It’s called “Day Zero” : when Cape Town, South Africa’s bustling port city, sees its water taps run dry, and its population thrust into a perilous situation. Originally projected for Continue Reading
Much of the modern world’s agricultural productivity, industrial activity, and high degree of urbanization is dependent upon the pumping and exploitation of limited freshwater resources. In some regions the water Continue Reading
On World Water Day, March 22, universal access to clean water continues to be a privilege, when it should be a right. Experts predict that by 2030 the global water Continue Reading
As Cape Town inches towards ‘Zero Hour’ set for July 15, 2018, the real threat of water scarcity is finally hitting millions of people worldwide. For on that day, the Continue Reading
The world has abundant fresh water but it is unevenly distributed and under increasing pressure, United Nations agencies say, as highlighted by the drought in Cape Town. On Tuesday South Continue Reading
An Iranian oil tanker has sunk after burning for more than a week following a collision on Jan. 6 in the East China Sea, Chinese state media said on Sunday, Continue Reading
Sanchi oil spill covers 4 square miles and is still burning Authorities collecting data from spill area to assess impact The oil tanker on fire after a collision on Jan. Continue Reading
Sunoco received a halt construction order from Pennsylvania environmental officials on Wednesday for a natural gas pipeline the southern half of the state due to a myriad of spills and Continue Reading
Toxic waste produced by one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters will be dumped into the sea, according to the head of the Japanese company tasked with cleaning up the Continue Reading
Since the beginning of the year, enough water has spilled out of California’s rain-swollen Lake Oroville to meet the demands of roughly 14 million people for a year. With no Continue Reading
U.S. President Donald Trump signed an order on Tuesday directing regulators to review an Obama administration rule that expanded the number of federally protected waterways as the new president targets Continue Reading
The Interior Department on Monday issued a rule putting tighter restrictions on coal mining near streams, one of several environmental rules President-elect Donald Trump has targeted to undo once he Continue Reading
Three years and three months later, a massive oil spill in North Dakota still isn’t fully cleaned up. The company responsible hasn’t even set a date for completion. Though crews Continue Reading
Fracking can affect drinking water supplies in certain circumstances, the Obama administration said in a long-awaited report issued Tuesday, leaving open the possibility of more widespread impacts that it says Continue Reading
Marnie Winter remembers seeing the oil spread through the waters of Barataria Bay in southeastern Louisiana. It was 2010, just a few weeks after an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon Continue Reading
A drilling industry advocacy group on Monday downplayed a report released last week by a scientific panel that called into question a major finding that the Environmental Protection Agency had Continue Reading
This implies that Africa awaits major crisis unless governments become unified in giving priority to water security management and sanitation. Almost 98 per cent of the affected people live in Continue Reading
Stalled projects and underperforming plants have hampered China’s desalination plans. The site of a seawater desalination plant that could provide up to one-third of the water consumed by Beijing’s households Continue Reading
The implications of the global water footprint of energy generation are phenomenal, writes Gary Bilotta of the University of Brighton. He warns that i f policy makers fail to take Continue Reading
A wave of recent reports from China make it clear that the country is now facing a water crisis of massive proportions. As Jules Suzdaltsev explains in today’s Seeker Daily Continue Reading
The Secretary of Iran Urban Economics Scientific Association (IUESA) Seyed Mohsen Tabatabaei made the remarks noting that that global demand for water follows extremely urbanization growth. he underlined that water Continue Reading
The water in the largest U.S. reservoir has sunk to a record low, due to the severe drought in the American Southwest. Lake Mead, in Nevada, had dropped 10 feet Continue Reading
BEIJING — More than 80 percent of the water from underground wells used by farms, factories and households across heavily populated plains of China is unfit for drinking or bathing Continue Reading
A new study from Stanford has confirmed that fracking operations are contaminating drinking water sources in Wyoming. “This is a wake-up call,” said lead author Dominic DiGiulio, a visiting scholar Continue Reading
Across the country, coal-fired power plants consume 7.4 billion cubic meters of water each year, enough to meet the basic needs of about 30 percent of the nation’s population. Credit Continue Reading
An estimated three out of four jobs globally are dependent on water, meaning that shortages and lack of access are likely to limit economic growth in the coming decades, the Continue Reading
