The Week in Water brings you blue living news from around the web.
I know I get tired swimming in the ocean, so it must be exhausting being a baby sea turtle. Except that it’s not. Just a couple of hours of swimming each day keeps newly hatched loggerhead sea turtles on course.
How to reduce the size of the Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch? Reduce the amount of plastic getting into the ocean. Hawaii has just become the first state in the nation to ban non-reusable plastic shopping bags.
The recovery of the Barton Springs salamander is inspiring. For a while, it looked like either Austin was going to lose a treasured swimming hole or an endangered species would go extinct. A little bit of thought and effort went into the compromise, but now both people and salamanders are coexisting happily.
Finding a compromise might be a little more difficult in the case of Cook Inlet’s belugas. Drilling and exploration is booming in Alaska and it seems to be wreaking havoc with the sea mammals.
The Keystone XL pipeline hasn’t been approved by the State Department, but the company that owns the pipeline, TransCanada, is taking farmers’ land by eminent domain.
The completion of the Gibe III Dam project in Ethiopia this year will bring with it both good and bad. The hydropower produced by the dam is expected to bring electricity to 400 million people. But the water stored up in the dam would have otherwise irrigated crops and fed rivers and streams full of fish, affecting the food security of 500,000 indigenous people.
If you find an interesting story centered around water that you would like to see here, let me know and I’ll do my best to include it in the next Week in Water.