Last fall, farmers working the flat land along the Colorado River outside Blythe, California, harvested a lucrative crop of oranges, lettuce and alfalfa from fields irrigated with river water. But that wasn’t their only source of income. They made almost as much per acre from the seemingly dead squares of dry earth abutting those orchards and row crops, fields left barren for the season.

The money crop that the fallowed land produced was one of the West’s most precious commodities: water. Under an experimental trading scheme set up by the Palo Verde Irrigation District in Blythe and the Metropolitan Water District — which supplies municipal water to the Los Angeles area, Orange and San Diego counties, and much of the Inland Empire — the farmers essentially leased millions of gallons of their Colorado River water to California’s coastal cities. Read more

A hundred years after it spawned the iceberg that sank the Titanic in the North Atlantic, the Jakobshavn Glacier is now a major contributor to global sea-level rise, this time threatening the homes and lives not of 2,200 passengers and crew but of a billion people across the world.

As climate-watchers and coastal-dwellers keep a weather eye out for signals of irreversible changes in the environment, the world’s fastest-moving glacier has already begun self-destruction.

Jakobshavn is now shedding ice nearly three times as quickly as it was 20 years ago, dumping enormous and growing quantities into the ocean. It’s contributed 0.1 millimeters per year to worldwide sea-level rise — more than 3 percent of the 3 mm produced globally — for the past decade. Read more

After a weekend of speculation, scientists were finally treated to NASA’s big reveal: there is flowing liquid water on the surface of Mars.

According to researchers, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter identified sloped streaks on the Martian surface that contain minerals called “perchlorates,” which are able to reduce the temperature at which water freezes up to -94 Fahrenheit. Those streaks only exist during the planet’s cold season, in which temperatures routinely dip below that, and disappear during the warm season, when temperatures climb above -10 Fahrenheit. Read more

The days are getting shorter and the leaves are starting to turn color, a sure sign that fall is on its way. Now is a great time to prepare your garden and irrigation systems for winter. Read more

In today’s world, sewage water pollution is one of the major problems faced by most cities. This kind of pollution leads to health-related and environmental issues. With proper treatment of water, it is possible to reduce water pollution.

Pollution caused by sewage water is one of the major problems in cities the world over. Sewage water is drained off into rivers without treatment. Careless disposal of sewage water leads to creation of a chain of problems like spreading of diseases, eutrophication, increase in Biological Oxygen Demand (BOD), etc.

The water used for domestic, industrial and other purposes gets converted into waste water. It is termed as sewage water. In ideal conditions, sewage water is channeled or piped out of cities so that it can be recycled. Sewage contains organic wastes as well as chemicals. The pollution of water occurring from sewage is mainly observed in developing countries. In these countries, sewage water is not disposed in a proper manner. In developed nations, a network of sewage pipes is used to take sewage away from cities. Treatment of waste minimizes pollution resulting from it. However, even in developed countries, the older cities may have sewage systems that are leaky. Read more