us that CO2 and other human-generated greenhouse gases are warming the planet, and that if we keep burning fossil fuels the trend will continue. Recent projections suggest a global average warming of perhaps 3 to 4 degrees C, or 5.4 to 7 degrees F, by the end of this century.

But those same scientists have also been reminding us consistently that this is just an average. Thanks to all sorts of regional factors — changes in vegetation, for example, or ice cover, or prevailing winds — some areas are likely to warm more than that, while others should warm less.

What’s true for temperature, it turns out, is also true for another frequently invoked consequence of global warming. Sea level, according to the best current projections, could rise by about a meter by 2100, in large part due to melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. But that figure, too, is just a global average. In some places — Scotland, Iceland, and Alaska for example — it could be significantly less in the centuries to come. In others, like much of the eastern United States, it could be significantly more.

more from Yale 360

West Africa sets out to protect dying mangroves

2010-03-09T09:22:00.000-08:00

In Sierra Leone, one of Africa's poorest nations still recovering from a 1991-2002 civil war, lawmakers are preparing a bill to join a seven-nation charter to protect the region's mangrove forests.

Conservation group Wetlands International says the initiative is essential for West Africa to save the 800,000 hectares (2 million acres) of mangrove swamps it has left, less than a third of the 3 million hectares it started with.

The mangroves are falling prey to the artisanal salt industry because they are most readily available source of wood for fires used to boil up seawater and salt dust -- the preferred method of making salt.

Environmental groups are trying to encourage salt producers to use other methods, including solar drying, to reduce the strain on mangroves.

"If the mangroves disappear, fishing will be in crisis," said Wetlands' West Africa coordinator Richard Dacosta. "The saltwater tide will invade river estuaries and coastal areas. Local communities on the coast will have to move."

The region's mangrove forests also suck up thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide, and so could be a way for West Africa to get a foothold in the $136 billion carbon market.

"Mangroves sequester large amounts of carbon and so reduce greenhouse gas emissions," Dacosta said.

"NO WOOD LEFT"

Mangroves swamps are the amongst the most diverse ecosystems on earth, scientists say. A barrier between the land and sea, they are the nurseries of the ocean, where many species of fish and shrimps breed and their young thrive. Birds roost, snakes seek out prey, monkeys scavenge in them.

They are also a buffer against coastal erosion in a region where much of the population lives in low-lying areas.

On the outskirts of the village of Fobo, 50km (30 miles) south of Freetown, a crab scuttles across mud in the mangrove forest while oysters cling to its roots. Vast areas have already been cleared to make way for rice fields in the nutrient-rich soil.

But the local salt industry is by far the biggest threat.

For generations, villagers have scraped "salt dust" from the soil, added seawater, and boiled it over wood stoves.

Marie Kano, head of the salt producers association, said many of the mangrove trees used for fuel have already gone.

more from Reuters

Rulings Restrict Clean Water Act, Hampering E.P.A.

2010-02-28T21:02:00.000-08:00

Thousands of the nation’s largest water polluters are outside the Clean Water Act’s reach because the Supreme Court has left uncertain which waterways are protected by that law, according to interviews with regulators.

As a result, some businesses are declaring that the law no longer applies to them. And pollution rates are rising.

Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years.

The Clean Water Act was intended to end dangerous water pollution by regulating every major polluter. But today, regulators may be unable to prosecute as many as half of the nation’s largest known polluters because officials lack jurisdiction or because proving jurisdiction would be overwhelmingly difficult or time consuming, according to midlevel officials.

“We are, in essence, shutting down our Clean Water programs in some states,” said Douglas F. Mundrick, an E.P.A. lawyer in Atlanta. “This is a huge step backward. When companies figure out the cops can’t operate, they start remembering how much cheaper it is to just dump stuff in a nearby creek.”

“This is a huge deal,” James M. Tierney, the New York State assistant commissioner for water resources, said of the new constraints. “There are whole watersheds that feed into New York’s drinking water supply that are, as of now, unprotected.”

The court rulings causing these problems focused on language in the Clean Water Act that limited it to “the discharge of pollutants into the navigable waters” of the United States. For decades, “navigable waters” was broadly interpreted by regulators to include many large wetlands and streams that connected to major rivers.

But the two decisions suggested that waterways that are entirely within one state, creeks that sometimes go dry, and lakes unconnected to larger water systems may not be “navigable waters” and are therefore not covered by the act — even though pollution from such waterways can make its way into sources of drinking water.

more from the NY Times

Reserves 'win–win' for fish and fishermen

2010-02-26T08:52:00.000-08:00

Although fisherman routinely fight bans on fishing, studies indicate that the creation of protected marine reserves in key areas can both raise the profits of fishermen and boost fish populations. Researchers presented evidence of these dual benefits in several sessions over the past week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in San Diego, and in a suite of papers published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Marine reserves could help to make nearby fisheries profitable by acting as nurseries for fish larvae that are later spread by ocean currents, for example. "Reserves allow a win–win situation — better conservation and higher profitability for fishing," says Christopher Costello, a resource economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). His group's modelling study of southern Californian waters suggests that fishing profits are maximized when significant areas are closed to fishing1.

Steven Gaines, a UCSB marine ecologist who organized an AAAS symposium on marine reserves, adds that his own team's research with ocean circulation models shows that protected areas do not need to be extensive. Strategic positioning of smaller reserves in a network can create pathways for fish outside protected zones, which can boost the yields of fishermen.

Research on one of the world's largest marine conservation efforts, along Australia's Great Barrier Reef, shows how quickly such efforts can make a difference. Nearly one-third of the 2,000-kilometre-long reef off Queensland is set aside as 'no-take' zones, after stringent controls were put in place in 2004.

Terry Hughes, director of the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies in Townsville, Queensland, said at the symposium that his team's reef research2 found that, in the no-take zones he studied, overall fish densities have doubled since they were created. On some reefs, the population of certain species, such as grouper, doubled within just two years of fishing closures. "The reef generates far more economic benefit to Australia than the cost of protecting it," he adds, estimating that the costs are less than 1% of annual revenue generated from other reef activities, such as tourism.

The experience of the Great Barrier Reef could inform an ongoing debate in California. The state is involved in a contentious process to create networks of reserves that could eventually encompass 10–20% of the state's coastline and stretch up to 5 kilometres from shore.

The Marine Life Protection Act was approved by Californian voters in 1999, but attempts to establish the reserves it mandated have been delayed by strong resistance. The battle between marine conservationists and fishermen has become so bitter that armed game wardens now attend public hearings about the plan. Fist fights have broken out at some meetings and, at one, Paul Dayton, a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, was spat at by a fisherman.

A reserve system has so far been adopted for two regions along the central coast; a plan for a southern coastal region is under review; and plans are to be developed for the final two areas by the end of 2011.

Many complain that the scheme is too costly, and argue that there is little evidence that reserves successfully protect marine wildlife. But marine biologist Jennifer Caselle at the UCSB and her colleagues have put paid to this claim3.

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Her team studied ten no-take and two fishing-restricted zones created in 2003 within the 100-kilometre-long Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary off Santa Barbara. The scientists found that the number and size of the fish targeted for protection was greater in the reserve than outside. They also found that the ecosystem was healthier overall, with more predators such as spiny lobster and California sheephead helping to keep sea urchins under control. Because the urchins graze on kelp — an important habitat for many fish species — Caselle says that "the increased abundance of predators may help to prevent the transition of productive kelp forests into unproductive urchin barrens".

The research was greeted cautiously by Norman de Vall, president of Redwood Coast Watersheds Alliance in Elk, California, where reserve planning is now under way. Even if reserves produce larvae that move into unprotected areas, that may not be enough to help fishermen, says de Vall, a former commercial fisherman. What is needed, he said, is smarter management of fishing stocks overall and "less fishing everywhere".

from Nature

Water Uses by Industry Revealed

2010-02-26T08:37:00.000-08:00

Water might be locally renewable, but it is also a globally finite resource with shifting availability. Industry accounts for most of the water used in the U.S., yet industry-specific estimates of that consumption—last tallied by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1982—are outdated. That is a problem because industrial sectors need to budget water uses correctly for effective planning.

In this issue of ES&T, Chris Hendrickson and colleagues address that shortage by estimating water withdrawals for more than 400 industry sectors (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2009, DOI 10.1021/es903147k). Their analysis accounts not just for direct uses—such as crop irrigation in agriculture—but also for indirect uses throughout a sector’s supply chain. For instance, irrigation water would be a direct use for agriculture but an indirect use for the grocery sector. “We’re trying to help industries track and make better management decisions about how they use water,” says Hendrickson, a professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. “If you’re trying to minimize environmental impacts, then you need to know about these upstream demands,” he adds.

Because reported consumption rates by sector are no longer available, Hendrickson and his colleagues had to estimate likely values and use them with a method called economic input−output life cycle analysis (EIO-LCA). By necessity, they had to combine disparate data sets for different sectors, gathered over varying time periods. Hendrickson acknowledges the results are subject to considerable uncertainty and variability. But Arpad Horvath, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, described the analysis as seminal. “It fills a very important gap,” he says. “The work comes nearly 30 years after the last reliable set of industrial water use data were made available. They used the best available data and methods and provided a practical piece of research that will be useful for a long time.”

Hendrickson and colleagues started with total water uses for six industry sectors defined by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). These “umbrella sectors” are extremely broad. For instance, the irrigation sector consumes 190 trillion liters (50 trillion gallons) a year, but USGS does not break that value out by crop. This is where Hendrickson’s analysis comes into the picture. He and his colleagues took each of 428 industrial “subsectors” defined by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), and assigned them to their corresponding USGS sectors. They then used other relevant data to determine how much of the USGS water totals were consumed by these more narrowly defined categories. Crop-specific irrigation values, for instance, were estimated using data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Likewise, “purchased” volumes consumed by sector were estimated based on how much money industries spend on water in a given year.

Michael Blackhurst, the first author of the paper and a Ph.D. candidate working under Hendrickson, says he was surprised that most water uses—60% on average—are indirect. “That turned out to be a significant finding,” he said. “A lot of that water consumption is hidden because companies don’t pay for all of it.” Indeed, among 96% of sectors evaluated, indirect uses exceeded direct uses throughout product supply chains.

more from EST News

Exposure on Tap: Drinking Water as an Overlooked Source of Lead

2010-02-04T21:22:00.000-08:00

Providence, Rhode Island, and Portland, Oregon, are two cities that by all accounts have well-run water utilities and health departments. Both have also had recurring problems with lead in tap water, yet both—according to some critics—have downplayed the potential importance of lead in tap water as a route of exposure. The experiences of these cities and others across the United States illustrate the difficulty not only of determining the causes behind specific cases of lead poisoning but also of ensuring that lead sources are eliminated.

Unlike most water contaminants, lead gets into water after it leaves a water treatment plant. Often this contamination is the result of water treatment changes meant to improve water quality that end up altering the water chemistry, destabilizing lead-bearing mineral scales that coat service lines and corroding lead solder, pipes, faucets, and fixtures. “Lead is a ‘close-to-home’ contaminant,” says Marc Edwards, an environmental engineer at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. “That makes it very difficult to regulate and monitor.”

Under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) 1991 Lead and Copper Rule (LCR), municipal water utilities must sample a small number of homes at high risk for elevated lead levels, such as those known to have lead plumbing components. The size of the water system determines how many samples must be collected in each sampling period (the maximum required is 100), and the sampling interval can vary from 6 months to 3 years, depending on past compliance. The law requires that samples be “first-flush” water that has stood in pipes for a minimum of 6 hours. This scenario represents high but routine exposures to lead in tap water, because the longer corrosive water sits in contact with lead parts, the more lead leaches out. In many households, this worst-case normal-use scenario happens twice daily Monday through Friday: in the morning when the residents awake, and in the afternoon when they return home from work and school.

Under the LCR, utilities are required to notify customers and take remedial action if more than 10% of the households sampled have tap water with lead levels exceeding 15 ppb. Remedial action might include changing chemical treatment methods to make the water less corrosive or, if treatment fails, to replace lead pipes that lie beneath publicly owned spaces such as streets and sidewalks. These provisions would seem to suggest that if a water utility is in compliance with the rule, then none of the dwellings served by the utility need worry about their tap water being a significant source of lead. Yet LCR compliance is based upon the results of sampling only a tiny percentage of the homes served. So even when a utility is entirely within LCR compliance, some consumers may unknowingly receive and consume water that contains lead levels much higher than 15 ppb.

“EPA as the regulator of lead in tap water and CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] with its concern for preventing lead poisoning in children should be working together to get on top of this problem,” says Edwards. “But in my experience this is not occurring to the extent it should.”

more from Environmental Health Perspectives

In Low-Lying Bangladesh, The Sea Takes a Human Toll

2010-01-29T14:13:00.000-08:00

Danish photographer and filmmaker Jonathan Bjerg Møller recently spent nine months in Bangladesh, chronicling the lives of people struggling to survive just a few feet above sea level. He traveled to the South Asian nation after hearing projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change about the millions of climate refugees that would be created this century by rising seas and more powerful storms. Møller wanted to put a human face on this issue, and decided there was no better place than Bangladesh, where 15 million of its 160 million people live less than three feet above sea level.

While he was in Bangladesh, Cyclone Aila struck, killing roughly 200 people and leaving thousands homeless. Møller proceeded to document the devastation from that 2009 storm, as well the impact of subsiding land and rising seas on other Bangladeshis, many of whom earn less than $1 a day. In this Yale Environment 360 report, we present two videos by Møller – “Aila’s Victims” and “Wahidul’s Story.”

Møller says he will leave it up to scientists to determine how much of the suffering he portrays is related to a warming climate. “I am not a scientist and I know that global warming is a contentious issue,” he says. “I wanted to focus on the people who are suffering today. The point is that these people are vulnerable today, and will become even more vulnerable in the future.”

