After 20 Years of Drilling, Russian Scientists Breached  Lake Vostok in  the Antarctic

It is the first time one of Antarctica’s subglacial lakes was penetrated.

On February 5,  2012, Russian scientists confirmed that they successfully drilled into Lake Vostok, a subglacial lake that has spent the last several million years isolated from Earth’s surface by a thick slab of ice. And it really is thick! — drilling down to the lake has taken 20 years of work. But the team has finally hit water, and the water could contain clues to (among other things) the mechanics of climate change.

It’s possible the lake contains new life forms, maybe bacteria. It’s also possible — and the initial samples seem to support this hypothesis — that it’s totally sterile, the only place on Earth with water but no life. Both options have the potential to help scientists understand more about life on Earth, and how it does or doesn’t survive in extreme conditions.

The untouched water in the lake will also allow researchers to compare ancient and current water, looking for changes that might help illuminate global warming and sea level rise.

Antarctica holds 70% of the planet’s fresh water as ice and subglacial liquid.  Understanding whether and how it is changing is key to understanding possible future rises in global sea levels.

Lake Vostok has been isolated from the surface for millions of years, and many hope it contains bizarre new life forms.  At present, however, that seems unlikely. The drillers have already sampled wedges of accretion ice – lake water that has naturally frozen onto the underside of the ice sheet – and although some researchers claim it contains bacteria, others write this off as contamination.

If Lake Vostok turns out to be sterile, that will make it the only place on Earth where there is water but no life.

For more information on the Lake Vostok project, see  Mysteries of Lake Vostok on brink of discovery.”

Russian scientists breached Lake Vostok in the Antarctic .

 

 

 

 

 

 

Almost Half of the Nation’s Land Area Is In Various Stages of Drought

For Academic Success You Just Have To Carry Water.  You Don’t Have to Actually Drink It.

by Hardly Waite

A  study presented at a psychology conference in London in April of 2012 suggests that students who bring water to drink while they  take exams may improve their grades.   This is, it is assumed, because they keep themselves hydrated.

The simple act of bringing water to the exam was linked to improvement in grades, although hypotheses put forth by the researchers indicated that they had not the slightest notion why. It was suggested that having water reduced anxiety.  The researchers did not examine whether the students actually drank the water,  so this does not rule out the possibility that the influence may have come wholly or partly from just having the bottle there.  Nor does it rule out the possibility that it was all simply coincidental that students who happened to take water into the exam scored higher and that neither the bottle nor the water had anything to do with the matter.

In all, 477 students took the exam. One important observation was that students in the higher grade levels were more likely to take water to exam sessions than students in earlier years.

The Medical News Today report on the research concludes:

[The chief researcher] said more research would be needed to tease apart these factors and their underlying explanations.  But whatever the result, he suggests it is probably a good thing for students to try and keep themselves hydrated while sitting exams. Judging from the results of this study, it appears that first year undergraduates in particular need to hear this message. There is an implication here for education policymakers too: whether students, at all levels of education, should have access to drinks during exams.

The Pure Water Gazette concludes:  A university psychologist  was desperately trying to put an academic publication on his record and all the good subjects, like the influence of  pencil color on penmanship, had already been exhausted.

For complete details of this important research, see Medical News Today.

 

Texas Capital Takes Water Conservation Seriously as Drought Lingers On

The severity of the drought in Texas was underlined in early Sept. by the shutdown of such familiar water features as downtown Austin fountains. This was mandated as the city of Austin issued a Stage 2 drought declaration.

The declaration was put in effect when the two main lakes, Lake Travis and Lake Buchanan, reached the 900,000 acre-foot trigger mandated by the city’s Drought Contingency Plan.

Here are some of the restrictions that went into place with the Stage 2 declaration.

