Salty threats for drinking water: Rising seas and land-based pollution
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I, for one, salute our new brine overlord.
Think brine...it's time.
Pour me a salty dog while I contemplate this new threat.
Think brine...it's time.
Pour me a salty dog while I contemplate this new threat.
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The acceleration in the trends is the most concerning part of.... all of this. Forget 2100 or even 2050. If it's not a temporary thing, we're looking at busting through a bunch of tipping points in the next decade.
Where things go from there is not encouraging.
Where things go from there is not encouraging.
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We use dirt rather than salt where I live when the roads are icy. Other than inertia, does anyone know what barriers are in place to adopt that more widely?
Maybe existing contracts with capitalist donors who supply the salt? Just spitballing.
Maybe existing contracts with capitalist donors who supply the salt? Just spitballing.
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It's not just salt water.
Sea‑level rise can raise the groundwater level a surprising distance inland, first exacerbating flooding risks from rainfall (the more saturated soil absorbs less), before potentially raising enough to emerge from the ground.
Anthropogenic climate change – the gift that keeps on giving!
Sea‑level rise can raise the groundwater level a surprising distance inland, first exacerbating flooding risks from rainfall (the more saturated soil absorbs less), before potentially raising enough to emerge from the ground.
Anthropogenic climate change – the gift that keeps on giving!
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Over-salting has been something that I see come up quite a bit here in Minnesota. Luckily the state has been pretty good on trying to address this.
https://www.pca.state.mn.us/news-and-stories/smart-salting
https://www.pca.state.mn.us/news-and-stories/smart-salting
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Look on the bright side. if sea level rise accelerates fast enough, Florida could be underwater before the next election.
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When one reads a report like this, one is forced to give a tip of the hat to those Chinese hoaxsters. The sheer detail of the hoax is amazing, and it all appears to be so reasonable, almost as though it were an inevitable consequence as opposed to an attempt to sell us cheap EVs.
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Not sure how dirt would be an alternative to salt for ice. If the goal is traction, then maybe? That's what sand is for, though I thought I've seen stuff about sand not being environmentally great. So maybe dirt is better for this.
The benefit of salt is lowering the freezing point of water to either melt the ice or prevent it from forming in the first place in low temperatures. Magnesium chloride is another option, I've also heard of beet juice being used.
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But .. but .. but salt is natural. How can a natural thing be bad for you?
Maybe we should start having salt parties, and promoting salt caves and salt lamps? /s
Maybe we should start having salt parties, and promoting salt caves and salt lamps? /s
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Is that juice that results from a beating? Something to do with groovy music? Help me out here.
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Car tires have improved a lot in recent decades with respect to longevity and grip. I wonder if better tires mean that less salt can be used on roads. That would be a win for local budgets and watersheds. Maybe not, since the amount of salt has to account for the worst tires that are going to used on that street.
This might also be a case for AI on road works. Have cameras on public works vehicles that actually look at how clear the roads are, and dispense salt as needed. Even if they just used road slopes to adjust the amount of salt used, that would save a lot. My own town has lots of steep hills that need it, but lots of flat streets that need a lot less.
Also, winters are getting milder, so less salt ought to be needed.
This might also be a case for AI on road works. Have cameras on public works vehicles that actually look at how clear the roads are, and dispense salt as needed. Even if they just used road slopes to adjust the amount of salt used, that would save a lot. My own town has lots of steep hills that need it, but lots of flat streets that need a lot less.
Also, winters are getting milder, so less salt ought to be needed.
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I wonder, does a Fall Line affect this as well? In Virginia, our rivers become tidal estuaries east of the Fall Line. If you look at the Potomac downriver of DC or the James downriver of Richmond you'll see what I mean. River depth can vary by several feet over the course of a day. Presumably the salinity of the water flowing downriver would be unchanged, so you'd have some sort of variable boundary conditions?
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Anything that can dissolve in water can lower the freezing point, related to the solute concentration. But everything also has a solubility limit - including good old NaCl. This places a floor on how low the freezing point can go. If winter temperatures regularly fall below that point (such as in Alberta), the only benefit is increased traction which you can also get from sand.