A Bangladeshi man who is the subject of one of his videos, Wahidul, lives in the town of Kuziartek, which was once home to 40,000 people. Now, the island on which Kuziartek was located is underwater. All that is left of Kuziartek is a small embankment rising from the sea, 2 ½ miles out in the Bay of Bengal. Seven families remain there, including Wahidul’s, clinging to a disappearing strip of earth.

“But what can we do,” asks Wahidul, fearful that abandoning his village would leave him homeless in a city slum. “We have an unfortunate fate. There are many people in the world, but I doubt that anyone must suffer as much as me. People shouldn't live where we live, but we have no choice. We have to live here.”

See his videos here

Stronger controls urged on chemicals in water

2010-01-12T07:19:00.000-08:00

Citing the decline in frogs and rise of "frankenfish," a Bay Area environmental group filed a legal petition Monday for tighter federal standards on pollutants that disrupt the hormones of humans and wildlife.

The Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the U.S. Environmental Agency to beef up criteria under the Clean Water Act for pesticides, pharmaceuticals and other endocrine disruptors that leak through the water-treatment process and contaminate groundwater and drinking-water supplies.

"We've found that a very small concentration of these chemicals can have profound reproductive effects," said Jeff Miller, a conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity in San Francisco.

Over the past two decades or so, scientists have found increasing amounts of endocrine disruptors in the groundwater, and they have seen corresponding effects in wildlife, particularly frogs, fish and other aquatic animals. Almost every native frog species in California is threatened, and scientists are finding fish with both male and female characteristics, Miller said.

The chemicals are found in dozens of household and industrial products, including sunscreen, birth control pills, herbicides, antibiotics, bug spray and painkillers. Miller's organization says the chemicals interfere with hormone production in people and wildlife, leading to infertility, birth defects and other problems.

The EPA, under the new administration, has recently launched several programs to look more closely at endocrine disruptors and other water pollutants, said Betsaida Alcantara, EPA deputy press secretary.

EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has called for a comprehensive overhaul of federal toxics laws, which could include tighter restrictions on endocrine disruptors, Alcantara said.

more from the SF Chronicle

Tests find antibiotic, other contaminants in Tampa's drinking water

2010-01-05T07:56:00.000-08:00

The tap water that Tampa residents consume is contaminated with low levels of antibiotics, nicotine byproducts and a chemical used to produce firefighting foams.

City and state officials say the levels of the contaminants – found in recent tests of the city's drinking water system – are miniscule and that the city's water is safe to drink.

But the presence of the contaminants raises questions about what is coming out of the faucets in tens of thousands of households served by the city's water system.

State and federal environmental regulators say they know little about possible health risks from the cocktail of contaminants that in recent years have been found in water supplies across the country. They are only beginning to study the long-term effects.

Without any regulation of these types of contaminants, the city isn't required to report the findings of the recent tests to state and local environmental regulators, or the public.

Elias Franco, distribution division manager for Tampa's water department, said the city began voluntarily testing its water for pharmaceutical contaminants two years ago.

He said the contaminants found in tests conducted in May 2009 include the antibiotic drug sulfamethoxzole; cotinine, a nicotine byproduct; and perfluorooctane sulphonate, a chemical commonly used for metal plating, photography and firefighting foams.

The contaminants were found in samples of treated drinking water taken from the city's treatment plant, indicating that the existing filtration process doesn't remove them.

Franco said the city meets all federal and state regulations for drinking water quality and, for now, doesn't intend to make any wholesale changes to the water treatment system.

more from the Tampa Tribune

California's groundwater shrinking because of agricultural use

2010-01-05T07:43:00.000-08:00

New data from satellites show the vast underground pools feeding faucets and irrigation hoses across California are running low, a worrisome trend federal scientists largely attribute to aggressive agricultural pumping.

The measurements show the amount of water lost in the two main Central Valley river basins within the past six years could almost fill the nation's largest reservoir, Lake Mead in Nevada.

"All that water has been sucked from these river basins. It's gone. It's left the building," says Jay Famiglietti, an earth science professor at the University of California, Irvine, who led the research collaboration. "The data is telling us that this rate of pumping is not sustainable."

Hundreds of farmers have been drilling wells to irrigate their crops, as three years of drought and environmental restrictions on water supplies have withered crops, jobs and profits throughout the San Joaquin Valley, where roughly half of the nation's fruits, nuts, and vegetables are grown.

Developers and cities dependent on the tight supplies also have joined the well-drilling frenzy as the crisis has deepened.

NASA scientists and researchers from UC Irvine presented their findings at a recent conference, showcasing data from twin satellites that pick up changes in the aquifers coursing underneath the state.

The NASA mission represents the first attempt to use space-based technology to measure how much groundwater has been lost in recent years in California and elsewhere in the world.

From October 2003 through March of this year, Mr. Famiglietti and his team tracked how Earth's gravitational pull on the satellites changed as the amount of water stored in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins dried up.

more from the CS Monitor

That Tap Water Is Legal but May Be Unhealthy

2009-12-17T08:40:00.000-08:00

The 35-year-old federal law regulating tap water is so out of date that the water Americans drink can pose what scientists say are serious health risks — and still be legal.

Only 91 contaminants are regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act, yet more than 60,000 chemicals are used within the United States, according to Environmental Protection Agency estimates. Government and independent scientists have scrutinized thousands of those chemicals in recent decades, and identified hundreds associated with a risk of cancer and other diseases at small concentrations in drinking water, according to an analysis of government records by The New York Times.

But not one chemical has been added to the list of those regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act since 2000.

Other recent studies have found that even some chemicals regulated by that law pose risks at much smaller concentrations than previously known. However, many of the act’s standards for those chemicals have not been updated since the 1980s, and some remain essentially unchanged since the law was passed in 1974.

All told, more than 62 million Americans have been exposed since 2004 to drinking water that did not meet at least one commonly used government health guideline intended to help protect people from cancer or serious disease, according to an analysis by The Times of more than 19 million drinking-water test results from the District of Columbia and the 45 states that made data available.

more from the NY Times

Onetime Nevada Brothel Could Become Conservationists’ Oasis

2009-12-15T07:40:00.000-08:00

Watching bulldozers pour crushed rocks to force the Truckee River into a more natural serpentine pattern, Mickey Hazelwood, project director for the Nature Conservancy, mused that like many acts of salvation, this one has its roots deep in sin.

For decades, this high-desert site eight miles east of Reno was best known as the home of the Mustang Ranch, the first licensed brothel in the United States. From thin to plump, dwarflike to Amazonian, women hired to suit a range of tastes would line up for inspection by clients in pink stucco buildings tucked into a cottonwood grove 300 yards from the river’s bank.

The brothel reopened a few miles downriver in 2006, after the land was confiscated by the Internal Revenue Service and the name and buildings were sold to the highest bidder. Working 12-hour shifts at their new complex, part of which was airlifted from the old site, the women still greet customers in knee socks, push-up bras and other intimate wear.

The old property, meanwhile, is undergoing a transformation. Workers are restoring it to floodplain, undoing the damage wrought when federal engineers straightened the Truckee River a half century ago.

For most of its recorded history, the Truckee meandered lazily 110 miles from mountainous Lake Tahoe through Reno, once a floodplain, to the great basin in Nevada. Dense forests grew at its banks, and 20-pound cutthroat trout swam its length.

But as rivers tend to do, the Truckee would flood. In Reno, where the population had been steadily growing since 1900, and passed 50,000 by 1950, the effects could be devastating.

So in the next decade, the Army Corps of Engineers moved to control flooding by straightening and widening the river. The unintended result was that the Truckee deepened in its own channel, and the entire water table dropped along its banks.

Within years, the lower Truckee lost a majority of its native plants as well as dependent birds and wildlife. Only ancient cottonwoods with deep roots survived. Invasive weeds took over, and the river became an eyesore.

more from the NY Times

River Project Fuels Competing Claims of Green

2009-12-14T07:23:00.000-08:00

Last month, on a gravelly embankment of the Youngsan River here, President Lee Myung-bak broke ground on a $19.2 billion public works project to remake the country’s four longest rivers, an ambitious and controversial undertaking that has spurred a national debate over what constitutes green development.

Mr. Lee says the project will generate thousands of jobs, improve water supply and quality, and prevent flooding, while providing a model for environmentally sound development.

But critics call it a political boondoggle, say it will be an environmental disaster and have sued to stop it. More South Koreans oppose the project than support it. And opponents charge that it is simply a repackaging of Mr. Lee’s earlier dream of linking the Han and Nakdong Rivers to create a “Grand Korean Waterway” across the nation, a proposal he abandoned in the face of widespread opposition.

Meanwhile engineers have already begun work to rebuild the Han, Nakdong, Kum and Youngsan Rivers, work that is likely to make Mr. Lee famous or infamous long after his five-year term ends in 2013 and could even determine who succeeds him.

“If they build a weir here, I fear it will trap the water and make the river more polluted than it is now,” said Choi Han-gon, 55, a farmer here who admits to conflicted feelings about the project. Gazing at a government billboard depicting the futuristic waterfront town promised to rise here within two years, he added, “I can also see why everyone will love it once it’s done.”

Mr. Lee, a former chief executive of the Hyundai construction company who is nicknamed the Bulldozer for his penchant for colossal engineering schemes, aims at nothing less than rethinking the ecology and economy of the rivers, some of which were heavily polluted during the country’s rapid industrialization. For three years, workers will dredge river bottoms and build dikes, reservoirs and hydroelectric power stations.

When the work is done, the government says, the rivers will “come alive” with tourists, sailboats and water sports enthusiasts. Sixteen futuristic-looking weirs will straddle the rivers, creating pristine lakes bordered by wetland parks. A 1,050-mile network of bike trails will run along the rivers.

more from the NY Times

A lake lies on its deathbed

2009-12-09T09:02:00.000-08:00

The short rains that pounded the larger Nakuru District for a few days in August, September and November were greeted with a sigh of relief.

For a while, residents and tourists marvelled at the replenished Lake Elementaita that had dried up due to the long drought, destruction of its catchment area and the effects of the much publicised climate change.

But their joy was short-lived, as the lake, home to thousands of lesser flamingoes, is on its deathbed again, with more than 80 per cent of it having dried up.

Rift Valley

Other lakes such as Nakuru, Naivasha, Baringo, Solai, Bogoria and Turkana, all in the Rift Valley, have also been affected although Elementaita is the worst hit due to its shallowness.

For years, the bright pink lake gave travellers using the Nairobi highway a great view through the dry scrubland that stretches from Naivasha Town to Nakuru.

Motorists would stop by the road to savour the sight that blends the pink colour of thousands of flamingoes with those of pelicans feeding in the shadow waters and the blue colour of the waters.

Others, unable to resist the magnificent sight, would drive down to the lake shore for a closer look and to take pictures.

But that was over a year ago as the protracted drought drained the lake after the rivers that replenish it dried up.

The lake is almost no more. The former expanse of water has been reduced to a puddle at the lake centre, where a few hundred determined birds still huddle to get their last pecks at the fast declining marine organisms that form their diet.

Motorists still look out of their windows, not with awe any more, but with a tinge of sadness to see what man can do to the environment.

Tourist attraction

And they are not alone. Scientists and conservationists are similarly alarmed and view the drying up of the lake as a major blow to an important ecosystem that is both a treasured national heritage and a major tourist attraction.

And the lake’s predicament could not have come at a worse time, what with the plans underway to declare the lake a World Heritage Site.

Kenya Wildlife Service research scientist Bernard Kuloba says Lake Elementaita, before being ravaged by the drought, was a vital breeding ground for the pelicans that live in Lake Nakuru National Park, located scores of kilometres away.

more from the Nation (Kenya)

Millions in U.S. Drink Dirty Water, Records Show

2009-12-08T10:53:00.001-08:00

More than 20 percent of the nation’s water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years, according to a New York Times analysis of federal data.

That law requires communities to deliver safe tap water to local residents. But since 2004, the water provided to more than 49 million people has contained illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage.

Regulators were informed of each of those violations as they occurred. But regulatory records show that fewer than 6 percent of the water systems that broke the law were ever fined or punished by state or federal officials, including those at the Environmental Protection Agency, which has ultimate responsibility for enforcing standards.

Studies indicate that drinking water contaminants are linked to millions of instances of illness within the United States each year.

In some instances, drinking water violations were one-time events, and probably posed little risk. But for hundreds of other systems, illegal contamination persisted for years, records show.

On Tuesday, the Senate Environment and Public Works committee will question a high-ranking E.P.A. official about the agency’s enforcement of drinking-water safety laws. The E.P.A. is expected to announce a new policy for how it polices the nation’s 54,700 water systems.

“This administration has made it clear that clean water is a top priority,” said an E.P.A. spokeswoman, Adora Andy, in response to questions regarding the agency’s drinking water enforcement. The E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, this year announced a wide-ranging overhaul of enforcement of the Clean Water Act, which regulates pollution into waterways.

“The previous eight years provide a perfect example of what happens when political leadership fails to act to protect our health and the environment,” Ms. Andy added.

Water pollution has become a growing concern for some lawmakers as government oversight of polluters has waned. Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, in 2007 asked the E.P.A. for data on Americans’ exposure to some contaminants in drinking water.

more from the NY Times

"Wired" Irish River Detects Pollution in Real Time

2009-12-07T09:15:00.000-08:00

Nature has gone wireless in Ireland, where scientists have outfitted a major river with sensors that detect spikes in pollution in real time.

Sensors recently placed at various points in the River Lee, near the city of Cork, send information on pollution levels back to a data center. Water managers can keep tabs on pollutants entering the river and, if need be, mount an immediate response.

Called the DEPLOY project, the program was developed as a cheaper alternative to sending out scientists to collect water samples several times a day. In addition, the technology can identify a disastrous influx of pollution, such as toxic industrial-chemical spills, before fish go belly up.

