South Carolina regulators have no immediate plan for a pollution cleanup at the state’s largest sewage dump, but they are negotiating an unusual agreement that would alert them if contamination begins to spread from the property.

The S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control’s plan met with skepticism at a public meeting Thursday night in Pelion, a small community south of Columbia ... read more >>

Swimmers, if you want to know how filthy that lake or stream is before you jump in, there's now an app for that. The Environmental Protection Agency launched its My Waterway app, available through the agency's website. By identifying the user's GPS location, the software allows swimmers and fishers to check the water quality in thousands of lakes, rivers and streams in the United States from thei ... read more >>

With millions of gallons of raw sewage dumping into New Jersey waterways following Hurricane Sandy, University of Delaware scientists are using satellites to help predict the sludge's track into the ocean. "Technically, you can't identify raw sewage from a satellite, but you can find river discharge that you suspect has raw sewage," said Matthew Oliver, assistant professor of oceanography in the ... read more >>

Hydrofracking, also known as hydraulic fracturing, fracking, frac'ing, or fraccing, is a new way to get natural gas from shale rock.
Geologists have long known that shale contains natural gas, but traditional drilling methods have not been able to get to the gas. In the past decade, however, a combination of higher natural gas prices, new technologies (fracking and horizontal drilling) and a lac ... read more >>

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University say a water quality problem in the Monongahela River that may have been linked to Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling is going away. ... read more >>

A recent study by US and Venezuelan researchers, revealed theat the collapse of sardine fisheries in the southern Caribbean during the past decade may have been driven by global climate change. Overfishing and plankton decline may have contributed to collapse of fisheries. ... read more >>

Climate change and extreme weather events grab the headlines, but there is another, lesser known, global change underway on land, in the seas, and in the air: acidification. It turns out that combustion of fossil fuels, smelting of ores, mining of coal and metal ores, and application of nitrogen fertilizer to soils are all driving down the pH of the air, water, and the soil at rates far faster th ... read more >>

Voters in Rutland, Vt., have rejected a $5.5 million water filtration system to help the city meet EPA drinking water standards. ... read more >>

Melbourne has one of the most pristine, pure and safe drinking water supplies in the world. Swinburne's Professor Ian Harding (Environment and Biotechnology Centre) discusses the quality issues that may arise from changing our source water. ... read more >>

As the world population increases and fresh water sources become scarcer, many people will likely rely on technologies that convert salt water to fresh water to meet their most basic needs. Currently, the most common method of water desalination is reverse osmosis, a process that removes water molecules from salt water, leaving salt ions (sodium and chlorine) in the leftover brine. But an alterna ... read more >>