• Hose-end irrigation may take place between midnight and 10 a.m. and between 7 p.m. and midnight on your assigned watering day.
• Automatic irrigation systems may operate between midnight and 5 a.m. and between 7 p.m. and midnight on your assigned watering day.
  • Please reduce system run times to fit within this schedule.
  • Please ensure that your system has a working rain sensor, or operate the system manually when rain is forecasted.
• Watering with a hand-held hose or bucket is allowed at any time on any day of the week.
• Drip irrigation is exempt from the schedule, due to increased efficiency.
• To water trees, soaker hoses may be used under the drip-line of the tree canopy or you may use your automatic tree bubblers.  Irrigating trees in this manner is exempt from the watering schedule
• Washing vehicles at home is prohibited. If you need to wash a vehicle, you may do so at a commercial carwash facility.
• Charity car washes are prohibited
• Fountains with either a fall or spray of water greater than four inches are prohibited; unless necessary to preserve aquatic life.
• Restaurants may not serve water unless requested by a customer
• Commercial properties (including restaurants and bars) may only operate patio misters between 4 p.m. and midnight.

Learn How to Care for a Tree During Drought at Austin Water’s Website.

What is ground water? When water falls as rain or snow, much of it either flows into rivers or is used to provide moisture to plants and crops. What is left over trickles down to the layers of rock that sit beneath the soil. And just like a giant sponge, this ground water is held in the spaces between the rocks and in the tiny inter-connected spaces between individual grains in a rock like sandstone. These bodies of wet rock are referred to as aquifers. Ground water does not sit still in the aquifer but is pushed and pulled by gravity and the weight of water above it. The movement of the water through the aquifer removes many impurities and it is often cleaner than water on the surface.

Africa Has Vast Hidden Water Resources, But They Must Be Used Wisely

“There is enough water for human need,  not human greed.” ~Mahatma Gandhi

Africa is a notoriously dry continent, but things may not be as bleak as one would suspect as climate change advances.

Currently, the situation appears bad.  At present only about 5% of arable land is irrigated.  Across Africa more than 300 million people are said not to have access to safe drinking water. Water for sanitation is in short supply.  Demand for water is set to grow markedly in coming decades due to population growth and the need for irrigation to grow crops.

Yet,  a BBC report says that Africa is sitting on a vast reservoir of groundwater–with pools suspected to contain 100 times the amount to be found on the surface.

Researchers have for the first time been able to carry out a continent-wide analysis of the water that is hidden under the surface in aquifers. Researchers from the British Geological Survey and University College London (UCL) have mapped in detail the amount and potential yield of this groundwater resource across the African continent.

The researchers say their new maps indicate that many countries currently designated as “water scarce” have substantial groundwater reserves.

The new mapping that shows formerly unsuspected ground water resources leads to cautious optimism. Caution is necessary because although there are vast groundwater reserves, experts believe that rapid extraction through large boreholes might not work in the region and that moderation in harvesting groundwater may be necessary.  The lead author of the study told the BBC: “High-yielding boreholes should not be developed without a thorough understanding of the local groundwater conditions. Appropriately sited and developed boreholes for low yielding rural water supply and hand pumps are likely to be successful.”

Water was added to the aquifers over 5000 years ago.  It must be harvested respectfully.

BBC Report for More Details

 Osedax Live At the Bottom of the Ocean.  They Were Discovered On A Whale Carcass in 2002.

Among the ocean’s strangest inhabitants are some tiny worms that devour bones.  They inhabit and feed on dead whale skeletons and other bones on the sea floor.  It was recently discovered that they have a unique ability to release bone-melting acid which makes their lifestyle possible.

The worms are called Osedax, and like all worms in their family they get by without mouth, anus, or gut. The digestion of the bone they live on is made possible by their partnership with bacteria.  The worms are 3 to 4 cm long and they live in extremely hot and acidic vents in the sea.

While it had been clear that the worms and their bacteria rely on nutrients such as collagen or fat from the bones they inhabit, until now it was a mystery how the worms penetrate the bone to access their nutrients. They appear to lack physical equipment necessary for drilling bone. The recently discovered process involves secretion of acid to demineralize the bone.

Researcher Sigrid Katz, perhaps the world’s foremost Osedax expert, says, “The discovery of Osedax shows that nutrition is even more diverse than we imagined, and our results are a step further in understanding the special relationship between the worm and its bacteria.”

Osedax are a female dominated society.  Males never grow beyond 1 mm.  In case you couldn’t tell, the worm in the picture is a female.

Adapted from Science Daily.