Alarming new research has found that 4 billion people around the globe — including close to 2 billion in India and China — live in conditions of extreme water scarcity Continue Reading
Two recent drinking water investigations in Texas show dangerous levels of contamination. The larger study tested 550 water samples collected from public and private water wells in the north Texas Continue Reading
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf signed into law a bill intended to encourage more oil and gas companies to use treated coal-mine wastewater for hydraulic fracturing . The law was scheduled to become effective in December. Consol Energy operates coal mines in southwestern Pennsylvania as well as developing and producing natural gas from the Marcellus and Utica shales . Consol Energy already had used wastewaste from its coal mines for fracturing, a company spokesman said. The new law is intended to encourage other gas operators to use treated mine water instead of fresh water. The use of mine water for fracing was among recommendations made by former Gov. Tom Corbett’s Marcellus Shale Advisory Commission. In 2013, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection issued a white paper to promote the practice. Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection officials supported the legislation. Previously, oil and gas companies were reluctant to use treated mine […]
It may be a see-saw course, but it’s riding an uphill train. A bit ago I wrote , regarding climate and tipping points: The concept of “tipping point” — a change beyond which there’s no turning back — comes up a lot in climate discussions. An obvious tipping point involves polar ice. If the earth keeps warming — both in the atmosphere and in the ocean — at some point a full and permanent melt of Arctic and Antarctic ice is inevitable. Permanent ice first started forming in the Antarctic about 35 million years ago, thanks to global cooling which crossed a tipping point for ice formation. That’s not very long ago. During the 200 million years before that, the earth was too warm for permanent ice to form, at least as far as we know. We’re now going the other direction, rewarming the earth, and permanent ice is […]
A U.S. judge in Wyoming has blocked new rules that tighten controls over fracking on federal lands, granting a measure of relief to producers who would have faced higher costs at a time when profits already are strangled by low crude prices. The order by U.S. District Judge Scott Skavdahl puts a temporary hold on the most closely-watched effort by the Obama administration to ensure that hydraulic fracturing doesn’t contaminate water supplies. While the rules apply only to federal lands, they are designed to spur states to follow suit, magnifying the impact and potentially slowing development of oil and natural gas resources. Skavdahl said the government’s Bureau of Land Management lacks the authority to control fracking. Republican Rob Bishop, chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, approved of the ruling as “the right decision because it stops the Obama Administration from shoving this harmful policy down the states’ […]
LOS ANGELES — California’s historic drought is in its fourth year and gloom-and-doom scenarios of its impact on everything from killing the state’s vegetation and triggering bug infestation to destroying farming jobs have been trickling in daily. Now, there is another fear: The prolonged drought may have weakened California’s more than 13,000 miles of levees, which could result in floods and affect the quality of water for millions of Californians. That’s a scary prospect for parts of the state that could get doused with torrential rain this winter, thanks to an El Niño weather front triggered by unusually warm Pacific Ocean temperatures. And the mere mention of levee breaks evokes terrifying images of the devastation Hurricane Katrina wreaked on New Orleans 10 years ago. A Mississippi State University civil engineer sounded the alarm in a recent article in Science magazine . “If the drought ends with heavy rainfall-induced flooding, […]
A snowboarder threads his way through patches of dirt in Olympic Valley, California. Many Tahoe-area ski resorts have closed due to low snowfall as California’s historic drought continues. (Max Whittaker/Getty Images) Researchers knew California’s drought was already a record breaker when they set out to find its exact place in history, but they were surprised by what they discovered: It has been 500 years since what is now the Golden State has been this dry. California is in the fourth year of a severe drought with temperatures so high and precipitation so low that rain and snow evaporate almost as soon as it hits the ground. A research paper released Monday said an analysis of blue oak tree rings in the state’s Central Valley showed that the amount of mountain snow California relies on for moisture hasn’t been so low since the 1500s. That was around the time when […]
