Archive for April 29, 2016

A Climate Analyst Clarifies the Science Behind California’s Water Woes

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A secret service agent in Los Banos, Calif., as President Obama spoke on February 14. Mr. Obama suggested climate change as an explanation for the area’s drought.

There’s no question that residents of California and much of the West face a collision between high water demands driven by growth and outdated policies and a limited and highly variable water supply.

But that reality hasn’t stopped heated arguments from springing up in recent days over the cause or causes of California’s continuing epic drought. Is one of the drivers the growing human influence on the climate? Or is this drought something we’ve seen before, the result of natural variability? Read more

Working Wonders Without Water Out West

In the long rain shadow of the Cascade Mountains, where dryland wheat farmers have eked out livings for more than a century, climate change is very much an issue of the present.

The rain gauge is always in the back of the mind for Mike Nichols, a wheat farmer cultivating 20,0000 acres across two counties in south-central Washington state.

It has to be: Nichols doesn’t irrigate, and with less than six inches of precipitation a year, his wheat crop is already on the edge of what’s considered possible for dryland farming. When drought hits or if, as expected, the West gets drier, his operation will be in trouble.

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A wheat field outside of Palouse, Wash. is dusted by a January snow. Most of Washington’s wheat crop is watered only with rain falling from the sky – a future facing many farmers across the West as water supplies dwindle and the climate shifts to drier conditions. Credit: Josh Smith/flickr.

 

“The last eight years have been pretty good,” said Nichols. “But we are putting some [cash] aside, because down the line we know we’re going to go through another drought.”

Although Nichols remains stoic about the potential that climate change could eventually have on his livelihood, his innovative dryland farming methods enable his crops to better handle low moisture conditions.

But there are legions of farmers in the West and Midwest dependent on dwindling aquifers and over-subscribed rivers for irrigation. If today’s drought conditions continue, a whole new generation of growers may join Nichols and return to wholly rain-fed farming. Read more

Much more than water found on the moon

A year ago, the twin impacts of NASA’s LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) spacecraft and a companion rocket stage into the lunar surface revealed the presence of water on the moon. Now new data uncovered by LCROSS and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has revealed that the lunar soil within shadowy craters is rich in useful materials, and that the moon is chemically active and has a water cycle.

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View northeast across the north rim of Cabeus crater

The twin impacts of LCROSS and a companion rocket stage in the moon’s Cabeus crater on October 9, 2009, lifted a plume of material that might not have seen direct sunlight for billions of years nearly 10 miles above the rim of the crater. It was the observations made by instruments aboard LCROSS and LRO of the crater and debris and vapor clouds that revealed the presence of water, mostly in the form of pure water ice grains. Read more

Sodium battery contains solution to water desalination

Much scientific effort goes into shoring up both our energy and water supplies for the future, but what if both problems could be addressed by the same technology? Researchers at the University of Illinois have come up with a new battery design that not only relies on salt water to store and release electricity, but removes the salt ions from the water in the process.

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Illinois mechanical science and engineers found they could desalinate salt water more efficiently than traditional methods relying on reverse osmosis.

Lithium-ion batteries have served us well when it comes to smartphones and laptops, but their suitability in large-scale energy storage leaves much to be desired. The relative scarcity of lithium has led scientists toward more abundant alternatives, one of which is the sodium that makes up more than 2.6 percent of the Earth’s crust. Read more

Oceanography: Dead in the water

1deadThe dead fish were one of the first signs. In July 2002, scientists with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife found unusual numbers of bottom-feeding sculpin lying lifeless on the ocean floor, which would normally be teeming with life. Crabs were also dying, and they washed up onto some beaches in large numbers.

Officials at the government agency asked Francis Chan, a biogeochemist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, for help in discovering the cause of the disturbance as quickly as possible. Chan was about to set off on a scheduled research cruise along the Oregon coast, so he grabbed all the extra equipment he could think of, including a brand-new oxygen sensor.

Ocean surface waters normally contain 5–8 millilitres of oxygen per litre of water, a number that declines rapidly with depth. But on his first day out, Chan found that at a depth of 50 metres the inner coastal waters off Oregon were hypoxic — oxygen levels there were lower than 1.43 millilitres per litre, so low that fish can’t survive1.

Many regions of the world have hypoxic coastal waters, usually caused by agricultural fertilizers leaking into the ocean. The excess nutrients fuel plankton blooms, which consume oxygen. But Chan knew that the hypoxia off the Oregon shoreline must have a different cause, because that part of the coast does not have enough farming to explain it. And when his colleague Jack Barth, an oceanographer from Oregon State University, found similarly low oxygen levels farther offshore, the researchers knew that something unprecedented was happening. Read more