There is a myth about water in the Western United States, which is that there is not enough of it. But those who deal closely with water will tell you this is false. There is plenty. It is just in the wrong places.  Cibola, AZ is one of the wrong places. Home to about 300 people, depending on what time of year you’re counting, the town sits on the California border, in a stretch of the Sonoran Desert encircled by fanglike mountains and seemingly dead rocky terrain. Driving across the expanse, where the temperature often hovers near 115 degrees, I found myself comforted by the sight of an oncoming eighteen-wheeler carrying bales of hay, which at least implied the existence of something living where I was headed. - NYTimes

After being shaken by 15 months of increasingly disruptive earthquakes, including about 50,000 in the past three weeks, Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula is finally experiencing the volcanic eruption that many geologists suspected was on its way. After nearly 800 years without an eruption, this southwestern strip of the country is experiencing lava flows that experts say have been a long time coming. - National Geographic

Aircraft stand at a turning point in the race to reduce emissions to mitigate climate change. Although the aircraft sector only accounts for a sliver of transportation-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the United States—at 9%—it is difficult to decarbonize.  That task just got a burst of energy with the publication of a new paper on carbon-negative sustainable aviation fuel by scientists. - NREL

Louisiana is known for its losing battle against rising seas and increasingly frequent floods. It can sometimes seem like the state has too much water. But the aquifers deep beneath its swampy landscape face a critical shortage.  Groundwater levels in and around Louisiana are falling faster than almost anywhere else in the country, according to U.S. Geological Survey data. An analysis traced the problem to decades of overuse, unregulated pumping by industries and agriculture, and scant oversight or action from legislative committees rife with conflicts of interest. Experts warn that all of these factors threaten the groundwater that nearly two-thirds of Louisianans rely on for drinking and bathing. Combined with the expected effects of climate-fueled heat and drought, it puts Louisiana on the brink of a groundwater crisis more common in Western states. - NPR

Transitioning away from fossil fuels to 100 percent renewable energy is essential to staving off the worst effects of the climate crisis. Wind and solar are currently leading the charge – but they may only get us so far. There is a less-talked-about, under-explored renewable out there that can generate clean, base load energy around the clock. “Geothermal electricity is always on,” said Jefferson Tester, a professor of sustainable energy systems at Cornell University and a leading expert on geothermal energy. “It can provide fully dispatchable power or heat and is scalable in the same way other renewables are.” - Climate Reality

Black carbon particles, produced by combustion of gasoline, diesel fuel, coal, and other organics, have been found to be the second-largest driver of climate warming, after carbon dioxide (CO2), since the Industrial Revolution. Much of black carbon’s role in this warming results from the fact that it contributes to the melting of snow and ice and thus to darkening of Earth’s surface, reducing the amount of sunlight the planet reflects and increasing the amount it absorbs.  Today the mass of MP particles in the environment is very likely more than that of BC. Dubaish and Liebezeit [2013] found 5 times more MP particles than visible BC particles in a microscope slide count of particles in water samples from Jade Bay along the northwestern coast of Germany. This is the only study to date that has reported simultaneous measurements of MP and BC particles, and it did not address the coexistence of MPs and BC in snow. - EOS