THE POLES

Huge iceberg forms in Antarctica

Last modified on 2011-11-05 05:03:14 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

 

“Scientists are monitoring the birth of a monster iceberg in West Antarctica.

A rift has formed in the shelf of floating ice in front of the Pine Island Glacier (PIG).

The surface crack in the PIG runs for almost 30km (20 miles), is 60m (200ft) deep and is growing every day.

US space agency (Nasa) researchers expect the eventual iceberg to cover about 880 sq km – an area the size of Berlin. It should break away towards the end of the year or early in 2012.

Pine Island Glacier is one of the largest and fastest-moving tongues of ice on the White Continent and drains something like 10% of all the ice flowing out of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet into the ocean.”

Read more: BBC

 

Major Rivers Have Enough Water to Meet Food Needs, Study Shows

Last modified on 2011-09-26 20:07:45 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

“Major river systems in the developing world have enough water to meet food production needs this century, according to a report by researchers from 30 countries published in the International Water Journal.

“A study of 10 river basins in Asia, Latin America and Africa released today from Recife, Brazil, found there’s “clearly enough” water, and the issue is one of inefficient use and unfair distribution rather than scarcity, the Challenge Program on Water and Food, or CPWF, said in a statement.

“The river basins studied are home to about 1.5 billion people, according to the research group. World food output will have to climb 70 percent by 2050 as the world’s population rises to 9.2 billion from an estimated 6.9 billion in 2010, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.

“Water scarcity is not affecting our ability to grow enough food,” Alain Vidal, director of the CPWF who is based in Colombo, Sri Lanka, said in the statement. “There is scarcity in certain areas, but our findings show that the problem overall is a failure to make efficient use of the water available in these river basins.”

Read more: Bloomberg

Icebergs to Go: Delivering Freshwater Across the Seas

Last modified on 2011-06-06 22:56:22 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

“Towing icebergs to places desperate for water is something of a non-urban myth. The idea sounds good on the surface. The planet is running short of freshwater, and gloomy forecasts predict a 30 percent rainfall decrease around the globe. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of big, purely freshwater icebergs crack off Greenland and Antarctica every year, only to drift into warmer waters and melt.

The notion of harnessing these massive, glassy natural resources is hardly new. In 1773 Captain James Cook brought small icebergs aboard The Resolution to replenish fresh water supplies. Towing bergs north or south has been seriously talked about in this century since the 1950s.

Unfortunately, every time a visionary entrepreneur floats a plan for navigating all that solid freshwater to parched markets, the H2O innovator is stymied by 1) the high cost of the towing and 2) the unacceptable amount of ice lost along the route.

Still, new iceberg theorists pop up every few years. The latest proposal comes from a University of Cambridge professor of ocean physics named Peter Wadhams. Wadhams claims to have partners in Canada and France who want to use tugboats to lug bergs from Newfoundland to the Canary Islands.”

Read more: Take Part

 

 

Vision: 8 Reasons Global Capitalism Makes Our Lives Worse — And How We Can Create a New Kind of Economy

Last modified on 2011-01-18 16:00:35 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

“Globalization wastes natural resources. Consumerism is threatening the planet, natural resources are stretched to the breaking point and yet we have an economic system that encourages us to consume more and more, says Norberg-Hodge. Consumer culture is increasingly urban and when rural people move to the city the food they used to grow themselves is now grown on industrial-sized chemical-intensive farms. Food must be trucked to cities, waste must be trucked out. Large dams are needed to provide water and huge centralized power plants must be fueled by coal and uranium mines.

4. Globalization accelerates climate change. Globalization’s “success” is often attributed to efficiencies of scale, but mostly it is fueled by deregulation and hidden subsidies that make food from around the globe cost less than food from down the street. With efficiencies of scale, it’s really the opposite, says British MP Zac Goldsmith, “Tuna caught off the east coast of America is flown to Japan, processed and flown back to America to be sold to consumers; English apples are flown to South Africa to be waxed, flown back to England to be sold.”

Read more: AlterNet

Bromine in the Dead Sea Makes Mercury Above it More Lethal

Last modified on 2010-12-02 16:36:01 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

“The research, led by scientist Daniel Obrist and colleagues at Nevada’s Desert Research Institute with a group of Israeli researchers at Hebrew University, found that mercury was concentrated into the most toxic form in the air above the Dead Sea.

The atmosphere over the Dead Sea, researchers found, is laden with oxidized mercury, a much more toxic form of Mercury than the elemental form. The finding was surprising, as such high levels of oxidized mercury have only been found at the polar regions.

“We’ve found near-complete depletion of elemental mercury – and formation of some of the highest oxidized mercury levels ever seen – above the Dead Sea, a place where temperatures reach 45 degrees Celsius,” Obrist noted.

The findings are a concern because oxidized mercury threatens the food supply more readily than the elemental form. That is because, once oxidized in what scientists call elemental mercury depletion events – it is then readily deposited on a surface such as the ocean, and can then find its way into the food chain.”

Read more: Green Prophet

The New Oil: Should private companies control our most precious natural resource?