Citizens can also set up an account to get data reports, so they can receive text messages or emails whenever water quality reaches an unhealthy level at points in the river where people may kayak or swim .

"You can build a story about what is actually happening with the water," added Paul Gaughan, a project coordinator at the Marine Institute in Galway, Ireland, which is co-funding the initiative with the Irish Environmental Protection Agency.

For some, the Irish project is a test case: If successful, DEPLOY and other water-monitoring projects across the globe could help build a case for widespread wireless environmental monitoring.

more from National Geographic

California’s sinking delta

2009-12-03T11:44:00.000-08:00

Dennis Baldocchi often drives past the ruins of his grandmother’s house on Sherman Island, in northern California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Flooding gutted the house when the island’s levee broke 40 years ago. Today, grass grows through the floors and chickens wander through.

To Dr. Baldocchi, the slanting hulk whispers an unsettling truth: The land that his family farmed for three generations is sinking farther below sea level each year.

Immigrants began arriving at the Sacramento River Delta 150 years ago. They drained 450,000 acres of marshy lands so that they could farm asparagus, corn, and sugar beets.

Their ingenuity fueled an economic boom, but it also triggered a slow-motion catastrophe: Draining allowed oxygen to penetrate the soil, permitting microbes to consume organic detritus that had lain undisturbed for millenniums, and to churn out carbon dioxide. As the soil deflated, the land sank as much as two inches per year.

Baldocchi, now a biogeochemist at the University of California in nearby Berkeley, spent much of his childhood on Sherman Island, pheasant hunting and helping harvest asparagus on his uncles’ farms. He didn’t appreciate the slow changes that were taking place in the land until he returned in 1999, after 22 years away.

Baldocchi motions to the road ahead. It hovers six feet above the plowed fields. The roads have sunk more slowly than surrounding fields, since blacktop slows the seepage of oxygen, which microbes need to devour peat. “When you grow up here, an inch or two per year you don’t notice,” he says. “But if you’re gone 22 years and it drops two or three feet, you get a visual sense of it.”

more from the CS Monitor

Overfishing linked to algal blooms

2009-12-01T11:30:00.001-08:00

Nitrogenous fertilizers and detergents have long been known to cause algal blooms that block sunlight and strangle ecosystems, but a study now reveals that overfishing of large predatory fish is also playing a key part.

Britas Klemens Eriksson at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands noticed that populations of predatory fish in the Baltic Sea seemed to be declining in areas where algal blooms subsequently tended to form. Curious as to whether there was a connection, Eriksson and a team of colleagues from the Swedish Board of Fisheries in Öregrund set up an investigation.

The team reviewed a year's worth of field data on predatory pike (Esox lucius) and perch (Perca fluviatilis) populations from nine areas covering 700 kilometres of coastline in the Baltic Sea. They then compared this information with information collected during the same period on smaller fish and algal populations in the region. They found some intriguing patterns.

"In areas where there were strong declines in perch and pike there were massive increases in smaller fish and large blooms of algae," comments Eriksson. Where perch and pike populations were intact, the surrounding waters had a 10% chance of experiencing an algal bloom; in areas where their populations had been substantially reduced, the chances of an algal bloom were 50%.

Intrigued by these trends, the researchers ran small-scale field experiments for 2 years in unpolluted waters to investigate the forces responsible for controlling algal growth. They manipulated the environmental conditions in these experiments by: sometimes excluding large predatory fish through the use of cages; sometimes adding nitrogenous fertilizer pellets; sometimes applying both techniques; and sometimes leaving areas as untouched controls.

As expected, the nitrogenous pellets increased algal growth. But surprisingly, when predatory fish were prevented from accessing a given area, algae in that area became much more prevalent. The effect even proved to be true when nitrogenous pellets were not added to the system.

"This is the first study to show that top predators are linked to the formation of macroalgal blooms," says marine biologist Heike Lotze, at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada.

more from Nature

Portland lifts water-boiling order; now tempers are simmering

2009-12-01T11:20:00.000-08:00

Portland lifted its drinking water alert Sunday afternoon, meaning westside residents no longer have to boil water, but the E. coli contamination scare has many people simmering in anger instead.

The contamination, discovered Thursday but not relayed to the public until confirmed by a second test Saturday, plainly worried many residents. They questioned why the alert was not given sooner, said officials didn't clearly define the affected area and wondered whether their tap water had made them sick.

It also reignited the argument over whether Portland's five open water storage reservoirs -- part of a system that provides drinking water for more than 860,000 people -- should be covered.

City officials, however, defended the Portland Water Bureau's handling of the situation.

"The system worked exactly as it was planned to work," Commissioner Randy Leonard said at a news conference Sunday. Leonard, who is in charge of the bureau, said no one was at risk during the alert.

Leonard and Mayor Sam Adams said the incident points out the need for improvements, however. Adams said the city should have a system similar to school districts, which e-mail parents when library books are due and make automated telephone calls to warn of closures during bad weather.

The contamination was limited to a single reservoir at Washington Park, but Water Bureau Director David Shaff said the bureau hasn't the capability to pinpoint which customers receive water from which reservoirs. Lacking that, the bureau had to issue a blanket boil-water order to westside residents. It was the first time in the bureau's history that it issued such a directive.

The order affected about 50,000 residences and businesses west of the Willamette River and receiving water from the Portland Water Bureau or the Burlington, Palatine Hill or Valley View water districts, which buy water from Portland.

In response, residents emptied store shelves of bottled water, restaurants on Portland's westside tossed out ice, quit serving water and coffee or closed, and hotels offered guests bottled water and apologies. Some people boiled water for tea and coffee and brushed their teeth with sparkling water.

"I think a lot of people are pretty worried," said Jessica Johnson, who lives in Northwest Portland. "My mom called to tell me yesterday, and I had just chugged a glass of water. But I'm feeling fine."

Leonard said some people overreacted, but said the incident pointed out the need to have water and other emergency supplies on hand. Multnomah County health officer Dr. Gary Oxman said the warning system is a "designed over-reaction" intended to protect the most vulnerable residents.

The E. coli bacteria found in the reservoir was not the most serious type, Oxman said. He and other health officials said the most likely symptoms would be a sore stomach and diarrhea. Hospitals haven't reported any increase in illness, Oxman said.

more from the Oregonian

Conservation is seen as key to dealing with state's water woes

2009-11-24T05:38:00.000-08:00

Katie Martin grew up with a set of water commandments. No lingering in the shower. Turn off the faucet when you brush your teeth. Don't flood the yard.

Until she left for college this fall, the 19-year-old lived with her family in a typical California stucco house with a lawn. But when it comes to water, neither the Martins nor their town, San Luis Obispo, is typical.

Katie, her parents and little brother use roughly half the water on a per-person basis as the average single-family household in Los Angeles used last year.

"The community is just like that," Martin said.

As climate change, environmental constraints and growth continue to tighten the valve on California's water supplies, the rest of the state is going to be more like that too. Not just during droughts but all the time.

The reason is simple. Compared to building new reservoirs, recycling or seawater desalination, conservation is one of the cheapest, quickest and least environmentally damaging ways for the state to get more water.

"I think we have a water crisis in California, and I think conservation is the only solution that can be implemented in time," said Kevin Wattier, general manager of the Long Beach Water Department.

Water demand in Southern California has remained essentially flat the last two decades, despite the addition of 3.7 million people.

Similarly, L.A. used slightly less water last year than in 1990, even though there are a million more Angelenos now.

Much of the lid on demand has been achieved through gadgetry. Utility rebates and plumbing ordinances have put low-flow toilets and shower heads in millions of buildings and homes. Water agencies promote high-efficiency washing machines.

But it hasn't been enough, said Timothy Brick, chairman of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the region's water wholesaler. "I think we have a long way to go."

Ramping up the Southland's conservation efforts could save more water annually than the combined demand of Los Angeles, San Diego and Long Beach, his agency estimates.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger last year called for the state to cut urban per-capita water use 20% over the next decade. Wide-ranging water legislation approved this month in Sacramento mandates the drop.

"It can be done. But people have to want to do it," said UC Berkeley professor Michael Hanemann, director of the university's California Climate Change Center. "Urban water agencies have to get religion."

more from the LA Times

U.S. group sees worsening coastal flooding threat

2009-11-20T05:35:00.000-08:00

Fast-melting ice from Greenland and Antarctica will lead to a much sharper rise in sea levels than previously estimated, touching off flooding that will radically alter U.S. East Coast cities from Miami to Baltimore, according to a new study.

Climate change will cause a rise of at least 1 meter (39 inches) in sea levels by the end of this century, according to a review of scientific data by Clean Air-Cool Planet, an environmental group that calls itself nonpartisan.

The projection is in sharp contrast to a 2007 study by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said world sea levels could increase 18-59 centimeters (7-23 inches) by 2100.

"We are on our way to radically changing what the coasts look like," said Jim White, a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who worked on the study. "Norfolk could replace New Orleans as the poster child" for coastal flooding, he told reporters on Thursday.

Norfolk, Virginia, situated near the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic Ocean, is home to the world's largest naval base.

The group said it based its conclusions on a study of ice melting by Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

The 2007 U.N. study linked most of its projected sea level rise to a natural expansion of water as it warms. But newer scientific data has focused more on the added impact of ice sheets sliding into oceans.

Gordon Hamilton, an associate professor at the University of Maine, said satellite data shows that Greenland is shedding ice at an accelerated rate, pushing more and more of it into the ocean.

"Icebergs are being calved off the ice sheet at a rate three times faster now than just a few years ago," he said.

more from Reuters

Sewage Industry Fights Phosphorus Pollution

2009-11-17T14:11:00.000-08:00

Tucked away in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, three massive metal cones could help address the world’s dwindling supply of phosphorus, the crucial ingredient of fertilizers that has made modern agriculture possible. The cones make consistently high-quality, slow-release fertilizer pellets from phosphorus recovered at the Durham Advance Wastewater Treatment Facility, less than 10 miles from downtown Portland. By generating about one ton of pellets every day, they are changing the view that such recycling could not be done efficiently. Ostara, the firm that makes the reactors and sells the pellets as Crystal Green, thinks that Durham is one of hundreds of facilities that could use the technology.

Humans excrete some 3.3 million tons of phosphorus annually. In fact, phosphorus from domestic sewage, in addition to fertilizer runoff, has traditionally been a nuisance, because it triggers blooms of algae that deplete local waters of oxygen. In some wastewater plants the element can also bind with ammonia and magnesium to form a mineral called struvite, which keeps phosphorus out of waterways but clogs pipes at the facilities. The growing recognition that cheap supplies of phosphorus will grow scarce in the coming decades has led some nations to consider conservation. Sweden has mandated that 60 percent of phosphate be recycled from wastewater by 2015. In 2008 China slapped a 135 percent export tariff on phosphate.

These pressures have made struvite a hot topic in sewage circles. Japan has been recycling struvite for a decade, but the cost-effectiveness and quality of the pellets varied, according to Don Mavinic, professor of civil engineering at the University of British Columbia (U.B.C.) and co-inventor of Ostara’s technology. “There’s always been a problem of struvite removal,” Mavinic says. “I wanted to build a better mousetrap.”

more from Scientific American

Mystery of Bangladesh's mass arsenic poisoning solved

2009-11-16T15:49:00.000-08:00

Researchers have pinpointed the source of what is probably the worst mass poisoning in history, according to a study published Sunday.

For nearly three decades scientists have struggled to figure out exactly how arsenic was getting into the drinking water of millions of people in rural Bangladesh.

The culprit, says the new study, are tens of thousands of man-made ponds excavated to provide soil for flood protection.

An estimated two million people in Bangladesh suffer from arsenic poisoning, and health experts suspect the toxic, metal-like element has caused -- and will continue to cause -- many deaths as well.

Symptoms include violent stomach pains and vomiting, diarrhoea, convulsions and cramps. A large dose can kill outright, while chronic ingestion of small doses has been linked to a large range of cancers.

It has long been known that the arsenic comes from water drawn from millions of low-tech "tube wells" scattered across the country.

Ironically the wells were dug -- often with the help of international aid agencies -- to protect villages from unclean and disease-ridden surface water.

Tragically, millions of people continue to knowingly poison themselves for lack of an alternative source of water.

Earlier studies succeeded in filling in a few pieces of the deadly puzzle.

They showed that water with the highest concentrations of arsenic is roughly 50 years old, and that the organic carbon which, once metabolised by microbes causes the poison to leach from sediment, does not take long to filter down from the surface.

But the source of both the contaminated water and the organic carbon remained unknown until a team of researchers led by Charles Harvey of MIT in Boston, Massachusetts cracked the secret.

Working in the Munshiganj district of Bangladesh, the researchers analysed the flow patterns of surface and underground water in a six square-mile (15.5 square-kilometre) area.

They used natural tracers and a 3-D computer model to track water from rice fields and ponds, and tested the capacity of organic carbon in both settings to free up arsenic from soil and sediments.

"We saw that water with high arsenic content originates from the human-built ponds, and water with lower arsenic content originates from the rice fields," said Rebecca Neumann, a co-author and postdoctoral associate at Harvard.

more from AFP

India Rain

2009-11-16T14:52:00.000-08:00

Farmers in India do a lot of talking about the weather—especially, it seems, when there is no weather in sight. During the month of May, when the land heats up like a furnace and most fields lie fallow, when wells have run dry and the sun taunts from its broiling perch in a cloudless sky, there is no topic more consuming—or less certain—than when and how the summer monsoon will arrive. The monsoon season, which normally starts in early June and delivers more than three-quarters of the country's annual rainfall in less than four months, will begin gently, like a deer, the farmers say, and later it will turn into a thundering elephant. Or it will start as an elephant and then turn into a deer. Or it will be erratic and annoying right through, like a chicken. In other words, nobody really knows. But still, everybody talks.

