A naled, or aufeis, in the flesh. Er, ice.
It sounds like science fiction, but, like so many science fiction-ish ideas in the age of radical adaption to climate change, it’s real: Mongolia is launching a $750,000 geoengineering project to freeze vast quantities of the Tuul River in order to cool its capital city of Ulan Bataar during the sweltering summer, and to provide drinking water as the ice melts, as well. While specifics about exactly how the cooling will work are scarce, details about the freezing process are not, as it will mimic a natural process that already occurs on rivers in the north.
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The Hudson River has been one of the most polluted in America, but because of that pollution, it’s now the site of evolution happening at a breakneck pace.
The furiously evolving species is the bottom-feeding Atlantic tomcod, which lives in areas of the Hudson that were contaminated by PCBs through much of the 20th century.
PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, were first introduced in 1929 and were used in hundreds of industrial and commercial applications, mostly as electrical insulators. They were banned 50 years later, but they don’t simply degrade. Partly because of PCB contamination, a 200-mile stretch of the Hudson River is the nation’s largest Superfund site. [National Geographic]
Despite swimming in PCB-polluted waters and accumulating the chemicals in their systems, the tomcods are alive and well in the river. In a study in Science this week, Isaac Wirgin and colleagues show that this is because in the span of just a few dozen generations, the fish have evolved a resistance to PCBs.
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Ever since the wall burst on a reservoir of industrial waste at a Hungarian alumina plant last week–killing eight people and deluging the countryside with red muck–shocked environmental officials have been scrambling to determine how dangerous the sludge is. It’s common knowledge that the initial torrent was highly basic in pH, which caused hundreds of people to suffer from chemical burns. But once the material was neutralized, the thinking went, the danger should be past.
However, Greenpeace activists have been on the ground in Hungary over the past week, and the red mud they’ve collected and analyzed contained twice as much arsenic as expected, as well as surprisingly high levels of mercury and chromium.
The study has met with scepticism from Hungarian chemists, partly because bauxite, the ore from which most aluminium oxide (and ultimately aluminium) is derived, contains neither mercury nor much arsenic. However, Greenpeace says that the findings have been confirmed by an independent laboratory in Hungary. The Hungarian government’s own figures — based on samples taken by scientists last week at two sites in the area — are yet to be published. [Nature News]
The head of Greenpeace campaigns in Central and Eastern Europe, a chemist named Herwig Schuster, says there may be an obvious explanation for the arsenic and mecury’s presence: The alumina plant may have mixed its industrial wastes.
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Earlier this week we brought you news of water woes in the American southwest, where reservoir levels have dropped dangerously low, and in China, where the government is spending $60 billion to route water to parched cites like Beijing. Now comes news of just how widespread the world’s water problems really are. A study in Nature reports that nearly 80 percent of the world’s population lives in areas where the fresh water supply isn’t secure. And while industrialized nations have made massive investments in infrastructure to keep the faucets flowing, those projects have taken a toll on the environment.
[The researchers] say that in western countries, conserving water for people through reservoirs and dams works for people, but not nature. They urge developing countries not to follow the same path. Instead, they say governments should to invest in water management strategies that combine infrastructure with “natural” options such as safeguarding watersheds, wetlands and flood plains. [BBC News]
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Images: Nature / C. J. Vörösmarty et al.
Mercury, arsenic, lead, cadmium, nickel, zinc—they’re all getting into the waters of northern Canada in dangerous amounts because of mining in the oil sands, according to a study coming out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Canada‘s oil sands hold an estimated 13 percent of the proven oil reserves in the world, and the United States grows increasingly reliant upon them to meet our petroleum needs. However, the process of extracting and refining the oil is energy-intensive, and dirty. An industry-led group called Regional Aquatics Monitoring Program (RAMP) oversees the pollution coming from oil sands exploration, and it has maintained that elevated levels of toxins in the nearby Athabasca River system come from natural oil seepage. However, the University of Alberta’s Erin Kelly and David Schindler say in their study that no, it’s the oil exploration that’s increasing the concentration of these elements in the water.
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Two Chinese bodies of water made pollution headlines this week: the Yellow Sea is home to an oil spill, and the Ting River to waste water from a copper processing plant.