Federal scientists may have found a link between the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and a decline of herring and pink salmon populations in Prince William Sound. In a study published Tuesday in the online journal Scientific Reports, researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) found that embryonic salmon and herring exposed to even very low levels of crude oil can develop heart defects. Herring and pink salmon juveniles that were exposed to crude oil as embryos grew slower and swam slower, making them vulnerable to predators, said John Incardona, a research toxicologist at NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest Fisheries Science Center in Seattle, in a prepared statement Exxon Valdez: 25 years later We explore the lasting impacts of oil spills on communities and the country. "These juvenile fish on the outside look completely normal, but their hearts are not functioning properly and that translates directly into reduced swimming […]
Saltwater Waste A Southlake, Texas man charged with illegally injecting saltwater into a disposal well in North Dakota pled not guilty to federal charges last week in federal court. Jason Halek, a former operator of a saltwater well in southwest North Dakota, was indicted on 13 federal counts and fined a record $1.5 million in 2013 for putting drinking water at risk by illegally dumping more than 800,000 gallons of salty, oilfield wastewater into a former oil well in Stark County. He entered not guilty pleas to all charges including violating the Safe Drinking Water Act, making false statements and obstructing grand jury proceedings. The indictment claims Halik conspired to hinder by “craft, trickery, deceit, and dishonest means the lawful and legitimate functions of the EPA, in enforcing federal laws relating to the requirements of the North Dakota underground injection control program.” Saltwater is considered an environmental hazard that […]
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The regulatory agency overseeing Texas’ oil and gas industry has determined that a series of small earthquakes in North Texas likely wasn’t caused by drilling operations by an Exxon Mobil subsidiary. The preliminary findings mark the first decision by the Texas Railroad Commission since it was authorized last year to consider whether seismological activity was caused by injection wells, which store briny wastewater from hydraulic fracturing. The commission ordered hearings after a university study suggested two companies’ wells were responsible for quakes that shook Reno, Texas, in 2013 and 2014. Commission investigators concluded that a well where Exxon Mobil subsidiary XTO Energy pumps millions of gallons of the wastewater likely didn’t cause the quakes, but also said there wasn’t enough evidence to demonstrate the earthquakes were naturally occurring. Parties have 15 days to respond. The report was released Monday, a day before a new law […]
AP Photo/Florence Low FRESNO, Calif. (AP) — Vast areas of California’s Central Valley are sinking faster than in the past as massive amounts of groundwater are pumped during the historic drought, state officials said Wednesday, citing new research by NASA scientists. The data shows the ground is sinking nearly two inches each month in some places, putting roads, bridges and vital canals that deliver water throughout the state at growing risk of damage. Sinking land has occurred for decades in California because of excessive groundwater pumping during dry years, but the new data shows it is happening faster as the state endures its fourth year of drought. "We are pumping at historic levels," said Mark Cowin, head of the California Department of Water Resources. He added that groundwater levels are dropping to record levels – up to 100 feet lower than previously recorded. Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory […]
WASHINGTON—U. S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy apologized Tuesday for a mine spill in Colorado caused by her agency, but she indicated she didn’t know much about what happened and would seek to fix any flaw in the agency’s procedures. “I am absolutely deeply sorry this ever happened,” Ms. McCarthy said at a news conference in Washington. “But I want to make sure we react positively and in a way that’s credible and we move this forward.” An EPA cleanup crew on Aug. 5 accidentally triggered a breach in an abandoned gold mine in the Southwestern part of Colorado, releasing an estimated three million gallons of toxic, mustard-hued sludge through a river system spanning three states. The sludge, which flowed down the Animas River and emptied into the San Juan River in New Mexico, contains such contaminants as lead and arsenic from the Gold King Mine, north of […]
Those under the impression that climate change is advancing at a constant and predictable rate don’t understand the true dynamics of the issue. The rate of increase of the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere, the main driver of climate change, went from 0.75 parts per million (ppm) per year in 1959 to about 1.5 ppm each year through the 1990s, to 2.1 ppm each year from 2002 to 2012, and finally to 2.9 ppm in 2013. The fear is that the ability of the oceans and plants to continue to absorb half the carbon dioxide human civilization expels into the atmosphere each year may have become impaired. That means more carbon dioxide is remaining in the atmosphere where concentrations are building at the fastest rate ever recorded in the modern era. Permafrost across the most northern reaches of land on the globe wasn’t expected to start melting until […]
