This Week in Water

Another week, another episode in the on-going struggle of humankind to make peace with its largest planetary asset:

How did you celebrate World Water Day? It was March 22, if you didn't know. Though it should probably be an every day thing.

The University of Bath (no, really!) is making waves (ugh!) in researching sustainable water resource management. Science and industry are on the case in the UK!

Matt Damon is co-founder of water.org, a non-profit created to help provide access to safe water and sanitation in Africa, South Asia, and Central America. You go, guy! And welcome to my Wise Links sidebar.

The Greenland ice sheet is thinning at increasingly alarming rates. It is the single largest contributor to rising global sea levels.

A UCLA geography grad student has devised a way to calculate river flows using only satellite data. This will assist in understanding how much water is draining from Greenland's melting ice sheets.

The Marshal Islands declared a state of emergency in the wake of "king tides" on rising sea levels which the government blames on climate change.

The U.S. Navy is strategizing how to expand its presence in the Arctic Ocean where the ice cover is thinning.

The latest gold (and mineral and ore) rush is at the bottom of the ocean, threatening ecosystems no one really understands.

A diamond found in a Brazilian riverbed shows evidence of vast reserves of water deep inside the Earth that could rival in amount all the world's oceans put together.

The Australian state of Queensland is in the grip of its most widespread drought ever. El Nino weather patterns appear to be forming in the equatorial Pacific, auguring more of the same.

A barge crash caused a fuel oil spill in Galveston Bay of up to 168,000 gallons. It is threatening fishing, commerce and shipping, and wildlife in the Texas bay. The shipping channel, one of the most important on the U.S. Gulf Coast, is not yet fully open. The spill is spreading and has not been fully contained, much less cleaned up as of this writing. Follow the news here.

A BP tar sands refinery in Whiting, Indiana, has dumped crude oil into Lake Michigan near Chicago. No one is quite sure how much oil was spilled, though estimates are rising as of this writing. Follow the news here.

No one knows how much the cleanup of radioactive waste from the Hanford Nuclear site in Washington state is going to cost—though estimates now are over $100 billion. Follow the news here.

In North Carolina, Duke Energy is still trying to remediate the environmental damages from slurries of coal ash it has dumped into state waterways. Corruption inquiries continue. Follow the news here.

Fukushima nuclear plant continues to be a global environmental disaster. Cleanup operations were suspended this week when a worker died in a mudslide. Follow the news here.

A mudslide in the State of Washington has killed at least 17 people. Some believe it came as a result of clear-cutting forests. Follow the news here.

The USGS has confirmed that injected water from fracking operations triggered a cascade of earthquakes recently in Oklahoma.