Last modified on 2010-10-19 20:48:49 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

“Sitka, Alaska, is home to one of the world’s most spectacular lakes. Nestled into a U-shaped valley of dense forests and majestic peaks, and fed by snowpack and glaciers, the reservoir, named Blue Lake for its deep blue hues, holds trillions of gallons of water so pure it requires no treatment. The city’s tiny population—fewer than 10,000 people spread across 5,000 square miles—makes this an embarrassment of riches. Every year, as countries around the world struggle to meet the water needs of their citizens, 6.2 billion gallons of Sitka’s reserves go unused. That could soon change. In a few months, if all goes according to plan, 80 million gallons of Blue Lake water will be siphoned into the kind of tankers normally reserved for oil—and shipped to a bulk bottling facility near Mumbai. From there it will be dispersed among several drought-plagued cities throughout the Middle East. The project is the brainchild of two American companies. One, True Alaska Bottling, has purchased the rights to transfer 3 billion gallons of water a year from Sitka’s bountiful reserves. The other, S2C Global, is building the water-processing facility in India. If the companies succeed, they will have brought what Sitka hopes will be a $90 million industry to their city, not to mention a solution to one of the world’s most pressing climate conundrums. They will also have turned life’s most essential molecule into a global commodity.”

Read more: Newsweek

Preparing For A Water-Limited World

Last modified on 2010-10-14 16:50:30 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

“The data and statistical tools used to plan $500 billion worth of annual global investments in dams, flood-control structures, diversion projects, and other big pieces of water infrastructure are no longer trustworthy,” she writes. “In other words, when it comes to water, the past is no longer a reliable guide to the future.”

The uncertainty of future water supplies and flow patterns is not limited to concerns over dams and diversions. Food security, public health, and life as we know it are also at risk.

Postel describes a “day of reckoning on the horizon” in the U.S. Southwest, for instance. Some scientists predict there is a 50 percent chance that Lake Mead, which stores Colorado River water for tens of millions of people and one million acres of irrigated land, will dry up by 2021.

And she notes that as much as 10 percent of the world’s food is produced through tapping too deep into residual and unreplenished groundwater resources. “This creates a bubble in the food economy far more serious than the recent housing, credit, or dot-com bubbles, for we are meeting some of today’s food needs with tomorrow’s water.”

The Solutions

“The water challenges confronting us locally, regionally, and globally are unprecedented,” Postel writes. The good news, she says, is that we have the economic and technological capacity to make sure global water needs are met. We just have to start using it.

The smarter path to water sustainability also requires us to work with nature and assign it a value for flood protection, water filtration, and other beneficial services it provides, according to Postel. And smarter water users-individuals, cities, utilities, businesses, and farmers-will be more aware of their water footprints and how to reduce them.”

Read more: National Geographic

World’s Rivers in Crisis: U.S. And Europe Face Highest Threat Levels

Last modified on 2010-10-08 16:54:29 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

“Rivers are the arteries of the planet, linking continents through coastal zones to the ocean. More than 120,000 species of plants and animals make up the world’s riverine ecosystems that provide the multi-trillion dollar services humanity relies upon – however up to 20,000 are at risk of extinction Vörösmarty says.

An international team examined data sets on 23 factors that impact rivers around the world and created state-of-the-art computer models to integrate all of the information to paint the first ever global picture of the health of river systems. More than 65 percent of the world’s rivers are in trouble and this finding is very “conservative” since there was not enough data to assess impacts of climate change, pharmaceutical compounds, mining wastes and massive inter-basin water transfers like the Colorado River in the western U.S.

Where rivers are least at risk are where human populations are smallest. Rivers in arctic regions and relatively inaccessible areas of the tropics appear to be in the best health, according to the findings.

In an unrelated study more than 80 percent of male bass fish exhibited female traits such as egg production because of a “toxic stew” of pollutants in the Potomac River that flows through Washington, DC scientists reported last week. Similar findings have been made in many U.S. rivers.”

Read more: AlterNet

How much is left?

Last modified on 2010-08-26 04:55:10 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

A very interesting interactive video from Scientific American about the limitations of the resources that so many think unlimited.

In this video, Christophe Miller, the project chief of the Continental Water, Climate, and Earth-systems Dynamics project (US Geological Survey/NOAA), summarizes the impact of Global Warming on the water resources.

Link: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=interactive-how-much-is-left&sc=WR_20100824

World Water Day – The Big Picture

Last modified on 2010-03-23 22:02:21 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

“Today, March 22nd, is recognized by the United Nations Water Group as “World Water Day”, this year’s theme being “Clean Water for a Healthy World”. Although we live on a water-covered planet, only 1% of the world’s water is available for human use, the rest locked away in oceans, ice, and the atmosphere. The National Geographic Society feels so strongly about the issues around fresh water that they are distributing an interactive version of their April, 2010 magazine for download – free until April 2nd – and will be exhibiting images from the series at theAnnenberg Space for photography. National Geographic was also kind enough to share 15 of their images below, in a collection with other photos from news agencies and NASA – all of water, here at home – Earth. (43 photos total)”

read more: boston.com

8 million tonnes of methane seeping out from Arctic annually: Study

Last modified on 2010-03-10 04:57:14 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

“Methane, the second most common greenhouse gas from human activities after carbon dioxide, is bubbling out from the frozen Arctic much faster than expected and could stoke global warming, scientists have warned.”

read more: Economic Times

Large Iceberg Breaks Off Antarctica’s Mertz Glacier

Last modified on 2010-03-01 14:55:56 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

“The future position of the two giant icebergs will likely affect local ocean circulation, the extent (and timing?) of the polynya, sea ice production, and deep water formation. It also has important implications for the marine biology of this region. A number of on-going field and research activities will follow up this calving event and its impact on the local environment”

read more:  Science Daily

Antarctic To Cover Global Water Shortage

Last modified on 2010-03-01 14:57:00 GMT. 0 comments. Top.

“The WMO regards drinking water shortages among principal obstacles to sustainable development. Even now, one third of humanity experiences permanent water shortages. Two thirds will share the plight by 2025 if the trend persists.
Antarctic ice offers a remedy.”

read more: Terra Daily