GEOLOGY WITH JEFF SIMPSON
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Earthjustice Is Suing EPA Over Coal Ash Dumps, Which Leak Toxins Into Groundwater

9/1/2022

 
- Inside Climate News

Shorter showers or rip up your lawn?: Conserving water is mostly an outdoors job

9/1/2022

 
The Southwest’s megadrought has put the spotlight on water conservation, and experts agree it’s a crucial part of the solution. But what does conservation mean to the average Arizonan? Shorter showers? No more grass lawns? What really matters might surprise you. Let’s say you’re standing at the kitchen sink with an empty peanut butter jar. You want to put it in the recycling bin, but you need to rinse it out first. Is it worth the water? In our daily lives, there are many ways to save water, such as turning off the faucet when we brush our teeth or taking shorter showers. These are nice gestures, but to really save water, said Sarah Porter of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute, we need to think bigger - Cronkite News

Arizona AG, governor candidates call for Saudi Arabian water leases investigation

9/1/2022

 
Democratic attorney general candidate Kris Mayes is calling to investigate and potentially cancel the leases the State Land Department signed with a Saudi Arabian company that is pumping from Phoenix's backup water supply in western Arizona.  Mayes is also calling for the Saudi Arabian company to pay the state approximately $38 million for using the water in La Paz County, which sits in a basin that could be tapped as a future water source for the Phoenix area.  Mayes says the lease should be put on hold while they are investigated because they potentially violate the Arizona Constitution in two ways: They could violate the gift clause as well as a clause that requires state land and its products to be appraised and offered at their true value.  - AZ Central

Foot floating in a Yellowstone hot spring leaves more questions than answers

8/21/2022

 
A foot found floating in a hot spring at Yellowstone National Park has been linked to a July 31 death. On Aug. 16, a park employee found the foot, still encased in a shoe, in Abyss Pool, one of the deepest hot springs in Yellowstone. In a statement today (Aug. 19), authorities said that the foot is linked to an incident involving a single individual on the morning of July 31 and that they do not suspect foul play. They did not elaborate on why they do not suspect foul play, nor did they identify the person who died. An investigation is ongoing. - LiveScience
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Irreversible declines in freshwater storage projected in parts of Asia by 2060

8/21/2022

 
The Tibetan Plateau, known as the “water tower” of Asia, supplies freshwater for nearly 2 billion people who live downstream. New research led by scientists at Penn State, Tsinghua University and the University of Texas at Austin projects that climate change, under a scenario of weak climate policy, will cause irreversible declines in freshwater storage in the region, constituting a serious threat to the water supply for central Asia, Afghanistan, Northern India, Kashmir and Pakistan by the middle of the century. “The prognosis is not good,” said Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State. “In a ‘business as usual’ scenario, where we fail to meaningfully curtail fossil fuel burning in the decades ahead, we can expect a substantial — that is, nearly 100% loss — of water availability to downstream regions of the Tibetan Plateau. I was surprised at just how large the predicted decrease is even under a scenario of modest climate policy.” - Penn State
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'Forever chemicals' destroyed by simple new method

8/21/2022

 
PFAS, a group of manufactured chemicals commonly used since the 1940s, are called "forever chemicals" for a reason. Bacteria can't eat them; fire can't incinerate them; and water can't dilute them. And, if these toxic chemicals are buried, they leach into surrounding soil, becoming a persistent problem for generations to come. Now, Northwestern University chemists have done the seemingly impossible. Using low temperatures and inexpensive, common reagents, the research team developed a process that causes two major classes of PFAS compounds to fall apart, leaving behind only benign end products. - Phys.org
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A Quiet Revolution: Southwest Cities Learn to Thrive Amid Drought

4/29/2022

 
In the rolling hills around San Diego and its suburbs, the rumble of bulldozers and the whine of power saws fill the air as a slew of new homes and apartments rise up. The region is booming, its population growing at a rate of about 1 percent a year. This, in spite of the fact that Southern California, along with much of the West, is in the midst of what experts call a megadrought that some believe may not be a temporary, one-off occurrence, but a recurring event or even a climate change-driven permanent “aridification” of the West. The drought is so bad that last year federal officials ordered cuts to water provided to the region by the Colorado River for the first time in history. Water officials in San Diego, though, say they are not worried. “We have sufficient supplies now and in the future,” said Sandra Kerl, general manager of the San Diego Water Authority. “We recently did a stress test, and we are good until 2045” and even beyond. - Yale Environment350
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Arizona faces a reckoning over water