The Ting River
The waste water came from the Zijinshan mine in China’s Fujian province. Though earlier this month mine operators blamed weather for waste water entering the river, this week they admitted to and contaminating the river with–as The Sydney Morning Herald puts it–”four Olympic-size swimming pools” worth of waste water containing acidic copper.
Zijin’s board of directors expresses “its deep regret regarding the incident and the improper handling of information disclosure by the company, for causing substantial losses to the fish farmers located at the reservoir downstream of the mine and having a harmful impact on society,” the company said yesterday. [Bloomberg Businessweek]
Chinese police have detained two of the mine’s operators. Meanwhile, acidic copper has reportedly killed 4 million pounds of fish and threatens drinking water.
Reports from China’s official Xinhua News Agency suggest that Zijin is being required only to fix the problem and compensate locals with an offer of three yuan for every kilogram of dead fish. That makes the potential payout about 6 million yuan, [about $900,000]. [Sidney Morning Herald]
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Brazil’s controversial plan to build the third-largest dam in the world right in Amazon rainforest got the go-ahead from the environmental ministry this week. The ministers approved the permits for the dam project, and now companies can begin to bid on the building rights. But whoever wins will have to pay out at least some money to protect the local environment.
The 11,000-megawatt Belo Monte dam is part of Brazil’s largest concerted development plan for the Amazon since the country’s military government cut highways through the rainforest to settle the vast region during its two-decade reign starting in 1964 [Reuters]. Nearly all huge dam projects raise environmental concerns because they flood vast areas and can change ecosystems so drastically. But the Belo Monte, to be built on the Xingu River, has the additional trouble of being in one of the most important habitats in world and near to populations of indigenous peoples. The Xingu is a tributary of the Amazon River.
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Last week, while the world gearing up to ring in a new year, China was quietly reeling from a new pollution scare. A pipeline operated by the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC)—the country’s number one oil producer—ruptured and spilled 40,000 gallons of diesel in the northern part of the country.
The spill occurred in the Wei River, a tributary of the Yellow River–which is the source of fresh water for millions of Chinese. Over the weekend, workers threw 17 floating dams across the Wei to block the toxic diesel and save the Yellow River. But scientists discovered diesel traces in a reservoir behind a dam in Sanmenxia, a city about 100 kilometers (62 miles) downstream from the point where the Wei meets the Yellow River, an official in the Henan provincial environmental protection bureau said on Monday [Wall Street Journal].
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The Great Lakes are under threat from an Asian carp invasion that could wipe out fishing stocks, and with it, the lakes’ billion dollar fishery. On Friday, officials from the Army Corps of Engineers reported that genetic material from the carp had been found for the first time in a nearby river beyond an elaborate barrier system, which has cost millions of dollars and was meant to block their passage [The New York Times]. There is concern that if carp make it into Lake Michigan, they will gobble up the plankton that native fish feed on.
Officials also say that recreational boating may be affected–the carp can grow up to 4 feet long and weigh up to 100 pounds, and the massive fish will occasionally leap up and strike boaters. Since they were found to be moving up the Mississippi River in 2002, agencies have been trying everything they can think of to slow them down, including erecting the expensive electric barriers that cost around $9 million. The barriers work by sending low-voltage electric current through steel cables that are strung across the canal; this creates an electric field that’s uncomfortable for the fish and that’s supposed to prevent them from swimming across it.
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In a landmark concession that will likely lead to the largest dam-removal effort in U.S. history, an electrical utility company has agreed to destroy four dams on the Klamath River to help migrating salmon and steelhead. The dams won’t be decommissioned until 2020 and there are still regulatory hoops to jump through, but fishermen and environmentalists are delighted by the development. “We’re about to make changes to the Klamath Basin that will be observable from space,” said Craig Tucker of the Karuk tribe, which traditionally fished for salmon [Los Angeles Times].
The Klamath River, which winds through Southern Oregon and eventually reaches California’s Pacific coast, was once home to one of the most vibrant salmon runs in the West. But since the first dam was erected in 1908, the region has been host to a nasty battle over water rights, with wildlife and commercial fishers ultimately bearing the worst scars as regulators were forced to repeatedly close salmon fishing along 700 miles of the Oregon-California coast [Greenwire]. The removal of the dams’ will open 300 miles of river to the salmon.
