rivers

During summer in central New York, residents often enjoy a refreshing dip in the region’s peaceful lakes. But sometimes swimming is off-limits because of algae blooms that can make people sick. “Some of the algae may produce chemical toxins that can have harmful effects on people, fish, shellfish, terrestrial and marine mammals, and birds,” says […]

The gruesome images of whales and deer dying after mistaking plastic for food has helped put into perspective just how severe the plastic waste crisis is. Now, a new study finds that it is not just land and sea animals eating our plastic trash. It turns out that birds are eating hundreds of bits of […]

For the first decade of the 2000s, the Missouri River, the nation’s longest river, was drier than it’s been in more than 1,200 years. The culprit is the climate crisis, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS. Since global temperatures continue to warm, the severe […]

A case that has bounced around the lower courts for 13 years was finally settled yesterday when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision, finding oil giant Citgo liable for a clean up of a 2004 oil spill in the Delaware River, according to Reuters. The spill stemmed from a collision that the […]

By Christopher Sergeant, Julian D. Olden Scars from large mining operations are permanently etched across the landscapes of the world. The environmental damage and human health hazards that these activities create may be both severe and irreversible. Many mining operations store enormous quantities of waste, known as tailings, onsite. After miners excavate rock, a processing […]

Millions of people rely on the Colorado River, but the climate crisis is causing the river to dry up, putting many at risk of “severe water shortages,” according to new research, as The Guardian reported. Longer periods of drought and rising temperatures have decreased the river’s annual flow by 20 percent compared to the last […]

“We see ourselves not as an owner of wild rice but a symbiotic partner and a parallel entity from the Creator,” says Frank Bibeau, a lawyer from the Anishinaabe indigenous group in the U.S. and Canada. Harvesters use flailing sticks to beat the wild rice — or manoomin, by its Anishinaabe name — and release […]

By Alex Kirby New forests are an apparently promising way to tackle global heating: the trees absorb carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas from human activities. But there’s a snag, because permanently lower river flows can be an unintended consequence. A study by scientists at the University of Cambridge, UK, has found that river flow […]