3/25/2022

 
The question now, as it has been since 1911 when the first big reservoir was completed to supply Phoenix with water, is one of longevity. Can this desert bounty be sustained for another 100 years, or even another 50? That question is more urgent and more relevant than ever. Climate change is disrupting the rules of the development game. Drought and extreme heat are emptying rivers and reservoirs, fallowing tens of thousands of acres of farmland, forcing thousands of homeowners to secure water from trucks and not their dead wells, and pushing Arizona ever closer to the precipice of peril.- HCN
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Road salt triggering 'massive' harm to US lakes, contaminating drinking water

2/27/2022

 
Five years ago, Hague was part of the problem. Each winter, more than 6 feet of snow fell on the upstate New York town nestled between scenic Lake George and the Pharaoh Lake Wilderness Area. Each year, the highway department dumped as much as 2,200 tons of rock salt onto 110 miles of road – nearly 2 pounds of salt for every square yard of road. And Hague is just one of more than a dozen communities that dot Lake George’s banks. Their combined use of road salt has increased the lake’s salinity nearly threefold over the past several decades, according to research by the nonprofit Fund for Lake George. The lake’s salt levels are now more than 30 times higher than more isolated lakes in the Adirondack Mountains, the group found. - USA Today
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A new tundra, engineered by beavers

2/18/2022

 
Beavers, once seldom seen in northwest Alaska, started appearing more frequently in the ’80s and ’90s. Pastor Lance Kramer (Inupiaq) traps beavers today, mostly for making fur hats. He recently asked an elder about the area’s first sightings. “They saw this thing on the tundra, and it looked like a wolverine, but it was a really long beaver,” Kramer said. “(It) had walked so far on the tundra to get up this way that it wore out the bottom of its tail.”  Now the animals — and their ponds, dams and lodges — are everywhere. Using satellite images of the Kotzebue area, scientists found that the number of beaver dams surged from two in 2002 to 98 in 2019, a 5,000% jump. And it’s not just Kotzebue: Beaver ponds doubled regionally since 2000, with 12,000 in northwestern Alaska now. Beavers, dubbed “ecosystem engineers” because of how they flood their surroundings, are transforming the tundra. - HCN
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The US is losing some of its biggest freshwater reserves

1/30/2022

 
​As concerns over water scarcity grow, research published in Nature recently documents how freshwater availability has changed over the years, helping water specialists and managers pinpoint how this essential resource’s flows have been changing. Xander Huggins, a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria and Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan, and his fellow researchers decided to explore what exactly these changes would mean for life here on Earth.  The team examined 1,024 basins across the world to understand how water availability couples with social processes to create vulnerability in communities. The main factor they studied were freshwater stress, which is the amount of H2O that naturally leaves the watershed or basin per year; the higher the stress, the less water there is available for ecosystems and for people’s demands, according to Huggins. Following this, he and his colleagues coupled the findings with data on how freshwater storage in underground aquifers and glaciers, for example, is changing. - Popular Science / Nature

Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project projected to serve thousands of people

1/27/2022

 
Arizonans are facing water shortages as the Colorado River declines, but Teddy Lopez and many other residents of the Navajo Nation have lived without easy access to clean water for decades. Lopez, 66, has learned that nothing is guaranteed – with water or in life. “I just take it one day at a time and try to work what I can, what I can do,” said Lopez, who in August received news no one wants to hear. “I have cancer, so I just take care of my family, I guess,” said Lopez, who lives with his wife in Lybrook, New Mexico, and his daughter and grandchildren come to cook meals for him every day. - Cronkite News
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With less water on the surface, how long can Arizona rely on what’s underground?