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Image: flickr / patrickmccully
A study that set out to determine the how many of the fish in our nation’s streams are contaminated with mercury came back with an ominous answer: quite possibly, all of them. Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey sampled 34 species of fish at 291 stream sites across the country, and found mercury in every single fish they tested. “This study shows just how widespread mercury pollution has become in our air, watersheds, and many of our fish in freshwater streams,” U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said [Los Angeles Times].
A quarter of the fish had mercury levels that are considered unsafe for people who eat fish regularly, according to the Interior Department. The main source of mercury to most of the streams tested, according to the researchers, is emissions from coal-fired power plants. The mercury released from smokestacks rains down into waterways, where natural processes convert it into methylmercury — a form that allows the toxin to wind its way up the food chain into fish [AP]. But fish with high mercury levels were also found in Western areas that have been mined for gold or mercury.
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Image: flickr / kasperbs
The Chesapeake Bay was once carpeted with oysters, but that was before centuries of overfishing, pollution, and disease took their toll: Today the oyster population has been reduced to less than 1 percent of its historical population. But a new restoration effort has shown unprecedented progress in bringing the bivalves back. In the Great Wicomico River, a tributary of the Bay, researchers have created a 87-acre oyster colony that contains about 185 million oysters.
The Chesapeake’s oyster reefs were destroyed by centuries of watermen towing rakelike metal “dredges” and silted over by dirt flowing from the mid-Atlantic’s farms and growing cities. The final blow came in the mid-20th century: A pair of new diseases killed oysters by the millions. Now, in many places, the bay bottom is a flat expanse of green mud. “Just picture, you know, a clear-cut forest,” said Kennedy Paynter, a biology professor [Washington Post].
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The region today known as Iraq was once known as Mesopotamia, which means “Land Between the Rivers,” and since that ancient time the land between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers has been renowned for its fecund soil and thriving farms. But now the Mesopotamian cradle of civilisation seems to be returning to desert [New Scientist].
Decades of war and mismanagement, compounded by two years of drought, are wreaking havoc on Iraq’s ecosystem, drying up riverbeds and marshes, turning arable land into desert, killing trees and plants, and generally transforming what was once the region’s most fertile area into a wasteland…. “We’re talking about something that’s making the breadbasket of Iraq look like the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma in the early part of the 20th century” [Los Angeles Times], said Adam L. Silverman, a social scientist with the U.S. military.
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The state of Louisiana is losing its coastal wetlands to the Gulf of Mexico, and a new study suggests that conservationists won’t be able to turn the tide. If engineers don’t divert sediment-rich waters from the Mississippi River to help replenish a sinking river delta, about 10 percent of [the] state will slip beneath the waves by the end of this century. However, even if the engineers do try to abate the subsidence, the Mississippi doesn’t carry enough sediment to offset more than a small fraction of that loss, a new analysis suggests [Science News].
Before American settlers subdued the Mississippi and its tributaries, the river periodically overflowed its banks and spilled muddy water, thick with sediment, into surrounding wetlands. But the new study found that the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers today carry only half the sediment they did a century ago — between 400 million and 500 million tons a year then, compared with just 205 million tons today. The rest is now captured by more than 40,000 dams and reservoirs that have been built on rivers and streams that flow into the main channels [The Times-Picayune].
So even if Louisiana officials embark on an all-out campaign to restore the marshes through controlled levee breaks and diversion projects that bring back river water, it wouldn’t be enough to save the land–especially since sea levels are rising due to global warming. “We conclude that significant drowning is inevitable” [The Guardian], the study’s authors wrote.
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Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught on fire 40 years ago June 22 when oily garbage floating in it was ignited, probably by sparks from a passing train. In turn, the fire sparked the creation of environmental agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, along with passage of 1972′s Clean Water Act. And the river, once a dumping ground for industrial waste and an icon for environmental disrepair, today supports more than 60 species of fish along with beavers and various bird species, and serves as an example of environmental restoration.
The river’s recovery is an inspirational account of how even the most putrid bodies of water could be cleaned up. Indeed, the first time [Cleveland resident] Gene Roberts fell into the Cuyahoga River, he worried he might die. The year was 1963, and the river was still an open sewer for industrial waste. Walking home, Mr. Roberts smelled so bad that his friends ran to stay upwind of him. Recently, Mr. Roberts returned to the river carrying his fly-fishing rod. In 20 minutes, he caught six smallmouth bass. “It’s a miracle,” said Mr. Roberts, 58. “The river has come back to life” [The New York Times].
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