Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from June, 2018

What's your county's water use? Regional patterns in US water withdrawals

Water use in the United States in 2015 was estimated to be about 322 billion gallons per day (Bgal/d), which was 9 percent less than in 2010. The 2015 estimates put total withdrawals at the lowest level since before 1970, following the same overall trend of decreasing total withdrawals observed from 2005 to 2010. www.water.usgs.gov www.epa.gov

Worlds of Rivers

Few lands are untouched by the power of a stream. Even the driest regions can hold traces of ephemeral river runs. Rivers create their own channels, gathering rain or snow and ice melt that runs off the land and bearing it downhill by force of gravity to the sea. The journey makes rivers the unsurpassed carvers of Earth, cutting canyons and valleys and depositing sediments as fertile soils. By nature, they wind—the most efficient way for water to travel. Rivers and lakes store less than half a percent of Earths fresh water, but they are the lifelines of human history—where people settled, farmed, traded, built cities, explored. A new chapter in river mapping reveals the true intricacies of river flow as headwaters feed consecutively larger tributaries that surrender their waters to the mainstream. Most major rivers are now yoked with dams and reservoirs, but on this map, rivers run free. Ten Longest River s 1. Nile (Africa) 4,400 miles 2. Amazon (South America) 4,150 miles 3. Y

The world in 50 million years

Much of Northern Europe submerged under the sea, with a depth averaging 60 meters due to melted ice caps (if greenhouse effect dominates) Mediterranean sea completely locked into a lake by mountain ranges brought by the collision of the African and European landmass. Volcanoes present in some islands in the lake. Bedrock exposed in Antarctica after ice caps melted, creating thousands of islands and fjords An Arabian peninsula surrounded by Andes-scale mountain ranges, providing rivers and vegetation East Africa fully separates from the main landmass of Africa, drifting into the northeast Volcanic islands emerge in the Indian Ocean due to subduction of the Antarctic plate under Indo-Australian plate Australia collides into Asian landmass, creating islands, mountains, and volcanoes

The Countries Banning Plastic Bags, 2018

National-level regulation to ban/limit the use of plastic bags and styrofoam. Via statista.com   Ocean debris worldwide kills at least 1 million seabirds and 100,000 mammals each year. Annually approximately 500 billion plastic bags are used worldwide(USA: 380 billion / year). More than one million bags are used every minute. Ireland reduces plastic bag consumption by 90% (over 1 billion bags) between 2001 and 2011 by imposing a plastic bag tax of 37-cent. In France plastic bag tax has raised 10 million euros. Bag ban in China has saved 1 million tons of oil. Prior to the bag ban, Australians were using 7 billion bags a year.