Happy St. Patrick’s Day! The Week in Water brings you latest news in Blue Living Ideas from around the web.
The EPA has reversed its finding in Dimock, Pennsylvania. Dimock is the small town where eleven homes were initially found to have drinking water contaminated by fracking. After a bit of a fuss, the EPA agreed to retest the water in Dimock and have now found that methane, chromium, arsenic, and other chemicals are all below safe levels for human consumption. The EPA will test again to be certain that the drinking water remains safe.
ABC News put together a list of seven landmarks and cities that are sinking. Some, like Mexico City, are sinking because they were built on lakes or rivers. Some are being taken over by sea level rise.
A report in Environmental Research Letters says that about 32000 square kilometers of land will be overtaken by sea level rise by 2100. About 3.7 million people currently live in the affected areas.
A cost-benefit analysis of the Keystone XL pipeline shows that U.S. citizens lose and a small number of private companies win (lots and lots of money). The number of jobs created has dropped from thousands to just twenty permanent jobs.
Pink dolphins! And manatees, too. In the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers, there’s an interesting diversity of water-based mammals.
It seems the race is on. Every week, there’s another newly developed hydroturbine even better than the last. The WaterHelix operates entirely underwater, so it won’t interfere with fish swimming or tourists oohing and aahing over the beauty of the river.
Iron Age water management in the Negev is a topic that caught my imagination many years ago. Evenari, et al studied Nabatean farming systems in the area and recreated a farm that produced plenty of food with less than a foot of water annually. The systems in the linked article are pre-Nabatean.
Pink dolphin photo via Shutterstock
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