This Week in Water

I apologize for not having posted much recently. I've been obsessing about finishing what I believe is my final revision of my unpublished novel EULOGY. I've had to rewrite the ending and been in a bit of a panic about that, but the novel is ready to be submitted to agents now. Wish me luck.

There. That's out of the way. Let's turn to the real world. Water: It's a problem.

Halliburton has to pay $1.1 billion for its role in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 workers. Something about faulty cement. BP which claims it has spent more than $28 billion on damage claims and cleanup costs may be fined up to $18 billion more for its role. Of course, if corporations were people, as folks like Mitt Romney and the U.S. Supreme Court claim, wouldn't that make them liable for murder and manslaughter? Oyster harvesting along the Gulf has yet to recover.

Satellite analysis is showing that Earth's two largest ice sheets—in Antarctica and Greenland—are being depleted at an astonishing rate of 120 cubic miles per year. Computer climate simulations show that human contribution to glacier melting is increasing steadily. The Atlantic Ocean, by absorbing vast amounts of heat from the atmosphere, has masked much of the effects of global warming. This trend may reverse after 2030.

A slow-motion disaster: The East Coast of the U.S. is facing increased damages and ill-effects from rising sea levels. Miami and New York City (my former home) are ground zero in the battle against rising seas. "Imagine Cape Cod without cod. Maine without lobster. The region's famous rocky beaches invisible, obscured by constant high waters. It's already starting to happen."

Historic levels of flooding hit Detroit and Michigan.

Half a million residents were left homeless as devastating floods hit Bangladesh. Monsoon flooding in India and Pakistan has claimed nearly 300 lives.

It's been a busy typhoon season in the Pacific, much busier than the Atlantic, and it's still going on.

Australia's Great Barrier Reef is under duress from natural and man-made forces. So much so the government has abandoned plans to dump 3 million cubic meters of dredged sand into the area.

Meanwhile, in another potential slo-mo disaster scenario, California continues to labor under historic drought conditions. Click for shocking pics of vanishing lakes. More than 80% of the state is either in extreme or exception drought category, the highest levels. Crops are shriveling up. Wells and aquifers are running dry. More devastating pics. Some worry that groundwater depletion there is destabilizing the San Andreas Fault (among others) and increasing earthquake risks. And it's not just a California problem: the food supply of the whole nation is in jeopardy.

Texas, too. And some think this Southwest drought could last for a generation or more. Especially with hydrofrackers competing for limited water resources and fouling nearby aquifers in their wake.