This was the case one day in 2008 when an extended family of farmers from a village called Satichiwadi climbed up to the hilltop temple of their village goddess, planning to ask her for rain. It was mid-May and 106 degrees, and Satichiwadi, a village of 83 families that sits in a parched rural valley in the state of Maharashtra, about a hundred miles northeast of Mumbai, hadn't had any significant rainfall for seven months. Most of India at this point was caught in an inescapable annual wait. In New Delhi, the heat had triggered power cuts. Dust storms raced, unmitigated by moisture, across the northern states. Tanker trucks clogged the rural highways, delivering government-sponsored loads of drinking water to villages whose wells had run dry. Meanwhile, radio newscasters were just beginning to track a promising swirl of rain clouds moving over the Andaman Islands, off the southeast coast.

All day, villagers had been speculating about those distant clouds. It was gambling time for rain-dependent farmers across India. In the weeks leading up to the monsoon, many would invest a significant amount of money, often borrowed, to buy fertilizer and millet seeds, which needed to be planted ahead of the rains. There were many ways to lose this wager. A delayed monsoon likely would cause the seeds to bake and die in the ground. Or if the rain fell too hard before the seedlings took root, it might wash them all away.

"Our lives are wrapped up in the rain," explained a woman named Anusayabai Pawar, using a countrywoman's version of Marathi, the regional language. "When it comes, we have everything. When it doesn't, we have nothing."

In the meantime, everyone kept scanning the empty sky. "Like fools," said an older farmer named Yamaji Pawar, sweating beneath his white Nehru cap, "we just sit here waiting."

If the people of Satichiwadi once believed the gods controlled the rain, they were starting to move beyond that. Even as they carried betel nuts and cones of incense up to the goddess's temple, even as one by one the village women knelt down in front of the stone idol that represented her, they seemed merely to be hedgingtheir bets. Bhaskar Pawar, a sober-minded, mustachioed farmer in his 30s, sat on one of the low walls of the temple, watching impassively as his female relatives prayed. "Especially the younger people here understand now that it's environmental," he said.

more from National Geographic

Salt-loving algae wipe out fish in Appalachian stream

2009-11-12T07:29:00.000-08:00

A salt-loving alga that killed tens of millions of fish in Texas has struck for the first time in an Appalachian stream that flows along the border of Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Prymnesium parvum or “golden algae” caused the sudden death of thousands of fish, mussels, and salamanders in early September along some 30 miles of Dunkard Creek. University and government scientists fear the disaster could presage further kills in the region. Streams at risk due to high concentrations of total dissolved solids (TDS) include portions of the northern branch of the Potomac River and 20 other streams in West Virginia, according to state scientists. Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and Kentucky also have many vulnerable rivers and streams, according to U.S. EPA scientists.
Dunkard Creek is a tributary to the Monongahela River, where last year high TDS levels fouled industrial equipment and ruined the taste of drinking water. Faced with projected increases in TDS as a result of the burgeoning and water-intensive natural gas hydraulic fracturing activity at the Marcellus Formation, Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (PA DEP) recently proposed TDS standards for end-of-pipe discharges of 500 parts per million (ppm) TDS and 250 ppm each for sulfate and chloride.
Despite historically high TDS levels, the creek was a good fishing stream with small mouth bass, muskie, mussels, and salamanders, according to biologist Frank Jernejcic with the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources. In just a few days the algal bloom wiped out the creek’s 18 species of fish and 14 species of freshwater mussels—the most diverse population of mussels in the Monongahela basin. “This is the worst fish kill I’ve experienced in 21 years in West Virginia,” says Paul Ziemkiewicz, director of the Water Research Institute at West Virginia University.

more from EST news

The New Dust Bowl

2009-11-09T06:46:00.000-08:00

When I meet Javier Vaca on a dusty strip of blacktop, he's been walking for three days. The skinny 18-year-old is being carried along in a procession of 7,000 farmworkers and farmers as it crosses California's Central Valley, his baggy jeans and hoodie standing out amid the work boots and button-downs. He's been told only one thing that matters: Marching 50 miles might earn him a job.

"I don't want to jack nobody," Vaca says, as though the thought had crossed his mind. When the housing boom imploded last year, he lost a $14-an-hour construction job, a job that had allowed this son of farmworkers to drop out of high school, buy a car, and rent an apartment for his young wife and baby in Fresno. It took him a month to find more work, this time picking peaches at less than half his previous wage. Then the worst drought in more than a decade hit, a court order to protect an endangered fish cut off water to the valley's farmers, and an area larger than Los Angeles went fallow. Vaca now works one day a week while his family survives on welfare and food stamps. "It's hard, man," he says. "Everybody's broke."

The spring morning chill becomes a broil as Vaca and his fellow marchers slowly follow a two-lane road through parched hills. A man squatting next to an ice chest on the median doles out carne asada burritos. "I'm hungry," Vaca says with a wan smile as he stuffs one into his pants pocket and bites into another. He passes an ATV draped in an American flag, where Sharon Wakefield, an almond farmer, is resting her feet. She says she believes that the Mexicans and Central Americans who have joined the California March for Water are basically no different from her mother, who fled Oklahoma during the Great Depression to earn a pittance harvesting hay and cotton in the valley. Except this time, the state has even less to offer them: "We've got no water, no food, no future," she says.

The Central Valley, the thin, fertile band running down the middle of California, has long boasted the world's richest agricultural economy, reliably producing more than a quarter of the nation's fruits, nuts, and vegetables. But it's done so in defiance of ecological reality. The 70-year-old irrigation system that has pumped water into the otherwise arid valley is proving increasingly vulnerable to shifting weather patterns. It now appears that waterwise, 20th century California was an anomaly, a relatively wet period in the midst of a historical cycle of severe drought. And the changing climate will only magnify the problem: By the end of the century, scientists predict, Central California could experience temperatures rivaling Death Valley's and face the loss of 90 percent of the Sierra Nevada snowpack, the region's main water source. "Business as usual won't work in the future," says Eike Luedeling, an expert in plant sciences at the University of California-Davis, whose research shows that higher temperatures will likely decimate the state's $10 billion fruit and nut industry. "Especially for tree crops, adapting will require huge investments that probably a lot of small guys can't make anymore."

The sudden collapse of the Central Valley's economy illustrates how climate change can push a fragile region over the edge. Already vulnerable from rampant housing speculation and a dependence on industrial agriculture, the valley never prepared for a prolonged spate of bad weather. In 2008, local bankruptcy filings jumped 74 percent—from about 15,300 to 27,000—a rate of increase twice the national average. Three of the valley's counties were among the nation's six worst for foreclosures, with nearly 85,000 houses lost. The drought is expected to dry up a billion dollars in income and 35,000 jobs, adding to a statewide unemployment rate that recently hit 11.9 percent—the highest since the eve of World War II. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has asked the federal government to declare the region a disaster area.

On the west side of the valley, which is often last in line for deliveries from federal water projects, farmers are selling prized almond trees for firewood, fields are reverting to weed, and farmworkers who once fled droughts in Mexico are overwhelming food banks. In short, the valley is becoming what an earlier generation of refugees thought they'd escaped: an ecological catastrophe in the middle of a social and economic one—a 21st century Dust Bowl.

more from Mother Jones

California Water Overhaul Caps Use

2009-11-05T09:12:00.000-08:00

California lawmakers on Wednesday approved a series of bills that would vastly overhaul the state’s troubled water system. The water package is the most comprehensive to emerge from the state since the 1960s, when California last upgraded its system for what was a far smaller population of users.

Prompted by a protracted drought — which has reduced water supply, harmed the fishing industry and contributed to crop loss — environmentalists and agricultural interests have agreed to broad concessions.

The plan calls for a comprehensive ecosystem restoration in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta — a collection of channels, natural habitats and islands at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers that is a major source of the state’s drinking water.

It also calls for new dams, aggressive water conservation goals and the monitoring of groundwater use, which other Western states already do. And it paves the way for a new canal — once the third rail of California’s byzantine water politics — that would move water from the north of the state to the south.

The series of bills, which Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has said he will sign, include an $11.1 billion bond issue, which voters will be asked to approve next November. The rest of the roughly $40 billion project would be paid for by localities, largely through new user fees.

more from the NY Times

More cities hit hard for sewer violations

2009-11-03T12:03:00.000-08:00

For years, the city of Clinton dumped excessive amounts of damaging ammonia, copper and other pollutants into a backwater channel of a national treasure - the Mississippi River.

This year, the state got serious about making the city stop.

After issuing 28 sanctions for sewage permit violations and a couple of small fines, the state of Iowa filed a lawsuit in March against the city, alleging excess discharges dating back to at least 1991. As part of a court agreement with Iowa's attorney general, the city paid a $100,000 fine - one of the state's largest involving sewage offenses.

But that's not all: The state also required the city of just under 30,000 to build a new sewage plant at a cost of up to $66 million.

"It's going to have a big economic impact on Clinton," said Mayor Rodger E.J. Holm. "We're looking at a staggering increase in fees over the next few years."

When Iowa sewage plants have been found in violation of their state permits, the state typically has written a letter advising the plants to obey pollution limits in the future. Any fines assessed as penalties have tended to be minimal - a thousand dollars or so.

But steeper fines of $10,000 or more have become more commonplace in recent years, and the state is increasingly playing hardball in some of the worst instances of waterway pollution, said Dennis Ostwinkle of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources' environmental-protection staff.

Clinton's excessive dumping into Beaver Slough never killed fish or directly threatened human life. But it did worsen Iowa's already serious water quality problems and stands out as an egregious example of years-long resistance to the work needed to clean waterways, state and local officials said.

"We racked up quite a few violations for exceeding our permit - particularly in 2002 and 2003," said public works director Gary Schellhorn. "If you did that every day for 20 years at that level, you'd do some damage."

In 2008, the DNR issued 38 orders requiring improvements at plants across the state - many of which carried specific fines if deadlines are not met. The number was almost double the 20 issued in 2005.

The DNR is also preparing to demand tougher pollution-control requirements that will mandate more widespread improvements to Iowa's treatment plants. The move comes as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency pushes harder to get states to comply with the U.S. Clean Water Act, including future limits in streams for certain chemicals like farm fertilizers, Ostwinkle said.

Already, many cities face schedules set by the state to expand plants or build new ones. Some of those are part of court agreements.

The state has been hesitant to levy heavy fines in the past because upgrades and greater compliance already will cost the plants and customers dearly. But it has been stepping up enforcement when offenses continue for years, cities continue to miss deadlines or they fail to warn the public of hazards.

more from the Des Moines Register

Chicken Litter: The Aerial Hunt for Poultry Manure

2009-11-03T11:47:00.000-08:00

Retired Marine officer Rick Dove boarded the four-seat Cessna armed with cameras, binoculars and global positioning devices for his latest mission: chicken farmers. Or, more precisely, aerial reconnaissance of poultry droppings.

"Oh, man, that looks like a hot site," Mr. Dove said as the plane soared 1,000 feet over farms near the Chesapeake Bay. Peering through binoculars, he said, "That pile is at least two stories high." He whipped out his camera and started snapping pictures.

Mr. Dove, 70 years old, suspected the brown mound was chicken manure -- a potential pollutant of the Chesapeake Bay, the huge estuary nestled between the shores of Maryland and Virginia. Mr. Dove, a former military judge whose subsequent fishing business he believes was ruined by pollution, is among the activists who, along with federal regulators, are ratcheting up pressure on poultry farmers to clean up their litter.

Livestock and poultry operations generate about 500 million tons of manure each year, or about three times the amount of human waste in the U.S., according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Much of that waste goes untreated and sometimes can make its way into public waterways. Among other contaminants, manure contains nitrogen and phosphorus that in large quantities can cause algae blooms -- green, gooey splotches on the water surface that can deplete the water's oxygen, killing fish and other organisms. And in some cases, the runoff, which can contain E. coli and other bacteria, can threaten human health.

more from the Wall Street Journal

Report: US getting better at conserving water

2009-10-30T08:03:00.000-07:00

Americans are using less water per person now than they have since the mid-1950s, thanks to water-saving technologies and a nationwide push to safeguard dwindling supplies.

A report released Thursday by the U.S. Geological Survey also shows that industries as well as the general population are sucking up less water overall than in 1980, when the nation's thirst for water peaked.

Experts said it was particularly welcome news in the burgeoning West, where cities built in dry regions are grappling with intense disputes and ecosystem collapse tied to dwindling supplies.

"Even during a time of population growth and economic growth, we are all using less water," said Susan Hutson, a USGS hydrologist in Memphis, and an author of the report. "It's exciting to see we have responded to these crises by really seeking solutions."

California, in the third year of a withering drought, was the most water-hungry state in 2005, the most recent year for which figures were available.

California used about 9 percent of all water extracted from lakes, rivers and underground aquifers, followed by Texas, Idaho and Illinois. All told, those four states drew more than a quarter of the country's total freshwater supplies in 2005.

Nationwide, about 80 percent of the 410 billion gallons used each day went to produce electricity at thermoelectric power plants and to irrigate farm fields.

But as the drought and environmental battles persist in California, some of the state's most productive farmers are receiving as little as 10 percent of their normal supplies, forcing growers to leave hundreds of thousands of acres unplanted and lay off thousands of farmworkers.

This year, city dwellers, too, have been forced to shorten their showers and let their lawns turn brown under mandatory water rations.

"We still have collapsing ecosystems because of water use, we still have rivers and aquifers that are overtapped, and we still have rapid population growth," said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, an environmental think tank based in Oakland. "I guess the optimistic way to put it is, we're learning our lessons about smart water use but we have a long way to go."

Occasional shortages and disputes have arisen even around the water-rich region of the Great Lakes, which hold 95 percent of the nation's fresh surface water and meet the drinking needs of 34 million people in eight states.