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RickRoyLeonPrisZhoraRacha
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Beet juice-brine is a real application. Just the DOT drive too fast on spreading it, but with the beet additive to the salt, it doesn't bounce on the road as much, protecting cars and overage. Beet juice also as an additive lowers the effective temp since just salt brine along is only good to about 25F. Beet juice addition brings that done to 5F. Adding calcium chloride can lower the effective temp to -10F. Beet juice can stain, and an issue with waterways...increase algae bloom in Spring as the runoff from melting has sugar from the beets.
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I'm sure the EPA will be right on top of this before it becomes a major threat to health and the economy. . .
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Yeah... if we don't hit 2C by 2035 I will be amazed. A bit surprising how quickly the thing is unraveling. Then there is the wrecking ball in the White House...motto "I'll burn down the government... then build a golden palace with the charcoal and ash"
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And there's an orange loon doing everything to make things worse and European nations preparing for war (which greatly exacerbates the problem). We are very screwed.
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production has been at 50% for some time now, and forecasted to continue to decline...
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Not to diminish the article and it's seriousness, but these concerns have always been there and have been an active area of research for a little while now.
I've done a tiny bit of work looking at contamination of groundwater resources from saltwater intrusion in coastal settings, mostly report writing and a modeling exercise. This is something that is terrifying common in coastal aquifers. People pump groundwater from coastal aquifers and it pulls seawater inland which makes for salty water supplies. Add drought effects increasing groundwater demand along with the increase in sea levels, you are effectively increasing the rate of seawater intrusion. That's not getting into storm surges, which will intensify, pushing seawater overland and contaminating freshwater resources from above.
From a soil salinity perspective, a knock on effect for increasing salinity, at least with sodium, changes the charge distribution on clay particles. The clays end up dispersing and clogging pores that make it more difficult for water to flow through. And that's not getting into kicking off heavy metals and other contaminants that were previously sticking to the clay particles. Those end up being released into the groundwater and eventually into someone's tap or some surface water body.
The disheartening thing about all of this is that dialogue is breaking down and people are more willing to point fingers in blame while not coming up with and actually implementing solutions to avert the crises that are coming up. Literally hundreds of millions are going to not have suitable freshwater, or already don't have suitable freshwater, in the coming decades and sadly I am skeptical that it will be properly dealt with.
If I sound salty, it's because I work on an environment adjacent field (hydrogeology) and am witness to this sort of stuff with increasing regularity.
I've done a tiny bit of work looking at contamination of groundwater resources from saltwater intrusion in coastal settings, mostly report writing and a modeling exercise. This is something that is terrifying common in coastal aquifers. People pump groundwater from coastal aquifers and it pulls seawater inland which makes for salty water supplies. Add drought effects increasing groundwater demand along with the increase in sea levels, you are effectively increasing the rate of seawater intrusion. That's not getting into storm surges, which will intensify, pushing seawater overland and contaminating freshwater resources from above.
From a soil salinity perspective, a knock on effect for increasing salinity, at least with sodium, changes the charge distribution on clay particles. The clays end up dispersing and clogging pores that make it more difficult for water to flow through. And that's not getting into kicking off heavy metals and other contaminants that were previously sticking to the clay particles. Those end up being released into the groundwater and eventually into someone's tap or some surface water body.
The disheartening thing about all of this is that dialogue is breaking down and people are more willing to point fingers in blame while not coming up with and actually implementing solutions to avert the crises that are coming up. Literally hundreds of millions are going to not have suitable freshwater, or already don't have suitable freshwater, in the coming decades and sadly I am skeptical that it will be properly dealt with.
If I sound salty, it's because I work on an environment adjacent field (hydrogeology) and am witness to this sort of stuff with increasing regularity.
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I get why you're downvoted since these are kinda legit bad puns, but...
