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Until recently, my concept of a ‘garbage patch’ was of an area of ocean with large pieces of floating debris, the kind of stray fishing gear and trash from ships and shorelines that collect where currents form eddies far from view of most people. Having seen my share of sea trash in 20,000+ miles of…
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Acid rain may not be top of mind these days for many Americans, but that doesn’t mean the problem has gone away. Referring to any form of precipitation with high levels of nitric and sulfuric acids, some acid rain can develop naturally from decay of living things. But the primary cause is emissions from burning…
On March 27, an estimated 15,000 young people gathered in Washington State’s KeyArena for We Day Seattle, an event “to celebrate the power of youth to create positive change in their local and global communities.” We Day Seattle marked the first time the program came to the U.S., although it has been well known in…
Landmark Cooperation Brings the Colorado River Home
Posted by Sandra Postel of National Geographic's Freshwater Initiative in Water Currents on April 5, 2013 
This post is part of a series on the Colorado River Delta. Standing at Morelos Dam, the last in the long line of dams on the Colorado River, and the only one in Mexico, it’s hard not to feel that we humans have betrayed this great river. It has traveled 1,350 miles from its headwaters,…
We recently covered a two-headed bull shark fetus that was found by a fisherman and described by scientists in a journal. That story got more than ninety comments and more than four thousand Facebook likes, and it got us thinking about what other two-headed creatures might have been found. So in lieu of this week’s…
The Accidental Wetland in the Colorado Delta
Posted by Sandra Postel of National Geographic's Freshwater Initiative in Water Currents on April 2, 2013 
This post is part of a series on the Colorado River Delta. Traveling south from the Mexican border town of San Luis Rio Colorado, we stop about 20 miles (32.2 km) from the Upper Gulf of California. It feels like the middle of nowhere. We’re surrounded by vast stretches of cracked, dried-out mudflats layered with…
One of my favorite vendors at D.C.’s Eastern Market sells illustrations of plants and animals. The intricate colored drawings harken back to a golden age of naturalism, when intrepid explorers headed out with little more than a notebook to chronicle the incredible biodiversity of our world. Of course, there are still many species yet to…
This month 36 Philippine freshwater crocodiles were introduced into the wild on Siargao Island, in an effort to bolster the population of this endangered reptile. The Philippine freshwater crocodile (Crocodylus mindorensis), also called the Mindoro crocodile, is found only in the Philippines. The Philippine crocodile shares the island chain with the much more common Indo-Pacific crocodile or saltwater…
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Now that a red flag has been raised by the Colorado River Basin Study – a federal and state cooperative analysis published in late 2012 – that there will be water shortages across much of the U.S. Southwest, the handwringing has started. Our cities, farms, and rivers face a slow-motion disaster; what are we going…
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The Great Lakes hold 20 percent of the world’s available surface freshwater–enough to cover the continental United States with 10 feet of water if you turned them upside down. In many places along the lakes, you can stand on one side without seeing the shoreline on the other because they are so huge. It’s difficult…
Revival in the Colorado River Delta
Posted by Sandra Postel of National Geographic's Freshwater Initiative in Water Currents on March 22, 2013 
This post is part of a series on the Colorado River Delta. So intimate was her connection to the river that as a girl she conditioned her hair with the soft mud from its channel bottom. Her family fished in the waters and hunted in the dense forests of cottonwoods and willows that spread across the…
For World Water Day, Cooperation Brings More Benefit Per Drop
Posted by Sandra Postel of National Geographic's Freshwater Initiative in Water Currents on March 22, 2013 
Rivers pay no mind to political boundaries. If unimpeded by dams and diversions, they flow naturally from mountain headwaters to the sea, crossing borders both within and between countries as if political maps did not exist. If the world is to meet growing food, energy, and consumer demands over the coming years while sustaining the…
In a recent volley between Phoenix and Los Angeles, newspapers in those two arid cities pointed fingers at each other over who has the least sustainable water supply. In the L.A. Times, opinion writer William deBuys asserted: If cities were stocks, you’d want to short Phoenix. Of course, it’s an easy city to pick on. The…
National Geographic’s recent video on Concrete Canvas shelters went viral, as nearly 4.8 million YouTube viewers saw how quickly a sturdy structure could be raised when air is blown into wetted, cement-covered cloths. So we caught up with Peter Brewin, director of the U.K.-based Concrete Canvas company, to get the story behind the innovation. Can…
While one could make a case that pigs should be this week’s Freshwater Species of the Week, since they have turned up by the thousands in a Chinese river, I decided to focus my attention a bit closer to home. Today, authorities announced that eight men have been indicted for alleged trafficking in American paddlefish…
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From Amethyst Brook in Massachusetts to Wychus Creek in Oregon, communities in 19 states restored 400 miles of rivers and streams by removing 65 dams in 2012. American Rivers announced the annual dam removal list today, bring the total for U.S. dam removals up to nearly 1,100. Last year, outdated or unsafe dams came out…
Posted by By Claire Schoen Media An estuary is a magical place where ocean water mingles with fresh river flows, creating a wealth of biological diversity. The San Francisco Bay is actually a huge estuary and through the narrow throat of it’s golden gate, one quarter of its water ebbs and flows each day. Kayaker and journalist…
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During the dry winter months, thousands of elephants roam the vast Kalahari savannah in search of water. The largest of earth’s land animals have been known to walk hundreds of kilometres across the dry plains to quench their thirst at waterholes that are often few and far between. Named after a local Nhanzwa chief, Hwange…
Today, delegates to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in Bangkok agreed to list the African manatee (Trichechus senegalensis) on Appendix I on an interim basis, boosting its protections. A final decision on the species’ status is expected by the time the conference wraps up on March 14, according to Humane Society…
Tropical lakes in East Africa don’t grab headlines the way polar bears do, but climate change is having an effect on them, too. Although the changes are not as visible as melting polar ice caps, they are no less real. As in many lakes around the world, water temperature is on the rise in Lake…
On Saturday, Paul Rose put on a dry diving suit and walked to the end of a pier on scenic Lake Windermere, the largest natural lake in England. He plunged into the cold water. “I had been underwater for 30 seconds when I bumped straight into a complete toilet,” Rose told Water Currents. Rose, a…
By Monika Freyman, Manager, Water Program, Ceres This post is the second in a two-part series from Monika Freyman, Manager in Ceres’ water program on hydraulic fracturing, water supplies and energy development. Read part one here. In the morning, we drove from Midland into sparsely populated, brush-dominated country. My colleague Ryan Salmon and I were on our way to…
Posted from Tel Aviv by Sasha Richey, UCCHM Graduate Fellow. This is the third in a series of posts on our Water Diplomacy trip to Israel, Jordan and Palestine. Other posts in the series: 1) Middle East Lost a Dead Sea Amount of Water in 7 Years, by Jay Famiglietti ; and 2) Parallel…
Parallel Worlds: Water Management in Israel and California
Posted by Jay Famiglietti of University of California, Irvine in Water Currents on February 27, 2013 
Posted from Jerusalem by Kate Voss, UCCHM Water Policy Fellow. This is the second in a series of posts on our Water Diplomacy trip to Israel, Jordan and Palestine. Other posts in the series: 1) Middle East Lost a Dead Sea Amount of Water in 7 Years, by Jay Famiglietti ; and 3) Desalinating Holy…
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It is in the nature of human hubris to assume Man Knows Better than Nature. Which is why, perhaps, when it comes to trout, things are a downright mess. Thanks to the British, as the Empire expanded beyond the sunset, so did trout. In 1864, they were introduced to Tasmania, India in 1889 and South…