Last year, the states signed a compact that limits any diversions of lake water to areas outside the drainage basin, in reaction to fears of Sun Belt water grabs.

Scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have warned that climate change will exacerbate water scarcity problems around the world. Computer models suggest a warming climate may send the Great Lakes' levels substantially lower by century's end.

"The pressure's on to conserve," said Tim Eder, director of the Great Lakes Commission, an interstate agency. "We're trying to position ourselves so we'll have an abundant supply that can be used sustainably, particularly if businesses want to relocate here from places where water is expensive or unavailable."

from the Associated Press

The trouble facing Canadian rivers

2009-10-15T08:40:00.000-07:00

he seasonal waxing and waning of rivers is one of nature's most crucial cycles, influencing everything from the success of salmon runs to having enough water during parched summers to irrigate crops.

But by this measure, many of Canada's major rivers are in trouble, contends a new report that says many of the best known rivers have suffered major alterations in their natural flows due to hydro dams, irrigation schemes and withdrawals by industry, and could be further compromised by the effects of global warming.

The report, by WWF-Canada, one of the country's major environmental organizations, says the rivers that have been most altered from their natural state include the St. Lawrence and the South Saskatchewan, whose “ecosystems are in serious trouble” as a result. But it warned that if safeguards aren't put in place soon, some of North America's last free-flowing rivers, including the Skeena in B.C., the Athabasca in Alberta, and the Mackenzie in the Northwest Territories “could soon be in trouble as well.”

The report, titled Canada's Rivers at Risk, is believed to be the first evaluation of rivers in Canada based on how much human activity has changed their natural flows. Previous studies of rivers by government or environmentalists have focused on such traditional threats as pollution from industries or sewage treatment plants.

“The concept of environmental flows is really emerging globally as a fundamental indicator of how to look at river health,” said Tony Maas, director of freshwater programs at WWF-Canada.

The report assessed 10 major rivers based on more than 300 scientific papers, and is being released Thursday.

Most rivers have a distinct annual flow pattern on which wildlife depend, with amounts peaking in spring when melting snow augments flows. Low levels occur during winter freeze-ups or summer droughts. But dams and other human interferences smooth out these natural fluctuations.

It highlighted the fact that responsibility for most large rivers in Canada is shared by several governments, making efforts to regulate their flows more difficult.

more from the Toronto Globe and Mail

Cleansing the Air at the Expense of Waterways

2009-10-13T07:34:00.000-07:00

For years, residents here complained about the yellow smoke pouring from the tall chimneys of the nearby coal-fired power plant, which left a film on their cars and pebbles of coal waste in their yards. Five states — including New York and New Jersey — sued the plant’s owner, Allegheny Energy, claiming the air pollution was causing respiratory diseases and acid rain.

So three years ago, when Allegheny Energy decided to install scrubbers to clean the plant’s air emissions, environmentalists were overjoyed. The technology would spray water and chemicals through the plant’s chimneys, trapping more than 150,000 tons of pollutants each year before they escaped into the sky.

But the cleaner air has come at a cost. Each day since the equipment was switched on in June, the company has dumped tens of thousands of gallons of wastewater containing chemicals from the scrubbing process into the Monongahela River, which provides drinking water to 350,000 people and flows into Pittsburgh, 40 miles to the north.

“It’s like they decided to spare us having to breathe in these poisons, but now we have to drink them instead,” said Philip Coleman, who lives about 15 miles from the plant and has asked a state judge to toughen the facility’s pollution regulations. “We can’t escape.”

Even as a growing number of coal-burning power plants around the nation have moved to reduce their air emissions, many of them are creating another problem: water pollution. Power plants are the nation’s biggest producer of toxic waste, surpassing industries like plastic and paint manufacturing and chemical plants, according to a New York Times analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data.

Much power plant waste once went into the sky, but because of toughened air pollution laws, it now often goes into lakes and rivers, or into landfills that have leaked into nearby groundwater, say regulators and environmentalists.

Officials at the plant here in southwest Pennsylvania — named Hatfield’s Ferry — say it does not pose any health or environmental risks because they have installed equipment to limit the toxins the facility releases into the Monongahela River and elsewhere.

more from the NY Times

interactive map of coal-fired plants in the US

Millions of gallons of raw sewage taints Missouri waters, state agency data show

2009-10-11T08:59:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, 3 million gallons of raw sewage poured into a south Kansas City stream, and it made news across Missouri.

But those may just be drops in a sea of bacteria flowing into the state’s rivers and lakes.

While a lot of attention has turned to the way a state agency handled E. coli problems in the summer at the Lake of the Ozarks, several other recreational lakes have been forced to close beaches.

Hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage have spilled into Missouri’s waterways in the past year, according to data from the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.

“We consider this to be a serious problem,” said Travis Ford, spokesman for the DNR, which is conducting an internal investigation into its own procedures because of concerns about the risk to human health.

Consider: In St. Joseph last December, more than 31 million gallons of raw sewage poured into the Missouri River during a rainstorm. Just a couple of weeks before that, 8.9 million gallons flowed in, and a month later, 8.5 million gallons more.

In Independence, 14 million gallons ran into streams there during rainstorms last April.

Kansas City annually fights millions of gallons of sewer overflows during rainstorms.

Many spills and overflows occur when rains flood decaying sewer systems; others occur when old pipes break.

more from the Kansas City Star

Egypt oasis risks becoming mirage

2009-10-06T06:14:00.000-07:00

Four days into the journey his men had run out of water. By the time they eventually stumbled across the oasis it must have appeared - as it still does - like a mirage out of the sand.

Today Siwa is a nine-hour drive from Cairo, across some of the most barren desert anywhere on the planet. It sits 18 metres below sea level, the main oasis surrounded by green desert islands where water naturally springs to the surface.

Beneath the sandstone is the Nubian aquifer an enormous - yet finite - supply of fossilised water that has flowed for thousands of years.

It fills the turquoise bathing pools in Siwa; one of them, "the spring of Juba", is so old it was mentioned by the Greek historian Herodotus who lived in the 5th Century BC.

So abundant is the water that within the oasis they grow over 120 different types of dates, some considered the best in Egypt. But the ancient caravan routes on which they once transferred their produce to market have now been replaced by a tarmac road.

It brings tourists, technology, growth and the sort of development that threatens delicate eco-systems. In the past 20 years the water, that once flowed naturally from beneath the rocks, has been sucked at alarming rate from hundreds of man-made wells.

Mounir Neamatalla runs an eco lodge in Siwa, a hotel complex built with mud brick, a model of sustainable development. He is now fighting a lonely battle to preserve the unique Berber culture and the precious water reserves on which the oasis survives.

"Unfortunately the whole industry of well drilling is now very active in the oasis," he said, "to feed our greed and appetite for more.

"As a result the rate of natural replenishment of the springs is lower than it ought to be. We are competing with a natural phenomenon that has existed for thousands of years."

more from the BBC

Feds to fund Mississippi clean up from Minnesota to the Gulf

2009-09-28T18:52:00.000-07:00

The river that begins as a trickle in Itasca State Park and ends 2,350 miles later at the Gulf of Mexico will get a $320 million infusion from the federal government to improve water quality.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced a program Thursday that will provide the money over the next four years to Minnesota and 11 other states in the Mississippi River basin.

Calling the river "a critical national resource," Vilsack said the Mississippi River Basin Healthy Watersheds Initiative will attempt to reduce excessive nitrogen and phosphorus runoff from farms that enters the river through its tributaries and creates a "dead zone" each summer in the Gulf of Mexico. The nutrients cause vast algae blooms that eventually die, sink to the bottom and are consumed by bacteria that rob the water of most of its oxygen.

In 2009, the dead zone covered about 3,000 square miles, slightly larger than Delaware. Although the zone was somewhat smaller than in other recent years, scientists and environmental leaders have expressed alarm since the 1990s about the large amounts of chemicals moving through the river and the repercussions on the gulf's ecosystem.

more from the Star Tribune

What's ugly, smells, kills dogs? Blue-green algae

2009-09-28T18:32:00.000-07:00

Waterways across the upper Midwest are increasingly plagued with ugly, smelly and potentially deadly blue-green algae, bloomed by drought and fertilizer runoffs from farm fields, that's killed dozens of dogs and sickened many people.

Aquatic biologists say it's a problem that falls somewhere between a human health concern and a nuisance, but will eventually lead to more human poisoning. State officials are telling people who live on algae-covered lakes to close their windows, stop taking walks along the picturesque shorelines and keep their dogs from drinking the rank water.

Peggy McAloon, 62, lives on Wisconsin's Tainter Lake and calls the algae blooms the "cockroach on the water."

"It is like living in the sewer for three weeks. You gag. You cannot go outside," she said. "We have pictures of squirrels that are dead underneath the scum and fish that are dead. ... It has gotten out of control because of the nutrient loads we as humans are adding to the waters."

Blue-green algae are common in waters but not every lake develops serious problems until plentiful "man-induced" nutrients like phosphorous arrive, said Jim Vennie, a Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources expert. The toxins released by the algae can be deadly. Symptoms include rash, hives, runny nose, irritated eyes and throat irritation.

No people have died in the U.S. from the algae's toxins, according to Wayne Carmichael, a retired aquatic biologist and toxicology professor in Oregon.

Many, however, have gotten sick: "Sooner or later, we are going to have more acute human poisoning," Carmichael said.

The scum has killed dozens of dogs over the years — including at least four in Oregon, three in Wisconsin and one in Minnesota this summer. Wisconsin wildlife experts are warning duck hunters with dogs to be extra cautious this fall. "If the water is pea-soup green, be sure to have clean water along to wash the dog off," Vennie said. "Don't let it drink the water."

Fewer than 100 lakes in Wisconsin typically have some problems with algae bloom each summer and the ones in western Wisconsin causing so much discomfort this year are being fueled by a perfect storm, Vennie said. The last month has seen little rain, warm, sunshiny days and little wind.

more from the AP

Polluted Lake Okeechobee getting dirtier

2009-09-24T11:08:00.000-07:00

Water managers, environmental agencies and conservation groups have been talking about cleaning up Lake Okeechobee for decades.

The water quality has only gotten worse. Much worse.

Two environmental groups on Wednesday released an e-mail from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that shows a troubling buildup of the key nutrient phosphorus -- whose presence in the lake has almost quadrupled since the 1970s and almost doubled since the 1990s.

With current concentrations approaching 200 parts per billion -- considered 20 times too polluted for the Everglades -- the dirty lake looms as major and expensive problem for an Everglades restoration effort who cost is already expected to top $20 billion.

Jerry Phillips, Florida director of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which released the September memo with the Civic Council Association, called the declining water quality, primarily flowing in from ranches and suburbs north of the lake, ``the elephant in the living room'' of Everglades restoration.

``If you don't start addressing the issue, you aren't going to get any true restoration on the south side,'' he said.

Phillips blamed lax regulation by the EPA and Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

A spokeswoman for the EPA's regional office in Atlanta said the agency was crafting a response. In a lawsuit settlement with environmental groups earlier this year, the agency agreed to set legal limits for farm and urban runoff that pollutes Florida's waterways.

The South Florida Water Management District, which is overseeing Everglades cleanup for the state, issued a written statement saying lawmakers had approved a North Everglades plan in 2007 to address the issues and had spent $1.8 billion to improve water quality in the Everglades. Most of that has gone into constructing almost 40,000 acres of pollution cleanup marshes designed to scrub runoff from sugar farms south of the lake.

North of the lake, the district said it is working with farmers and cattle ranches to reduce fertilizer use and runoff. It is also constructing a 2,700-acre treatment area to clean water before it flows into the lake.

The memo, written by Eric Hughes, a wetlands biologist based in the EPA's Jacksonville office, said an average of 572 tons of phosphorus flows into the lake each year -- four times the target the state is supposed to reach by 2015.

Excess phosphorus, a nutrient in manure and fertilizer, can choke native plants and fuels the growth of cat-tails and other exotic plants in the Everglades and algae blooms in rivers and lakes.

from the Miami Herald

Vietnam Finds Itself Vulnerable if Sea Rises

2009-09-24T07:34:00.000-07:00

For centuries, as monsoon rains, typhoons and wars have swept over them and disappeared into the sunshine, the farmers and fishermen of the Mekong Delta have drawn life from the water and fertile fields where the great river ends its 2,700-mile journey to the sea.

The rhythms of life continue from season to season though, like much of the country, the delta is moving quickly into the future, and industry has begun to pollute the air and water.

But everything here, both the timeless and the new, is at risk now from a threat that could bring deeper and longer-lasting disruptions than the generations of warfare that ended more than 30 years ago.

In a worse-case projection, a Vietnamese government report released last month says that more than one-third of the delta, where 17 million people live and nearly half the country’s rice is grown, could be submerged if sea levels rise by three feet in the decades to come.

In a more modest projection, it calculates that one-fifth of the delta would be flooded, said Tran Thuc, who leads Vietnam’s National Institute for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Sciences and is the chief author of the report.

Storm surges could periodically raise that level, he said, and experts say an intrusion of salt water and industrial pollution could contaminate much of the remaining delta area.

The risks of climate change for Vietnam go far beyond the Mekong Delta, up into the Central Highlands, where rising temperatures could put the coffee crop at risk, and to the Red River Delta in the north, where large areas could be inundated near the capital, Hanoi.

Climate experts consider this nation of an estimated 87 million people to be among the half-dozen most threatened by the weather disruptions and rising sea levels linked to climate change that are predicted in the course of this century.

If the sea level rises by three feet, 11 percent of Vietnam’s population could be displaced, according to a 2007 World Bank working paper.

more from the NY Times

'Millions at risk' as deltas sink

2009-09-21T09:15:00.000-07:00

Damming and diverting rivers means that much less sediment now reaches many delta areas, while extraction of gas and groundwater also lowers the land.

