Western Australian Water Minister Bill Marmion and Energy Minister Peter Collier have finalised an agreement that will see the Water Corporation purchase the output of two renewable energy projects to offset the energy requirements from the new Southern Seawater Desalination Plant (SSDP) to be built near Geraldton in the State's Mid-West. Both renewable energy power plants involve Verve Energy wo ... read more >>

Lake Enriquillo in the Dominican Republic has doubled in size over the past eight years, swallowing thousands of acres of farms and more than a dozen villages.
While the cause remains a mystery, theories as to why the lakes are rising range from sediment and trash clogging the water system to increased rainfall from climate change and heavy storms. ... read more >>

On September 12th the Chilean Environment Ministry’s Evaluation Service recommended approval for construction of a new desalination plant to supply drinking water in the Antofagasta region.

The project will cost $120 million USD, with work carried out by local water company Aguas Antofagasta.

When complete, the South Desalination plant will make Antofagasta the first city in Latin America ... read more >>

The forest of towering, dead mangrove trees stretches along the beach as far as the eye can see. As the crashing waves rise and fall, short stumps emerge and vanish beneath the Pacific Ocean. Climate change has come early to the Bajo Lempa region of western El Salvador.
A tiny rise in the sea level has, according to local people, seen about 1,000ft of the mangroves on which they depend vanish be ... read more >>

The first set of formal map products from the California Seafloor Mapping Program are now available on the United States Geological Survey website. This first map set covers Hueneme Canyon and vicinity, and includes 12 map sheets displaying seafloor characteristics, an explanatory pamphlet, and a data catalog of GIS files. More information on map product development is available on and on the U ... read more >>

Rawabi is the first Palestinian planned city in the West Bank. Rawabi is to be located near Ramallah and Bir Zeit. A master plan has been drawn up for the city, which will consist of 10,000 homes in six neighborhoods with a population of 40,000. ... read more >>

common argument is that climate is always changing, and that Earth has had higher levels of CO2 in the past... and was much warmer. Richard Alley in the National Ice Core Lab in Denver CO, shows the hard (and very cold!) evidence that today's levels of CO2 are unlike anything seen in the whole of human civilization, for much more than 400,000 years. And, by the way, when Earth was much, much hott ... read more >>

A recent survey conducted by AXE found the average shower taken by an 18- to 24-year-old in the U.S. lasts more than 17 minutes, a full nine minutes longer than the optimum shower time recommended to conserve water.[1] While generally not top-of-mind, people's water use habits play a big role in determining their personal environmental footprints. AXE Shower is launching "Showerpooling," a campai ... read more >>

In 1972, a government consultant, using the same unscientific logic as the water-heater salesman, presented a report to the U.S. Congress asserting that the country as a whole was using energy at a rate of 50-percent efficiency, which he assured the politicians was so high that no further gains from efficiency could be relied on and therefore the country would need to build hundreds of new nuclea ... read more >>

An explanation on total stress, effective (inter granular) stress, and water pressure in saturated soil and also capillary rise. ... read more >>