1/20/2022

 
In Arizona, verdant fields of crops and a growing sprawl of suburban homes mean a sharp demand for water in the middle of the desert. Meeting that demand includes drawing from massive stores of underground water. But some experts say those aquifers are overtaxed and shouldn’t be seen as a long-term solution for a region where the water supply is expected to shrink in the decades to come. “We should recognize now, as we do with the Colorado River, that we have to take action before it’s too late,” said Kathleen Ferris, a senior research fellow with Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy. - Cronkite News



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Midwest power plants face shutdown after EPA proposes denying requests to keep using unlined coal ash ponds

1/12/2022

 
The EPA proposed denying requests from 3 Midwest coal-fired power plants to continue dumping coal ash in unlined surface impoundments, a move that could lead to the plants' early retirements. The EPA also tentatively determined that 4 of 57 applications to extend the deadline for meeting its coal ash requirements were incomplete. Once the EPA issues final decisions for the incomplete and denied applications, the owners of the seven plants will have 135 days to stop putting coal ash in the impoundments. The EPA is interpreting and enforcing its coal ash rules for the first time since they were passed in 2015, during the Obama administration, according to Earthjustice. The EPA's action will set a precedent for more than 200 U.S. coal-fired power plants and the nearly 750 ponds and landfills where their ash is stored, the advocacy group said. - Utility Dive
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U.S. Looks to Extract Lithium for Batteries from Geothermal Waste

12/30/2021

 
According to a study by the Department of Energy, the Salton Sea in California’s Imperial Valley—one of two large geothermal energy production sites in the state—could produce as much as 600,000 tons of lithium annually. That is more lithium than the United States currently uses. It could bring in $7.2 billion a year, and that could just be the beginning of expected economic benefits. The global demand for lithium is expected to grow as much as tenfold by 2030. - Scientific American

Right -  A geothermal energy plant taps deep underground heat from the southern San Andreas Fault rift zone at the Salton Sea near Calipatria, Calif. 
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The Most Detailed Map of Cancer-Causing Industrial Air Pollution in the U.S.

11/2/2021

 
It’s not a secret that industrial facilities emit hazardous air pollution. A new ProPublica analysis shows for the first time just how much toxic air pollution they emit — and how much the chemicals they unleash could be elevating cancer risk in their communities. ProPublica’s analysis of five years of modeled EPA data identified more than 1,000 toxic hot spots across the country and found that an estimated 250,000 people living in them may be exposed to levels of excess cancer risk that the EPA deems unacceptable. The agency has long collected the information on which our analysis is based. Thousands of facilities nationwide that are considered large sources of toxic air pollution submit a report to the government each year on their chemical emissions. - ProPublica
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California farm town lurches from no water to polluted water

11/2/2021

 
The San Joaquin Valley farm town of Teviston has two wells. One went dry and the other is contaminated. The one functioning well failed just at the start of summer, depriving the hot and dusty hamlet of running water for weeks. With temperatures routinely soaring above 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius), farm workers bathed with buckets after laboring in the nearby vineyards and almond orchards. Even as officials restored a modicum of pressure with trucked-in water, and after the well was repaired, the hardships have endured. Teviston's 400 to 700 people - figures fluctuate with the agricultural season - have received bottled drinking water since the well failed in June. But for years, probably decades, the water coming from Teviston taps has been laced with the carcinogen 1,2,3-Trichloropropane, or 1,2,3-TCP, the legacy of pesticides. - Reuters
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PFAS are everywhere—and the EPA has a new plan to fight back

10/24/2021

 
The United States has a PFAS problem. Whether they are raining down from the sky or popping up in food packaging, the mysterious chemicals, also known as Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances have been finding their way into our bodies and environment—sometimes at concerningly high levels. PFAS are also found in everyday cosmetics, especially in longwear and waterproof makeup items and can  accidentally be ingested overtime. PFAS can even be found in our drinking water.  PFAS are not only dangerous because they build up in the environment and in our bodies, but the chemicals are often associated with low infant birth rates and even cancer according to the EPA. In the past year, some research has connected high rates of PFAS exposure to worse COVID outcomes. Despite being such harmful toxins to people, they’re used regularly and are not historically regulated in the U.S.  To tackle this dilemma, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a “Comprehensive National Strategy” to regulate the toxic industrial chemical. The plan describes three main strategies going forward–investing in more research on PFAS, leveraging authorities that can take action to restrict more PFAS chemicals from being released, and accelerating PFAS contamination cleanups. EPA administrator Michael S. Regan pointed out that the agency will work on holding polluters accountable in the announcement. - Popular Science

Pinal County farmer struggles to grow crops with less water

10/24/2021

 
Nancy Caywood’s Pinal County farm should have a full field of alfalfa, but since the irrigation district shut off her water because of drought, her fields are empty and dry. - Cronkite News
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Understanding the Environmental Impacts of Shale Development