Rivers affected include the Colorado, Nile, Pearl, Rhone and Yangtze.

About half a billion people live in these regions, the researchers note in the journal Nature Geoscience.

They calculate that 85% of major deltas have seen severe flooding in recent years, and that the area of land vulnerable to flooding will increase by about 50% in the next 40 years as land sinks and climate change causes sea levels to rise.

"We argue that the world's low-lying deltas are increasingly vulnerable to flooding, either from their feeding rivers or from ocean storms," said Albert Kettner from the University of Colorado in Boulder, US.

"This study shows there are a host of human-induced factors that already cause deltas to sink much more rapidly than could be explained by sea level alone."

Most of the at-risk river basins are in the developing countries of Asia, but there are several in developed nations as well, including the Rhone in France and the Po in Italy.

The Po delta sank by 3.7m during the 20th Century, mainly from methane extraction, the researchers say.

more from the BBC

EPA Turns the Lights on Mountaintop Removal

2009-09-16T06:33:00.000-07:00

The Environmental Protection Agency made good on its promise today to assert greater scrutiny and "use the best science and follow the letter of the law" with regard to controversial mountaintop removal mining permits in the Appalachian coalfields. In a highly anticipated announcement, the agency declared that all seventy-nine pending permits in four states would "likely cause water quality impacts" and sent them on for additional review under the Clean Water Act.

Does today's big announcement end the practice of mountaintop removal--which has clear-cut more than 1.2 million acres of deciduous forests, employed billions of pounds of ammonium nitrate/fuel oil explosives to blow up 500 mountains, packed and sullied an estimated 2,000 miles of streams with mining waste, and left coalfield communities in economic ruin?

The short answer from the EPA: no.

But while the agency has gone out of its way to make clear that this announcement does not "constitute a change" in policy or usurp the Army Corps of Engineers's authority over such permits, today's news comes as a telling harbinger that the rule of science, law and interagency cooperation just might be returning to the Appalachian coalfields.

"The administration pledged earlier this year to improve review of mining projects that risked harming water quality," EPA administrator Lisa Jackson announced in a statement. "Release of this preliminary list is the first step in a process to assure that the environmental concerns raised by the seventy-nine permit applications are addressed and that permits issued are protective of water quality and affected ecosystems."

According to the EPA, this preliminary list of projects will be evaluated over the next 15 days, at which time "issues of concern regarding particular permit applications will be addressed during a 60-day review process triggered when the Corps informs EPA that a particular permit is ready for discussion."

more from The Nation

Israel mourns the dying Dead Sea

2009-09-15T08:46:00.000-07:00

There can be few sights sadder than a seaside restaurant that has been abandoned by the sea.

Dropping south on Route 90, the Israeli highway that stretches the length of the Jordan River, we turned left at the service station selling Dead Sea mud for skin-toning and salt crystals for your bath.

A few hundred metres on is a wrecked concrete building baking in the sun, one of those melancholy Middle East ruins that look as if they became redundant almost as soon as they were built.

Except this one is different. Walk into what is left of the lobby and you notice the remains of a once stylish bar.

Look ahead and you see two crescent arms enclosing a dining terrace, adorned with an outsized crusader map of the River Jordan. It is of course recognisable, despite the large hole in the concrete just up from Jericho.

The restaurant was sited so that guests could drop off the terrace straight into the sea. You do not really swim in the Dead Sea, you bounce about, and it is easy to imagine flopping into the salty waters after a hearty lunch.

Except that the sea has now gone, you can see it glittering in the sunshine just less than a mile away.

Where the sound of lapping water once mixed with chinking glasses and the clatter of plates, there is now just desert dust.

more from the BBC

How Safe Is Your Water?

2009-09-13T08:17:00.000-07:00

Is your drinking water safe? That depends on several factors: the source; the treatment the water receives, if any; and the quality of the pipes in your home.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency, reports of Americans falling ill from drinking tap water are rare, and mostly involve people who are already in frail health. But it is not known how many people suffer unreported stomach upsets from bacterial contamination, or even more serious problems, like long-term exposure to contaminants like lead, from drinking tap water.

The Environmental Protection Agency regulates the community water systems that supply drinking water to most Americans. Every water system is required to publish a yearly “consumer confidence report” detailing contaminants or violations of water quality standards. You can see the report for your water system by contacting the system directly. To find your water system, visit www.epa.gov/enviro/html/sdwis/sdwis_query.html.

If your water comes from your own well, the E.P.A. advises that you test it annually, especially if you see signs of trouble like corroded pipes, strange odors or stained laundry.

Your municipality, county or state health department may offer free or low-cost testing services; otherwise, you can use a laboratory certified in your state. The E.P.A. has a list at www.epa.gov/safewater/labs/index.html. For further information on well water quality, the E.P.A. suggests consulting nonprofit groups like the American Ground Water Trust (www.agwt.org).

Health departments can offer guidance to well owners on which contaminants to test for. Ask about the presence of radon or heavy metals like arsenic in underground rocks or soils. Tell the laboratory if you live near a farm, an industrial cattle-feeding operation, a gas station, a mine, a factory, a dump or any kind of operation that might produce contaminants that can find their way into ground water.

If your water is contaminated, there are a few steps you can take.

If the issue is corroded pipes in your home, consider replacing them. If your well is contaminated by bacteria, you can have it disinfected. (Be vigilant about testing in the future.) Or you can drill a deeper well.

For a few hundred dollars, you can install a “point of entry” system to filter contaminants, like heavy metals or bacteria, out of water where it enters your home. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the E.P.A. say such filters can help people whose immune systems are weakened by H.I.V., chemotherapy, steroid treatments or other factors. Some experts also recommend them for people who are very young, very old, pregnant or frail.

A number of organizations, including Underwriters Laboratories (www.ul.com/global/eng/pages/) certify units that meet or exceed E.P.A. standards.

You can also use filters that can be attached to the tap or used in pitchers. They differ in quality and the contaminants they remove, so figure out what you need before you buy. Consumers Union, an independent testing organization, rates these filters (www.consumersunion.org). If you use these devices, you must be vigilant about replacing the filter components as scheduled. If you neglect this, even low levels of contaminants can collect in your filter, making it a potential trouble source.

One knotty issue is the presence in the water supply of residues from prescription drugs, personal care products like sunscreen or shampoo, or other substances that scientists call “emerging contaminants.” The E.P.A. says researchers have found these compounds in water almost everywhere they have looked. They attribute this to improved sensors as well as greater prevalence.

Many of these substances seem impervious to water treatment regimes. But are they a problem for people? So far, that question remains unresolved.

from the NY Times

Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Human Suffering

2009-09-13T07:07:00.000-07:00

Jennifer Hall-Massey knows not to drink the tap water in her home near Charleston, W.Va.

In fact, her entire family tries to avoid any contact with the water. Her youngest son has scabs on his arms, legs and chest where the bathwater — polluted with lead, nickel and other heavy metals — caused painful rashes. Many of his brother’s teeth were capped to replace enamel that was eaten away.

Neighbors apply special lotions after showering because their skin burns. Tests show that their tap water contains arsenic, barium, lead, manganese and other chemicals at concentrations federal regulators say could contribute to cancer and damage the kidneys and nervous system.

“How can we get digital cable and Internet in our homes, but not clean water?” said Mrs. Hall-Massey, a senior accountant at one of the state’s largest banks.

She and her husband, Charles, do not live in some remote corner of Appalachia. Charleston, the state capital, is less than 17 miles from her home.

“How is this still happening today?” she asked.

When Mrs. Hall-Massey and 264 neighbors sued nine nearby coal companies, accusing them of putting dangerous waste into local water supplies, their lawyer did not have to look far for evidence. As required by state law, some of the companies had disclosed in reports to regulators that they were pumping into the ground illegal concentrations of chemicals — the same pollutants that flowed from residents’ taps.

But state regulators never fined or punished those companies for breaking those pollution laws.

This pattern is not limited to West Virginia. Almost four decades ago, Congress passed the Clean Water Act to force polluters to disclose the toxins they dump into waterways and to give regulators the power to fine or jail offenders. States have passed pollution statutes of their own. But in recent years, violations of the Clean Water Act have risen steadily across the nation, an extensive review of water pollution records by The New York Times found.

In the last five years alone, chemical factories, manufacturing plants and other workplaces have violated water pollution laws more than half a million times. The violations range from failing to report emissions to dumping toxins at concentrations regulators say might contribute to cancer, birth defects and other illnesses.

However, the vast majority of those polluters have escaped punishment. State officials have repeatedly ignored obvious illegal dumping, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which can prosecute polluters when states fail to act, has often declined to intervene.

Because it is difficult to determine what causes diseases like cancer, it is impossible to know how many illnesses are the result of water pollution, or contaminants’ role in the health problems of specific individuals.

But concerns over these toxins are great enough that Congress and the E.P.A. regulate more than 100 pollutants through the Clean Water Act and strictly limit 91 chemicals or contaminants in tap water through the Safe Drinking Water Act.

Regulators themselves acknowledge lapses. The new E.P.A. administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, said in an interview that despite many successes since the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972, today the nation’s water does not meet public health goals, and enforcement of water pollution laws is unacceptably low. She added that strengthening water protections is among her top priorities. State regulators say they are doing their best with insufficient resources.

The Times obtained hundreds of thousands of water pollution records through Freedom of Information Act requests to every state and the E.P.A., and compiled a national database of water pollution violations that is more comprehensive than those maintained by states or the E.P.A.

n addition, The Times interviewed more than 250 state and federal regulators, water-system managers, environmental advocates and scientists.

That research shows that an estimated one in 10 Americans have been exposed to drinking water that contains dangerous chemicals or fails to meet a federal health benchmark in other ways.

Those exposures include carcinogens in the tap water of major American cities and unsafe chemicals in drinking-water wells. Wells, which are not typically regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act, are more likely to contain contaminants than municipal water systems.

Because most of today’s water pollution has no scent or taste, many people who consume dangerous chemicals do not realize it, even after they become sick, researchers say.

more from the NY Times

EPA should set nutrient limits to block dead zones, agency's inspector general says

2009-08-28T10:19:00.000-07:00

The Environmental Protection Agency should move immediately to adopt enforceable limits on the release of nutrient pollutants -- such as fertilizer and sewage -- into rivers and streams to halt the creation of dangerously low oxygen areas in water bodies, and the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico should be one of its first targets, the agency's Office of Inspector General said in a report made public today.

"We believe selecting nationally significant waters and acting to set standards for nutrients in them is a minimal first step if EPA is to meet the requirements of the (Clean Water Act)," the report said.

"Critical national waters such as the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River require standards that, once set, will affect multiple upstream states," the report said. "These states have not yet set nutrient standards for themselves; consequently it is EPA's responsibility to act."

Nutrient pollution is regulated under the federal Clean Water Act, which requires federal and state governments to assure that rivers, streams, estuaries and coastal waters are "fishable and swimmable."

The report studied states whose nutrients were carried to the Gulf "because excess nutrients have resulted in its having one of the largest dead zones in the world."

Research has shown that the Gulf of Mexico's dead zone forms during the spring and summer after nutrients from 41 states -- including Midwest farms and sewage treatment plants -- is carried down the Mississippi River, where they provide food for the growth of algae.

The algae bloom in fresher surface water along the Louisiana and Texas coastlines and then die and sink into saltier water at the bottom, where its decomposition creates hypoxia, or low-oxygen water conditions. The result can be death for organisms living on the bottom, while fish and shrimp attempt to escape by swimming to water offshore containing more oxygen.

more from the Times Picayune

Measuring the Damage of our 'Water Footprint'

2009-08-27T08:53:00.000-07:00

Arjen Hoekstra didn't really stand out in the crowd of 2,000 scientists, activists, politicians and representatives of industry roaming the halls of the Stockholm trade fair. Far more attention-getting figures than the 42-year-old Dutch hydro engineer attended World Water Week in Sweden last week. Asian delegates wore glowing saris. And Indian businessman Bindeshwar Pathak drew flocks of media everywhere he went at the event after being named the recipient of this year's Stockholm Water Prize for inventing a toilet for slum dwellers.

But Hoekstra preferred to keep a low profile at the annual global conference, which focuses on water-related issues. He had nothing to prove. Still despite his apparent efforts to keep a low-profile, Hoekstra's creation served as a magnet for debate here. Hoekstra came up with the idea of the "water footprint."

10,000 Liters of Water for a Pair of Jeans

His equation is actually just a couple of numbers used to describe the amount of water that is used -- or polluted -- during the manufacture of various products. Anyone can calculate their water footprint by looking at the amount of water they use directly and then by looking at the amount of "virtual water" they use -- that is, how much water is used in the production of any goods they consume. The global average for an individual's water footprint is 1,243 cubic meters of water per year. In the US, this goes up to 2,483 cubic meters per year; in Germany it's 1,545 and in China, 702.

Hoekstra's water footprint formula has already made headlines around the world with its estimates of the amount of water that is used or abused in the simple products that are a part of our everyday lives:

* 140 liters of water for one cup of coffee!

* 2,400 liters for a hamburger!

* 10,000 liters for one pair of jeans!

In the dicussions and workshops in Stockholm, participants debated what sort of action should be taken as a result of the water footprint figures. The WWF environmental group first recognized the validity of the water footprint, and further conservation and environmental protection groups as well as the United Nations and the World Bank soon followed suit. Finally, even multinational companies like Nestle, Unilever and Pepsi got on board.

Brown water in Greenville

2009-08-24T08:56:00.000-07:00

In the blur of his campaign, it was just another overnight stop: a Holiday Inn Express in Greenville, dead in the heart of this forsaken land called the Delta.

In the lobby, atop the front desk, a card in a plastic frame greeted guests. It served as an alert, a quaint warning of sorts: "You may be wondering why our water is brown -- it's the cypress tree roots, in the springs underground. Y'all can drink our water and bathe without fear. For no one lives longer than the folks around here."