Nah upvote from me
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California uses sand, but we have fairly limited areas that see regular freezing conditions, and most of those don't stay frozen for long periods of time - so it's more about providing traction than melting snow and ice (though the sand does help melt snow/ice faster once the sun is out and/or temperatures increase). Salting roads always seemed like something that should be done extremely sparingly, but I'd guess highway departments see it as a double whammy - helps with the ice in winter, cuts down on vegetation maintenance in the summer; but salting your own land never really seemed like a good long-term approach.
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Combination of factors, most probably not nefarious (unless you count political inertia itself as nefarious). Certainly, a big part is that often as a collective, people just don't care about the environment that much and aren't good at accounting for externalities, but there are legitimate safety issues.
Sand provides extra traction but isn't a good replacement for ice not being there in the first place. It necessitates technique and skill to drive on, and often people lack this, particularly on areas that rarely encounter heavy snow and ice (not really a failing on their part if they don't have a chance to develop those skills). I live in Richmond, VA, which only reliably gets maybe one big snowstorm a year, and it's startling how much it shuts down a major metropolitan area, even coming from only slightly north in Maryland (where I learned to drive). Like, routine for most of the city to close down for half an inch sort of thing. And I'm of the opinion that whatever, let that happen and don't use salt, everything is going to melt by the end of the day anyways and it'll be fine for the most part.
But this year, we had several weeks of on-and-off freezing rain and snow that was already crippling the city and surrounding counties (we lost water pressure across the entire city as the main pumps failed and that resulted in a boil water notice for about a week which spread to the counties), and that might be a little long to essentially ask everyone to hunker down for, especially when people need to drive to the store to get water. Nobody here knows how to drive in icy conditions (again, not a moral failing on their part) whether there's sand or not, so salt became something of a necessity to let people get around.
With all that said, I certainly think whoever makes these decisions has been a little trigger happy, frequently resulting in salt trucks driving around and the following day ends up being 40+ degrees F. But it's also really easy to make that call in hindsight when you know how it turned out despite the forecast calling for 30F and freezing rain all day, and the kids haven't been to school in two weeks because of ice. It's a weird place with weather that is often hard to predict.
I care a lot about this sort of thing, as evidenced but this really long post (native insects are one of my personal passions, which is strongly connected to both waterway health and marginal plant populations, both of which are negatively impacted by salt usage) but I do acknowledge it's always going to be a trade-off with human safety, and it can be a tough pill to swallow that in order for some weeds and fish to survive, some people might get hurt or killed due to road conditions.
On the other hand, that was the issue before human health was at issue. Still, I'm not confident that more nebulous and diffuse health issues will outweigh the thought of acute, horrifying car accidents (or even the struggle of dealing with school closures). Let's just say that US culture has never been particularly good at addressing that sort of thing.
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Puns in a Dr Mole article are probably a noticable percentage of why people subscribe to Ars.
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I wonder what a generation or two from now will do with all those displaced persons from Florida.
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This is exactly why the state of California limits how much farmers can take from the freshwater that flows out from many lakes and streams into the Pacific.
If ever allowed to take too much of that water, we could wind up in a situation with insufficient freshwater outflow to hold back the salty sea from trying to come inland from the other way. The disaster that would come from this Is why the governor can’t give Trump the things that he asks.
But you never hear this side of the story only the part about the endangered fish.
If ever allowed to take too much of that water, we could wind up in a situation with insufficient freshwater outflow to hold back the salty sea from trying to come inland from the other way. The disaster that would come from this Is why the governor can’t give Trump the things that he asks.
But you never hear this side of the story only the part about the endangered fish.
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The Romans were rather careful to make sure that it was somebody else's land that they salted. Usually as the last stage in war of extermination.
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Yeah, I've been saying that for a while. Like a decade or more.
And I'm relatively confident that we're already busting tipping points. One is absolutely certain. The Greenland ice sheet is doomed.
Off the top of my head, I'm not recalling any tipping points showing ANY signs of slowing down. It's pretty much the opposite. And I expect those failures will be increasingly catastrophic for civilization as the next few decades (not centuries) go by.