Rainwater Harvesting in Texas–A Practical Approach to Water Shortage

For centuries, people have relied on rainwater harvesting to supply water for household, landscape, livestock, and agricultural uses. Before the advent of large centralized water supply systems, rainwater was collected from roofs and stored on site in tanks known as cisterns. With the development of large, reliable water treatment and distribution systems and more affordable well drilling equipment, rain harvesting was all but forgotten, even though it offered a source of pure, soft, low-sodium water.

A renewed interest in this time-honored approach of collecting water has emerged in Texas and elsewhere because of escalating environmental and economic costs of providing water by centralized water systems or by well drilling. The health benefits of rainwater, and potential cost savings associated with rainwater collection systems have further spurred this interest.

An Outstanding Texas Application of Rainwater Harvesting

 

Native American Seed, founded in 1988 by Jan and Bill Neiman, specializes in native wildflower and prairie grass seeds from the Texas-Oklahoma-Louisiana region. In mid 2011, as the drought in the area took hold, the scarcity of drinking water became an issue and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality began curtailing the watering of all native wildflower and prairie grass seed crop. Acting proactively, Native American Seed voluntarily cut back its farm production and – going a step farther – began to explore a more sustainable source of future water supply for its operations. They settled on rainwater harvesting.

The system that Native American Seed installed has a 30,000-gallon Pioneer Galaxy® tank, a 55-gallon first flush diverter, a 12V pump powered by a 185-watt solar panel, two sediment filters, one carbon filter, and an ultraviolet lamp. The pump and the treatment system are housed in a new pump house that was constructed of dry stacked cinder blocks with a plaster of surface bonding cement to insulate the pumping and filtration system in the pump house. The rainwater harvesting system is designed to meet up to 85% of the water demand (potable and non-potable) at the seed-cleaning plant.

Adapted from Texas Water Development Board News.

 In Its Naive Belief in Water Fluoridation The US Lags Pitifully Behind the Civilized World

by Hardly Waite

What do Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland,  and Turkey have in common?

They are among the world’s developed nations that do not fluoridate their drinking water. In fact, 97% of the advanced nations of western Europe do not fluoridate their drinking water.
Only 5 % of the world’s population drinks artificially fluoridated water.
There is no difference in tooth decay between western nations that fluoridate their water and those that do not.

At present, 97% of the western European population drinks non-fluoridated water. In most advanced countries, fluoridation has been tried and rejected.

In the United States, 64% of the population lives in areas where the public water supply is still fluoridated.

This is yet another area where the US is a backward country.  We still allow capital punishment, we still do research on animals,  and we still allow a systemic poison to be put in our water because of a slow-dying superstition that it prevents cavities in teeth.

Fluoridation of water has been around almost as long as blood-letting.  Isn’t it time we let it go the way of  medical treatment with leeches?

 

More about fluoridation.

 

 Amoeba Infection Is Usually From Sinus Irrigation with Tap Water

The amoeba Naegleria fowleri (N. fowleri), which has a 99 percent fatality rate, was found in water samples taken from the homes of two people from Louisiana who died in August 2012 from primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM) – an almost universally fatal infection – after using neti pots filled with tap water to irrigate their sinuses.

Water samples taken from the victims’ homes tested positive for Naegleria fowleri (N. fowleri),  a climate-sensitive amoeba found in warm freshwater lakes and rivers.  N. fowleri has over a 99 percent fatality rate, with only one known survivor in the U.S. since 1962.

The amoeba enters the body through the nose and migrates through the olfactory nerve to the brain.  Symptoms, which occur one to seven days after exposure, include headache, fever, stiff neck, loss of appetite, vomiting, confusion, seizures, coma and death.

Here are some facts.

Although the condition is almost always fatal,  it is also very rare.  There are less than ten cases per yer in the US.  Some years there are none. The highest number of cases, 8, were reported in 1980.

The condition is not associated with general water use like drinking, bathing or showering.  It seems to be associated with water directly forced up the nose during sinus  irrigation.

N. fowleri is normally a warm-weather amoeba found primarily in Southern states, but it seems to be moving north,  probably because of climate change.

In most cases, city distribution systems do not test positive for N. fowleri,   but rather, the home’s plumbing.  How the amoeba enters the home’s piping system is unknown, but once in the pipes the organisms are able to survive and spread through the hot water system.

Read more.

Federally Funded Wastewater Plant Will Run on 100-Percent Renewable Energy