Barack Obama passed the card on the way to his room. There, the bathroom sink and shower offered exactly what the card predicted: a stream of yellowish-brown water, to be found in every room. It came from a Greenville city well, which pumped the same alarming-looking water into all the homes and businesses in the area. City leaders and hotel employees emphasized that although it looked bad, the brown water met all federal and state safety standards, and that residents commonly drank it and bathed in it.

The next morning, Obama walked past the warning card again, on his way out of the hotel and into an SUV that would ferry him to a restaurant for a breakfast speech. He found himself sitting in the vehicle with Greenville's mayor, 33-year-old Heather McTeer Hudson, who had come to believe that the brown water was seriously harming her city's image, impeding its efforts to lure new businesses. She hoped to get rid of the color with a filtration system that several American and foreign cities had used to take care of their own brown-water problems. But struggling Greenville had no money to pay for such a system, another complication in an array of infrastructure quandaries for which Hudson was hoping to obtain federal assistance. As their 10-minute ride began, Obama said to the mayor, as she recalls, "Tell me about Greenville's needs, the Delta's needs."

more from the Washington Post

River Basin Fight Pits Atlanta Against Neighbors

2009-08-16T07:49:00.000-07:00

The residents of the economic engine of the South, as they like to call this comparatively gleaming and rapidly expanding state capital, have always suspected that they are the objects of resentment from their more rural neighbors.

Now they are certain of it.

A recent court defeat has left Atlanta howling that its enemies, including Alabama and Florida, are trying to choke off the city’s prosperity, if not out of sheer spite then at least the misguided notion that jobs and money would flow to them instead. The conflict is the timeworn rural-versus-urban enmity writ large, a battle over water that has pitted Atlanta against its neighbors in and out of Georgia.

“The only motivation is political,” Charles Krautler, the director of the Atlanta Regional Commission, said of the fight. “We don’t have as good of spin doctors as they do. It’s easy to point the finger at big bad Atlanta.”

Ostensibly, the war among the three states is about a river basin that supplies the taps of 3.5 million people in metropolitan Atlanta before it flows down the Alabama-Georgia state line and into the Florida Panhandle. Each state says the others are demanding too much water. But many experts say there is no actual scarcity — the system, managed properly, could meet the needs of users along the Apalachicola, Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers, including power companies, farmers and oystermen.

more from the NY Times

Millions of salmon disappear from Canadian river

2009-08-14T08:38:00.000-07:00

Millions of sockeye salmon have disappeared mysteriously from a river on Canada's Pacific Coast that was once known as the world's most fertile spawning ground for sockeye.

Up to 10.6 million bright-red sockeye salmon were expected to return to spawn this summer on the Fraser River, which empties into the Pacific ocean near Vancouver, British Columbia. The latest estimates say fewer than 1 million have returned.

The Canadian government has closed the river to commercial and recreational sockeye fishing for the third straight year, hitting the livelihood of nearby Indian reserves.

"It's quite the shocking drop," said Stan Proboszcz, fisheries biologist at the Watershed Watch Salmon Society. "No one's exactly sure what happened to these fish."

Salmon are born in fresh water before migrating to oceans to feed. They return as adults to the same rivers to spawn.

Several theories have been put forward to try to explain the sockeye's disappearance:

* Climate change may have reduced food supply for salmon in the ocean.

* The commercial fish farms that the young Fraser River salmon pass en route to the ocean may have infected them with sea lice, a marine parasite.

more from Reuters

Entrepreneurs Wade Into the 'Dead Zone'

2009-08-14T08:36:00.000-07:00

Every spring, fertilizer runoff from the U.S. Mississippi River floods into the Gulf of Mexico, causing a massive algae bloom that leads to a giant oxygen-deprived "dead zone" where fish can't survive.

Now, this annual problem is getting new attention, not from marine scientists but from entrepreneurs looking for a new domestic source of fuel. And one start-up sees fish themselves being part of the process.

The algae blooms are spawned each year as the farmland runoff from as far away as Montana flows into rivers, eventually reaching the Mississippi and flowing into Louisiana bayous and out into the Gulf of Mexico. These nutrients are a buffet for the floating algae, or phytoplankton, which are simple sea organisms that eat and reproduce quickly. This algae bloom eventually sinks and feeds an array for bacteria, which suck up so much oxygen that fish and plants either move away or perish.

These so-called hypoxic areas exist around the world, and there were as many as 200 in North America in the spring, says Robert J. Diaz, a professor of marine science at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. The Gulf of Mexico dead zone is the second largest in the world, after one in the Baltic Sea.

Scientists have been studying dead zones for decades, and the concern about their effect on ocean life has grown. The Louisiana seafood industry worries that dead zones threaten the ecosystems that support the state's $1 billion shrimp industry as well as other fisheries. Environmental groups are concerned that the runoff from agricultural fertilizer is threatening a natural ecosystem and pushing it toward collapse.

Turning algae into a bio-based oil to run in conventional refineries alongside crude has been a long-held dream of biofuels entrepreneurs. Exxon Mobil Corp. last month announced a partnership with Synthetic Genomics Inc., a privately held biotech firm owned by genomics scientist J. Craig Venter, to spend as much as $600 million working on developing algae biofuels. Greener Dawn Research estimates that privately held start-ups Sapphire Energy and Solazyme Inc. have raised more than $75 million for their own algae-to-fuel effort.

Thus far, both of those projects plan to raise their algae stocks in controlled facilities onshore.

more from the Wall Street Journal

Snake Valley plan drafted

2009-08-14T08:10:00.000-07:00

After four years of negotiations, Utah and Nevada officials have created a draft agreement for management of the controversial Snake Valley aquifer straddling both states.

Overall, it allows a 50 percent split of the water between the two states, strives for clean air and other environmental concerns and postpones new uses of the valley's water for a decade, pending further study.

The water-rights fight, which pits farmers and environmentalists against the needs of a sprawling metropolis hundreds of miles away, is a battle that experts say will increasingly be played out across the West as water sources dry up.

In this case, Nevada officials hope to build a 285-mile pipeline that would pump water from the Snake Valley to Las Vegas. But environmentalists say if the pipeline were approved it would suck so much water out of the valley that plants that hold the soil in place would die, potentially creating giant dust storms that would affect air quality as far away as the Wasatch Front.

According to the draft agreement announced Thursday, the proposed pipeline couldn't tap into the Snake Valley until at least September 2019. Four public meetings are now planned on the proposal, which can be downloaded online.
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More than 100 miles long, the Snake Valley in Utah extends from the south end of western Tooele County to western Iron County.

"The goal of the agreement is to protect the way of life of the water users in Snake Valley," said Mike Styler, executive director of the Utah Department of Natural Resources.

"The cornerstone of this is protection of existing (water) rights," Allen Biaggi, Nevada's director of Conservation and Natural Resources, said.

The agreement addresses environmental concerns over wildlife and air quality in the area and even extends to Utah's Fish Springs, located just outside the northeast end of Snake Valley.

more from the Deseret News

India's Groundwater Disappearing at Alarming Rate

2009-08-10T09:19:00.000-07:00

Farming is a thirsty business on the Indian subcontinent. But how thirsty, exactly? For the first time, satellite remote sensing of a 2000-kilometer swath running from eastern Pakistan across northern India and into Bangladesh has put a solid number on how quickly the region is depleting its groundwater. The number "is big," says hydrologist James Famiglietti of the University of California, Irvine--big as in 54 cubic kilometers of groundwater lost per year from the world's most intensively irrigated region hosting 600 million people. "I don't think anybody knew how quickly it was being depleted over that large an area."

The big picture of Indian groundwater comes from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission, launched in March 2002 as a joint effort by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the German Aerospace Center. Actually two satellites orbiting in tandem 220 kilometers apart, GRACE measures subtle variations in the pull of Earth's gravity by using microwaves to precisely gauge the changing distance between the two spacecraft.

As the lead spacecraft passes over a patch of anomalously strong gravity, it accelerates ahead of the trailing spacecraft. Once past the anomaly, the lead satellite slows back down. Then the trailing spacecraft accelerates and again closes on the leader. By making repeated passes over the same spot, GRACE measures changes in Earth's gravity, which are mainly due to water moving on and under the surface. Most famously, GRACE has recorded the shrinking of ice sheets; it has also detected shifting ocean currents, the desiccation of droughts, and the draining of large lakes.

more from Science Magazine

Years of food processors' waste turns Michigan's natural treasures to ruins

2009-08-10T09:05:00.000-07:00

While searching for a lost cow, farmer Charlie Brozofsky discovered in late 2002 that a stream on his property was tainted. The stream, usually clear and rippling, was slimy orange.
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What unfolded next was a saga of illegal blueberry waste dumping, which contaminated the groundwater that fed the stream, killing fish and other aquatic life in it.

In Michigan's prized fruit and vegetable industry, processors have contaminated groundwater with metals and arsenic by spraying wastewater on fields -- a 40-year-old practice that has led to polluted wells.

But in some cases, they also have dumped or spilled their waste into streams, marshes and wetlands, damaging them for years to come.

Two companies responsible for dumping the blueberry waste are still arguing with the state over cleaning up the stream, which flows to Platte Lake.

Eric Chatterson, the Department of Environmental Quality official overseeing the cleanup, visited the stream last week. There's still no life in it seven years later, he said.

"Even leaves don't decay in there," he said. Trees along the stream are still dying. The spring that feeds the stream gushes like orange paint.

The fixes are complex and expensive.

more from the Detroit Free Press

Harnessing the Severn

2009-08-08T06:00:00.000-07:00

A tidal project that would put a 10-mile concrete barrier across the United Kingdom’s longest river is generating controversy. The proposed Severn barrage would help the UK produce reliable, renewable energy in its efforts to combat climate change. But critics say the huge tidal wall will harm the river ecosystem. Producer Tom Allan reports.

more from Living on Earth

What's Your Water Footprint?

2009-08-07T10:48:00.000-07:00

ON THE EDGE of Jim Diedrich's 1,500-acre almond and tomato farm is a rustic office where his son would normally be sitting in front of a flat screen, controlling a superefficient drip irrigation network. But he'll have some more time on his hands this summer. California is in the midst of its most severe drought in nearly 20 years. And to make things worse, two years ago a federal judge ruled that pumps in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta were killing off the threatened delta smelt. And so Diedrich's farm outside the Central Valley town of Firebaugh is receiving almost no irrigation water this year. Sitting in his office, commiserating with a neighboring farmer, he griped, "It's unbelievable the power of the goddamn wacko environmentalists."

Then his neighbor, Shawn Coburn, turned toward me and demanded if I knew how much water it took to grow one almond, a cantaloupe, or a pound of tomato paste. (I didn't. Turns out it's 1 gallon, 25 gallons, and 55 gallons, respectively.) "The people in the city, they don't know what their footprint on nature is," he scoffed. "They sit there in an ivory tower and don't realize what it takes to keep them alive."

Even in thirsty California, where the battle lines between the big rural irrigation districts and urban water utilities were drawn long ago, this was a new angle on an old argument. The farmers' complaint underscores a curious, often unexamined aspect of our relationship with water: Even as the greenest among us cut our showers short and let our toilets go yellow, we may be blissfully unaware that our household water use accounts for only 6 percent of the water that we consume. The other 94 percent comes from the products we buy, everything from almonds and tomatoes to blue jeans and microchips. (See "Big Gulp.") The average person in the developed world drinks a gallon of water each day but "eats" another 800 gallons. And as Americans, our water consumption per capita is twice the world's average. Each one of us uses enough water annually to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool—four times what someone in Yemen uses.

In an effort to get consumers, companies, and entire countries to recognize the true costs of their water use, a few environmental groups are promoting the concept of our "water footprint." The idea "very much brings the water problem to the people," explains its creator, Arjen Hoekstra, scientific director of the Netherlands-based Water Footprint Network. Just as calculating carbon footprints has encouraged—and shocked—many Americans into seriously considering their personal environmental impacts, Hoekstra hopes that water footprinting will reveal the gushing faucet behind every purchase we make. "And then it shows that maybe people can do something about it."

We've got a long way to go. In the past 50 years, the world's water use has tripled. More than a third of the western United States sits atop groundwater that is being consumed faster than it's replenished. Half of the world's wetlands are gone, killed off in part by irrigation and dams, which have destroyed habitats along 60 percent of the planet's largest river systems. Since 1970, the population of freshwater species has been halved; one-fifth of all freshwater fish vanished in the past century—an extinction rate nearly 50 times that of mammals. And consuming more water has concentrated pesticides and fertilizers in what's left over: It's unsafe to swim or fish in nearly 40 percent of US rivers and streams, and polluted water sickens nearly 3.5 million Americans a year.

more from Mother Jones

Florida Bay's ecology on the brink of collapse

2009-08-05T06:04:00.000-07:00

Boat captain Tad Burke looks out over Florida Bay and sees an ecosystem that's dying as politicians, land owners and environmentalists bicker.

He's been plying these waters for nearly 25 years, and has seen the declines in shrimp and lobster that use the bay as a nursery, and less of the coveted species like bonefish that draw recreational sportsmen from around the world.

"Bonefish used to be very prevalent, and now we don't see a tenth of the amount that we used to find in the bay, and even around the Keys because the habitat no longer supports the population," says Burke, head of the Florida Keys Fishing Guides Association.

Experts fear a collapse of the entire ecosystem, threatening not only some of the nation's most popular tourism destinations - Everglades National Park and the Florida Keys - but a commercial and recreational fishery worth millions of dollars.

Florida Bay is a sprawling estuary at the state's southern tip, covering nearly three times the area of New York City.

The headwaters of the Everglades - starting some 300 miles north near Orlando - used to end up here after flowing south in a shallow sheet like a broad, slow-moving river, filtering through miles of muck, marsh and sawgrass.

