rivers

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 […]

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 […]

Researchers have found that plants are growing farther up the Himalayas than they did in the past, according to a new study in the journal Global Change Biology, as Newsweek reported. Researchers looked at satellite data from 1993 to 2018 and found plant life extending into the harsh terrain between the top of the tree […]

Scientists have concluded of the largest freshwater fish species in the world is now extinct because of human activity. The Chinese paddlefish, sometimes called the “panda of the Yangtze River,” was found to have been lost to overfishing and habitat destruction, Phys.org reported Wednesday. Its extinction was announced and documented by researchers at the Chinese […]

By Jodi Helmer Each year, millions of tons of grain make their way along what was once one of our wildest river systems, the Columbia-Snake River. Four dams — the Lower Granite, Little Goose, Lower Monumental and Ice Harbor — erected between 1955 and 1975, ease the way for massive barges bound for ports on […]

Countries around the world are seeing a mounting threat from antibiotic resistance. After decades of overprescribing antibiotics and overusing them in factory farming, rivers are polluted with antibiotics and complications from drug-resistant infections are projected to cost $100 trillion by 2050, according to Scientific American. The Centers for Disease Control released a report last month […]