PORTERVILLE, Calif. — Their two peach trees had turned brittle in the heat, their neighborhood pond had vanished into cracked dirt and now their stainless-steel faucet was spitting out hot air. “That’s it. We’re dry,” Miguel Gamboa said during the second week of July, and so he went off to look for water. He had a container in the bed of his truck from the dairy where he worked, a 275-gallon tank that had been used to treat milk with chemical preservatives. Now he rinsed it with bleach and drove out of the suburbs, passing rows of tract houses with yellowed front lawns. He went to see a friend who still had a little water left in his well, and the friend offered Gamboa his hose. They stood together and watched the tank begin to fill with water that looked hazy and light brown. “You really want this?” the […]
BEIJING, July 14 (Xinhua) — A new pumping station has increased the capacity of the massive project bringing water from the Yangtze River to Beijing, just as the city’s water demand soars under a heat wave. Huinanzhuang, a major pumping station on the middle route of the south-to-north water diversion project, went into operation on Monday, pushing up the water inflow of the route from 24 to 38 cubic meters per second, according to the Beijing south-to-north water diversion office. As a result, the project’s water supply capacity has been increased from 2.07 to 3.28 million cubic meters per day, with its daily supply to the city’s water plants growing from 1.77 to 2 million cubic meters. Beijingers have been thirsty as the Chinese capital has baked under temperatures above 35 degrees Celsius since Saturday. Daily water supply in the city has been kept above 3 million cubic meters […]
California’s epic drought is pushing Big Oil to solve a problem it’s struggled with for decades: what to do with the billions of gallons of wastewater that gush out of wells every year. Golden State drillers have pumped much of that liquid back underground into disposal wells. Now, amid a four-year dry spell, more companies are looking to recycle their water or sell it to parched farms as the industry tries to get ahead of environmental lawsuits and new regulations. The trend could have implications for oil patches across the country. With fracking boosting the industry’s thirst for water, companies have run into conflicts from Texas to Colorado to Pennsylvania. California could be an incubator for conservation efforts that have so far failed to gain traction elsewhere in the U.S. Drillers may have little choice. The state’s 50,000 disposal wells have come under increased scrutiny this year, after regulators […]
OriginClear’s equipment purifies wastewater by zapping it with electric pulses. Source: OriginClear via Bloomberg California’s epic drought is pushing Big Oil to solve a problem it’s struggled with for decades: what to do with the billions of gallons of wastewater that gush out of wells every year. Golden State drillers have pumped much of that liquid back underground into disposal wells. Now, amid a four-year dry spell, more companies are looking to recycle their water or sell it to parched farms as the industry tries to get ahead of environmental lawsuits and new regulations. The trend could have implications for oil patches across the country. With fracking boosting the industry’s thirst for water, companies have run into conflicts from Texas to Colorado to Pennsylvania. California could be an incubator for conservation efforts that have so far failed to gain traction elsewhere in the U.S. CHART: Big Oil’s Other Gusher […]
If approved by a federal judge, the deal would conclude a monumental legal showdown over the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which killed 11 crew members aboard the drilling rig and caused the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. The agreement would avert years of litigation over the environmental impact of the spill, which leaked millions of barrels of crude into the Gulf and coated hundreds of miles of sensitive beaches, marshes and mangroves. The settlement would add at least $10 billion to the $44 billion BP has already incurred in legal and cleanup costs, pushing its tab for the spill higher than all the profits it has earned since 2012. But the payments would be stretched out over 18 years at around $1.1 billion annually, softening the blow to the company’s cash flow. Much of the penalties would likely be tax-deductible, analysts noted. The money largely will end up […]
When EPA’s long-awaited draft assessment on fracking and drinking water supplies was released, the oil and gas industry triumphantly focused on a headline-making sentence: “We did not find evidence of widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States.” But for fracking’s backers, a sense of victory may prove to be fleeting. EPA’s draft assessment made one thing clear: fracking has repeatedly contaminated drinking water supplies (a fact that the industry has long aggressively denied). Indeed, the federal government’s recognition that fracking can contaminate drinking water supplies may prove to have opened the floodgates, especially since EPA called attention to major gaps in the official record, due in part to gag orders for landowners who settle contamination claims and in part because there simply hasn’t been enough testing to know how widespread problems have become. And although it’s been less than a month since EPA’s draft assessment […]