Historically, the bay thrived on that perfect mix of freshwater from the Everglades and saltwater from the adjacent Gulf of Mexico. It was a virtual Garden of Eden, home to a bounty of wading birds, fish, sea grasses and sponges.

But to the north of the bay, man's unforgiving push to develop South Florida has left the land dissected with roads, dikes and miles of flood control canals to make way for homes and farms, choking off the freshwater flow and slowly killing the bay.

more from the Washington (DC) Post

Oysters Are on the Rebound in the Chesapeake Bay

2009-08-03T14:48:00.000-07:00

After decades of overharvesting of oysters in the Chesapeake Bay and many fruitless efforts to replenish them, scientists have re-established a significant population of the shellfish along the Virginia shore.

Researchers from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science at the College of William & Mary say that large experimental reefs created five years ago are now home to more than 180 million native oysters. That is still a far cry from the late 1880s, when the bay held billions of the oysters, Crassostrea virginica, and watermen harvested about 25 million bushels annually. But more larvae have been settling on the new reefs every year, the researchers said.

The results, they added, suggest there is a potential for further restoration in the bay by creating additional reefs where harvesting is prohibited.

“What we need are thousands of acres of permanently restored sanctuary reefs to turn this situation we have with the oyster around,” said David M. Schulte, a doctoral student at the institute and an author of a paper published in Science last week that describes the work. The sanctuaries would aid the oyster harvest by helping to seed nearby areas, but the overall effort would benefit the bay in other ways, by helping to clean the water and providing more habitat for fish, crabs and other marine life.

Mr. Schulte said that when he began the experiment, he assumed there would be only a 10 percent survival rate among juvenile oysters on the reefs, which are near the mouth of the Great Wicomico River, just south of the Potomac. Throughout the bay, high mortality due to disease, as well as overfishing, had reduced the population to about 1 percent of 19th-century levels.

The current harvest is less than 200,000 bushels a year, and the situation has become so dire that there is an elaborate proposal to introduce the Asian oyster, C. ariakensis, as an alternative.

more from the NY Times

'Dead zone' strategy rattles farm interests

2009-07-31T08:13:00.000-07:00

The fight over the Gulf of Mexico's "dead zone" - a problem scientists say can be traced in large part to Iowa and its sister farming states - has ramped up as the Obama administration considers a regulatory attack on the problem.

Suzanne Schwartz, who directs a division of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency working on the dead-zone issue, said the federal government and Louisiana researchers are checking to see whether the pollution violates water quality standards.
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If it does, "Louisiana could set standards for what comes in," using the legal authority of the Clean Water Act, Schwartz said at a news conference this week. "That is not a short-term, immediate action but something we are looking at."

Said Jane Lubchenco, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: "This is an issue we take seriously."

The possibility drew immediate fire from Iowa agricultural interests, which pointed out that this year's dead zone is far smaller than predicted and among the smallest in recent history.

The dead zone is an area left largely lifeless in summer as algae fed by a mixture of Midwestern fertilizers, sewage and dead plants from the Mississippi River watershed die off, consuming oxygen. Biologists call this hypoxia. There are at least 200 such zones worldwide.

The U.S. Geological Survey has said that nine states - Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio and Mississippi - are responsible for 70 percent of the nitrogen and phosphorus running into the Gulf of Mexico. At issue is not only water quality in those states but disruption of Louisiana's lucrative shrimping industry.

New attention on the issue will include a meeting of the federal Gulf Hypoxia Task Force in Des Moines Sept. 23-24. Details are pending.

The Clean Water Act machinery often leads to new pressures on polluters to limit contamination, though farming has largely escaped that kind of regulation in the past.

more from the Des Moines (IA) Register

U.S. "dead zone" smaller but more severe: NOAA

2009-07-28T08:52:00.000-07:00

The "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, an area choked by low oxygen levels that threatens marine life, is smaller than expected this year but more deadly, the government said on Monday.

The zone, caused by a runoff of agricultural chemicals from farms along the Mississippi River, measured about 3,000 square miles or about 1.5 times the size of the state of Delaware, compared with estimates that it would measure up to nearly 8,500 square miles, scientists said.

"Clearly the flow of excess nitrogen and phosphorus from agricultural fields in the Mississippi drainage basin continues to wreak havoc with life in the Gulf," said Jane Lubchenco, the administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told reporters in a teleconference.

Unusually strong winds and currents stirred the waters and brought oxygen back in, making the zone smaller than anticipated.

But Nancy Rabalais, a scientist from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, who helped measure the zone during a week-long expedition, said it was more severe because the low oxygen levels are closer to the surface than in recent years.

The dead zone threatens Gulf fisheries worth nearly $3 billion per year.

Now marine life that normally feed close to the sea bottom, including eels and certain kinds of shrimp and crabs, are being found closer to the surface.

The dead zone is caused by fertilizers and nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus that wash off crop lands into the Mississippi, leading to the overproduction of tiny organisms such as algae in the Gulf of Mexico.

If the organisms are not eaten, they die and fall to the bottom of the ocean where bacteria rots them, sucking oxygen from the water.

The average size of the dead zone during the past five years has been about 6,000 square miles, or nearly the size of the state of Connecticut.

Federal and state agencies have worked together in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi River Watershed Nutrient Task Force since 2001 to control growth of the zone. It wants to cut it to about 2,00O square miles by 2015.

more from Reuters

Boom in hydropower pits fish against climate

2009-07-27T07:11:00.001-07:00

The Rocky Reach Dam has straddled the wide, slow Columbia River since the 1950s. It generates enough electricity to supply homes and industries across Washington and Oregon.

But the dam in recent years hasn't produced as much power as it might: Its massive turbines act as deadly blender blades to young salmon, and engineers often have had to let the river flow over the spillway to halt the slaughter, wasting the water's energy potential.

The ability of the nation's aging hydroelectric dams to produce energy free of the curse of greenhouse gas emissions and Middle Eastern politics has suddenly made them financially attractive -- thanks to the new economics of climate change. Armed with the possibility of powerful new cap-and-trade financial bonuses, the National Hydropower Assn. has set a goal of doubling the nation's hydropower capacity by 2025.

Expanding hydropower is fraught with controversy, much of it stemming from the industry's history of turning wild rivers into industrialized reservoirs struggling to support their remaining fish. The emerging boom in hydroelectric power pits two competing ecological perils against each other: widespread fish extinctions and a warming planet.

The issue has been particularly contentious in the Pacific Northwest, where some are calling for actually breaching dams on the Snake River in an effort to bring back the declining salmon and steelhead.

"Hydropower does have pretty significant and serious impacts on rivers. We know that. The industry knows that," said John Seebach, director of the Hydropower Reform Initiative launched by the conservation group American Rivers. "It also provides some pretty significant benefits in terms of power production. So it's a tricky balance to get those benefits while trying to minimize those impacts."

more from the LA Times

Mountaintop Mining Legacy: Destroying Appalachian Streams

2009-07-23T12:40:00.000-07:00

Laurel Branch Hollow was once a small West Virginia mountain valley, with steep, forested hillsides and a stream that, depending on the season and the rains, flowed or trickled down into the Mud River about 200 yards below. The stream teemed with microbes and insect life, and each spring it became a sumptuous buffet for the birds, fish, and amphibians in the valley.

But over the past decade, the Hobet 21 mountaintop removal coal mining operation has obliterated 25 square miles of surrounding highlands. From the air, the mine is a 10-mile-long, mottled gray blotch among the green, crisscrossed by trucks and earth movers, appended by black lakes of coal sludge.

The Caudill family has owned a house at the mouth of the hollow since the early 1900s. Many of their neighbors left, but the Caudills fought and blocked an attempt by Hobet to force them to sell their property. Unfazed, the mining operation simply steered around their land, and dumped a mountain’s worth of rocky debris into the Laurel Branch up to their property line.

Anita Miller looks out at a mining operation in Berry Branch, W.Va., not far from her family’s home.
have to go somewhere, and the most convenient spots are nearby valleys. Mining operations clear-cut the hillsides and literally “fill” mountain hollows to the brim — and sometimes higher — with rocky debris. At the mouth of the hollow, the outer edge of the fill is typically engineered into a towering wall resembling a dam.

As I visited Laurel Branch recently with family members Anita Miller and her mother, Lorene Caudill, two bulldozers crawled back and forth over the peak more than 200 feet above us, sculpting it into a steep, three-tiered sloping form. When it can reach no higher, the coal company will seed the slope with grass and move on. But the valley fill’s impact on the environment will last much, much longer.

more from e360 at Yale

Smart tech could save billions of liters of water

2009-07-23T11:31:00.000-07:00

Americans can save some of the 225 billion gallons of water (852 billion liters) wasted each year through over-watering by installing smart systems which deliver just the right amount of moisture.

Homeowners and companies over-water their grass and plants by between 30 and 300 percent, said Chris Spain, chief sustainability officer at water management company HydroPoint, citing a report by the American Water Works Association.

"The reason for the waste is because of dumb technology," Spain said. "There are 45 million irrigation systems in the U.S. (controlled) by simple timers. They do a great job of keeping time but a lousy job of irrigating to what the land requires."

City landscaping, or "urban irrigation," makes up 58 percent of urban water use, Spain said, adding that the water wasted generates over 544,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases annually.

Smart irrigation systems are programed to optimize water use based on parameters including plant and soil types and amount of sunlight, and also feature weather sensors that monitor soil moisture levels following rainfall.

"U.S. water-related energy use is at least 521 million megawatt hours a year -- equivalent to 13 percent of the nation's electricity consumption," said a River Network Carbon Footprint of Water report published in May.

"The carbon associated with moving, treating and heating water in the U.S. is at least 290 million tonnes a year."

Climate change also affects water levels, with western states experiencing their driest years since records began.

more from Reuters

Study of Missouri River to expose differing visions of its future

2009-07-23T11:26:00.000-07:00

Chance Norton cruises his speedboat along the straight-banked river, oblivious to the big debate looming over its future.
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"It's another day in paradise," Norton said, beer in hand, several friends aboard. "I'm a river rat. It's always a good thing, especially the sandbars. We'll camp all night and boat all day."

Like Norton, thousands of Americans take for granted the Missouri River, long a source of drinking water, electricity, commerce, recreation and tourism. But the day is coming when the nation's longest river will command much more attention.

An exhaustive five-year, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study of the Missouri begins in October. The $25 million study is expected to set up another round of battles among states, tribes and organizations with competing visions of the historic waterway.

At issue: everything from future drinking supplies and cooling water for power generation, to flood control, barge traffic, habitat protection, untapped recreational opportunities and potential economic gain.

The future of the oft-forgotten treasure affects not only the seven states along the Missouri's main channel, but many others along the Missouri-fed Mississippi.

"It's one of the great rivers of the world, and we aren't reaping the benefits," said Bernard Hoyer, assistant to the director of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. "We've destroyed the river. As it is, it's just a big ditch."

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which runs the nation's dam and reservoir systems, plans to ask all Americans to offer their hopes for the Missouri, said Paul Johnston, corps spokesman for the Omaha, Neb., office. Iowans' hopes will wash up against those of other states as upstream interests in recreation and irrigation compete with lower-state calls for more water to be released downstream for barges and tribes' water supplies.

Al Sturgeon, a Sioux City lawyer who represents Iowa on the Missouri River committee, said a key will be restoring the river, long neglected compared with the heavily traveled Mississippi. Sturgeon believes a healthier river would mean more tourism, especially to areas such as Iowa's geologically unusual Loess Hills in the state's western border.

from the Great Falls Tribune (IA)

Feds document shrinking San Joaquin Valley aquifer

2009-07-13T18:30:00.000-07:00

California's San Joaquin Valley has lost 60 million acre-feet of groundwater since 1961, according to a new federal study. That's enough water for 60 Folsom reservoirs.

This is among the findings in a massive study of groundwater in California's Central Valley by the U.S. Geological Survey. It helps shed light on the mysteries and dangers of California's groundwater consumption, which is mostly unregulated.

According to the study, groundwater pumping continues to cause the valley floor to sink, a problem known as subsidence. This threatens the stability of surface structures such as the California Aqueduct, which delivers drinking water to more than 20 million people.

The Central Valley is America's largest farming region; it's also the single-largest zone of groundwater pumping. About 20 percent of groundwater pumped in America comes from under the Central Valley, said Claudia Faunt, the study's project chief.

In the Sacramento Valley, the study found groundwater levels have remained stable. Virtually all of the groundwater loss has occurred in the San Joaquin Valley, where aquifer levels have dropped nearly 400 feet since 1961, she said.

The current drought has aggravated this problem.

"In most years, especially in the San Joaquin Valley, the groundwater pumping exceeds the recharge," said Faunt, a USGS hydrologist. "With recent times, those groundwater levels have dropped back down close to historical lows."

more from the Sacramento Bee

California Gives Desalination Plants a Fresh Look

2009-07-09T07:08:00.000-07:00

Early next year, the Southern California town of Carlsbad will break ground on a plant that each day will turn 50 million gallons of seawater into fresh drinking water.

The $320 million project, which would be the largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere, was held up in the planning stages for years. But a protracted drought helped propel the project to its approval in May -- a sign of how worried local authorities are about water supplies.

"Water is going to be very short until you have a new source," said Carlsbad Mayor Claude Lewis. "And the only new source is desalination, I don't care what anybody says."

The desalination plant would use water that flows by gravity from the ocean across a manmade lagoon and into the facility through 10 large pumps. The plant would then blast it through a filter, extracting fresh water and leaving behind highly pressurized salty water. The process would provide enough water for 300,000 people each day.

Government agencies have opposed desalination because of the process's energy consumption. The desalination plant would use nearly twice as much energy as a wastewater-treatment plant available in Orange County. Environmental groups also object because fish and other organisms are likely to be sucked into the facility.

more from the Wall Street Journal"