The mighty Columbia River rolls down from the Canadian rockies to form the border between Oregon and Washington State. Rolling along in its waters are the fish that have been the backbone of the region’s life for countless centuries. Fisherman Bob Rees with a sturgeon from the Lower Columbia River. That fish may not be […]
This one’s not a big one in the scheme of things. But to those impacted—especially in Ohio, where algae bloom recently caused the water supplying nearly a half million people in the Toledo area to be undrinkable for several days—it’s bad news. Monday morning, reports the Columbus Dispatch, the Coast Guard closed down a 15-mile […]
Even as we watch the stunning footage of an overwhelmed Detroit drowning under massive rainfall, U.S. Drought Monitor shows other regions of the country parched and longing for more water. The organization releases weekly maps tracking the extent of drought in the U.S., ranking regions on five levels: “abnormally dry,” “moderate drought,” “severe drought,” “extreme […]
What do Walter Cronkite, Sylvia Earle and Sam Low all have in common? They have mastered the might of media on behalf of the sea. 2014 Walter Cronkite Award recipient Dr. Sylvia A. Earle is a world-famous ocean pioneer and former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who has spent her life […]
On Aug. 4, an approximately 580 acre impoundment failed at a Canadian gold and copper mine near Likely, British Columbia. The breach at Imperial Metal’s Mt. Polley mine dumped an estimated 1.3 billion gallons of toxic mine waste into the surrounding environment. On Aug. 5, Landsat 8 acquired an image of the mine showing that grey sludge […]
The City of Toledo issued a “Do Not Drink” advisory to more than 400,000 residents last weekend after chemical tests confirmed the presence of unsafe levels of the algal toxin Microcystin in the drinking water in three counties in Ohio and one in Michigan. Last night on MSNBC’s the Ed Show, Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur and Dr. […]
A now-famous 1972 photo of Earth taken by Apollo 17 astronauts from 45,000 kilometres away became known as “the blue marble.” The late scientist Carl Sagan described a 1990 picture taken from six billion kilometers away by the unmanned Voyager 1 as a “pale blue dot.” The vision of Earth from a distance has profoundly moved pretty much anyone […]
The mineral-stained canyon walls and the plunging water levels at Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, are the most visible signs of the driest 14-year period in the Colorado River Basin’s historical record. The Colorado River flows past irrigated fields in Arizona. During a dry decade, most of the water losses in the seven-state basin […]
Hidden from the usual tourist circuit, two streams of southwestern Oregon tumble down from the Siskiyou Mountains through wild canyons embossed with pines and boulder fields. These unprotected waters are now threatened by nickel mines. This cherished region of Oregon and California does not have to be an impoverished and polluted resource colony of other […]