Photo The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, anchored by the convergence of two rivers, is a 720,000-acre network of islands and canals that is the hub of California’s water system. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times BYRON, Calif. — Fighting over water is a tradition in California, but nowhere are the lines of dispute more sharply drawn than here in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta , a 720,000-acre network of islands and canals that is the hub of the state’s water system. Giant pumps pull in water flowing to the delta from the mountainous north of the state, where the majority of precipitation falls, and send it to farms, towns and cities in the Central Valley and Southern California, where the demand for water is greatest. For decades, the shortcomings of this water transportation system, among the most ambitious and complex ever constructed, have been a source of conflict and complaint. But […]
Things have never been this dry for this long in the recorded history of the state of California, and this has created an unprecedented water crisis. At this point, 1,900 wells have already gone completely dry in California , and some communities are not receiving any more water at all. As you read this article, 100 percent of the state is in some stage of drought, and there has been so little precipitation this year that some young children have never actually seen rain . This is already the worst multi-year drought in the history of the state of California , but this may only be just the beginning. Scientists tell us that the amount of rain that California received during the 20th century was highly unusual. In fact, they tell us that it was the wettest century for the state in at least 1000 years. Now that things […]
Forget about peak oil—we should be worrying about peak water: Groundwater basins that supply 2 billion people are being rapidly depleted , according to a new study. Worse: No one knows how long those reserves will last. A research team led by scientists at the University of California, Irvine, examined the world’s 37 largest aquifers between 2003 and 2013 and found that one-third of them were “stressed,” meaning more water was being removed than replenished, according to one of two studies published Tuesday in the journal Water Resources Research . The eight worst-off aquifers, labeled “overstressed,” had virtually no natural replenishment to offset human consumption. The scientists determined the Northwest Sahara Aquifer System, which supplies water to 60 million people, to be the most overstressed. The Indus Basin aquifer of northwestern India and Pakistan is the second-most overstressed, followed by the Murzuk-Djado Basin in northern Africa. California’s Central Valley […]
The record-breaking drought in California is not chiefly the result of low precipitation. Three factors – rising temperatures, groundwater depletion, and a shrinking Colorado River – mean the most populous U.S. state will face decades of water shortages and must adapt. The Lake Oroville reservoir in Northern California was at less than 25 percent capacity last month. Image via raybouk/flickr. Creative Commons 2.0. The current drought afflicting California is indeed historic, but not because of the low precipitation totals. In fact, in terms of overall precipitation and spring snowpack, the past three years are not record-breakers, according to weather data for the past century. Similarly, paleoclimate studies show that the current drought is not exceptional given the natural variations in precipitation of the past seven centuries. Nor can it be confidently said that the current drought bears the unequivocal imprint of climate change driven by increasing greenhouse gases, since […]
Forget about peak oil—we should be worrying about peak water: Groundwater basins that supply 2 billion people are being rapidly depleted , according to a new study. Worse: No one knows how long those reserves will last. A research team led by scientists at the University of California, Irvine, examined the world’s 37 largest aquifers between 2003 and 2013 and found that one-third of them were “stressed,” meaning more water was being removed than replenished, according to one of two studies published Tuesday in the journal Water Resources Research . The eight worst-off aquifers, labeled “overstressed,” had virtually no natural replenishment to offset human consumption. The scientists determined the Northwest Sahara Aquifer System, which supplies water to 60 million people, to be the most overstressed. The Indus Basin aquifer of northwestern India and Pakistan is the second-most overstressed, followed by the Murzuk-Djado Basin in northern Africa. California’s Central Valley […]