9/20/2021

 
Development of shale gas and tight oil, or unconventional oil and gas (UOG), has dramatically increased domestic energy production in the U.S. UOG resources are typically developed through the use of hydraulic fracturing, which creates high- permeability flow paths into large vol- umes of tight rocks to provide a means for hydrocarbons to move to a wellbore. This process uses significant volumes of water, sand, and chemicals, raising concerns about risks to the environment and to human health. Researchers in various dis- ciplines have been working to make UOG development more efficient, and to better understand the risks to air quality, water quality, landscapes, human health, and ecosystems. Risks to air include releases of methane, carbon dioxide, volatile organic compounds, and particulate mat- ter. Water-resource risks include excessive withdrawals, stray gas in drinking-water aquifers, and surface spills of fluids or chemicals. Landscapes can be signifi- cantly altered by the infrastructure installed to support large drilling plat- forms and associated equipment. - Geological Society of America
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Dry Wells, Lower Flows Raise Alarm About the Verde River's Future

9/6/2021

 
Across the [Verde] watershed, thousands of wells draw groundwater from the same aquifers, supplying growing towns like Prescott Valley and Chino Valley. State records show groundwater levels have been declining. Already, some families in communities near the river have watched wells dry up and have turned to relying on plastic storage tanks and paying to have water hauled by truck.   The upper Verde is increasingly threatened.  If pumping continues unchecked, wells will capture more of the water that would otherwise feed the springs. - AZ Central

Right -Sullivan Dam (foreground) and Sullivan Lake (background) near Paulden, Arizona. 


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Starving cows. Fallow farms. The Arizona drought is among the worst in the country

8/17/2021

 
The alfalfa barely exists.  “Can you even call this a farm?” asked Nancy Caywood, standing on a rural stretch of land her Texas grandfather settled nearly a century ago, drawn by cheap prices and feats of engineering that brought water from afar to irrigate central Arizona’s arid soil.  The canals that used to bring water to the fields of Caywood Farms have gone dry due to the drought.  On the family’s 247 acres an hour south of Phoenix, Caywood grew up tending to cotton and alfalfa, two water-intensive crops that fed off melted mountain snows flowing from a reservoir 120 miles away. She grew up understanding the rhythms of the desert and how fields can blossom despite a rugged, sand-swept terrain where sunlight is a given but water is precious.  Now more than ever. Looking out at her farmland recently, Caywood held back tears. - LATimes
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A mega-dairy is transforming Arizona’s aquifer and farming lifestyles

8/13/2021

 
Nobody knows how many wells have dried up in Sunizona, let alone the entire Willcox Basin, which covers 1,911 square miles in Arizona’s southeast corner, near the New Mexico border. But between 2014 and 2019, records from the Arizona Department of Water Resources (ADWR) show that around 20 wells in the Sunizona area were deepened after drying up. In the entire basin during that time, records show that 57 wells were deepened, but interviews and anecdotal accounts place the number at more than 100.- High Country News

Right: Thousands of dairy cows crowd the Coronado Dairy’s feedlot in the Kansas Settlement area near Sunizona, Arizona. - Roberto (Bear) Guerra / High Country News
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We Could Convert Abandoned Oil and Gas Wells into Millions of Acres of Green Space

6/9/2021

 
President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan proposes to spend $16 billion plugging old oil and gas wells and cleaning up abandoned mines. But there’s no authoritative measure of how many of these sites exist across the nation.  In a recent study, my colleagues and I sought to account for every oil and gas well site in the lower 48 states that was eligible for restoration—meaning that the well no longer was producing oil or gas, and there were no other active wells using that site. We found more than 430,000 old well sites, with associated infrastructure such as access roads, storage areas, and fluid tanks. They covered more than 2 million acres—an area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined. - Fast Company

The Central California Town That Keeps Sinking

5/25/2021

 
In California’s San Joaquin Valley, the farming town of Corcoran has a multimillion-dollar problem. It is almost impossible to see, yet so vast it takes NASA scientists using satellite technology to fully grasp.  Corcoran is sinking.  Over the past 14 years, the town has sunk as much as 11.5 feet in some places — enough to swallow the entire first floor of a two-story house and to at times make Corcoran one of the fastest-sinking areas in the country, according to experts with the United States Geological Survey. - NYTimes
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