The thing that people seem to not get (present collective company excepted) is that it won't be climate change ITSELF that does us in. We will do it to ourselves. There are too many people using too many resources in a too inefficient way for the civilization we use in that manner to survive. The irony is that this is a perfectly survivable event, for a much much less numerous, and much less technologically advanced species.
High levels of resource scarcity and population pressure have RELIABLY led to large-scale warfare in our history. Look at the fall of civilization in Syria and other countries more impacted by climate change-induced drought than most. That's the roadmap for SMALL SCALE civilization collapse. The large scale collapses have yet to happen. But based on our global plans and trajectory today, it will happen. And were I a betting man, I expect it will be within the next generation (barring another Disease X that takes out half the population of the planet inside of a year, which in and of itself, may be enough incentive on the parts of some totalitarian states losing control over their people to push the button on all of civilization).
And people wonder why I don't sleep well.
Call me Chicken Little, but the sky IS falling. It's just not falling in a way that alarms enough people to do something about it fast enough to survive the impact when it lands.
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A student I knew from Chicagoland went to Chapel Hill for his PhD. One day there was a 2 inch snowfall, so he drove into the university on deserted streets, and stopped to pick up a hitchhiker. Said hiker turned out to be Chapel Hill's only snow plow driver, who was not prepared to risk his own car driving into work. We all found that story highly entertaining.
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Roads in California are commonly sanded for traction in snow or freezing conditions, though when thoroughly iced up salt or alternative (less damaging to the vegetation and (sometimes) water quality) chemicals are also used.
California has been dealing with seawater intrusion in groundwater basins near the coast for ages. Agricultural water use has caused or promoted a lot of that (some intrusion, very close to the coast, is natural when the freshwater input is strongly seasonal in a dryish climate like California's). Injection of treated municipal wastewater has also been used for decades in places like Orange County CA to create a barrier between the actual fresh groundwater (largely maintained these days by infiltration basins filled with Colorado River water) and the intruding seawater; in a way, when you go to Disneyland, if you use one of the rare drinking fountains rather than buying bottles of someplace else's tap water (you actually thought all that Kirkland or Disney-branded stuff came from springs?), you're drinking recycled pee.
As for the NASA report, read it quickly. It'll certainly be a target for removal in one of the sweeps for "woke" material since it deals with effects of climate change and sea level rise, both of which are myths of course.
EDIT: Yes, massively Ninja'd. Sorry. I did read what I saw in the comments, but didn't refresh often enough.
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A mechanism coming into play where I live: pumping up more ground water near the coast (ao due to more droughts) allows sea water to ingress. Normally the water forms a pressure lid (it kind of pushes back) on the sea water. You pump up non salty water and it is replaced by salty water.
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Yep. My crazy idea is that we should subsidize a whole production that uses clean energy to power desalination, and then create industrial scale salt batteries with the left over salt. Charge up the batteries with the clean energy, then ship out the clean water and batteries to towns across the country.
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Oh it's definitely funny at times (really great people watching to go to the grocery store the day before and see what people are stocking up on for what will realistically be 12 hours of inability to drive max; the most amusing one to me was a cart almost filled with bottles of mountain dew followed by another cart with like a month's worth of groceries), and it's gotten 'better' in recent years with better prep from the city but when I first moved here there were I think 2 plows for the whole city.
And why I'm really insistent that it's not the drivers' fault is when I first got here, I was all 'oh yeah, I can drive in the snow, no problem' but that turned out to be only true with proper road prep and clearing. The plows didn't really know what they were doing (or being charitable, were being extra careful to not damage the road surface), so my drive home was the most harrowing drive I've ever done, with at least an inch of slush on all the roads, and that was me following right behind a plow (to be even more charitable, this did also happen to be probably the most snow we've ever gotten while I've lived here). I stopped trying to be cool after that and honestly just enjoyed that every now and then you get a day without the pressure of needing to be somewhere doing something. I now vastly prefer it to the expectation that people should just continue with their daily lives, though again that's with the understanding that it's one or two days out of the year.
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