Salty threats for drinking water: Rising seas and land-based pollution
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I don't know where you live but dirt isn't going to cut it anywhere there's proper winter.
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Taking Florida for example, is there a saline gradient as you work inwards from the coast?
Seems like some monitoring wells might be a good idea.
Seems like some monitoring wells might be a good idea.
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There's more thaw-refreeze going on in the winter now, and therefor the roads are more icy.
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My region in the northeast US we recently had a town hall meeting on this. Recent tests on municipal water sources determined pollution (primarily from rock salt used in the winter) has caused the saltiness of the water to triple over the past 20 years. It's having unexpected outcomes on durability of the municipal water system that it wasnt designed for, and preliminary projections are the rate of pollution will accelerate even if the munipality stopped using rock salt entirely immediately (although that would help a lot). Many govt people want the municipality to keep using rock salt if only because the citizens expect it and they dont want to deal with complaints with all of the other scares currently hapoening.
The meeting didnt even discuss possible effects on wildlife, we ran out of time.
Wild to think its happening everywhere but it makes sense i suppose. The local experts suggested that the natural water system has been diluting/carrying away the salt used in the past but its ability to dispose of the salt has been surpassed leading to the current situation.
The meeting didnt even discuss possible effects on wildlife, we ran out of time.
Wild to think its happening everywhere but it makes sense i suppose. The local experts suggested that the natural water system has been diluting/carrying away the salt used in the past but its ability to dispose of the salt has been surpassed leading to the current situation.
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I wouldn't say he's doing everything to make the problem worse.
I mean, the tariffs on all that cheap KCl the fertilizer industry imports from Canada will lead to less being spread on farmland.
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This is something impacting Maryland right now. 87% of the state is in drought, and where I work and live is in severe drought status. Driving to and from work all the plants are brown. Even large evergreens are browning and losing their lower leaves, with some small ones dying outright. We just had a little bit of rain (under projections) so grasses have been revived a bit, but what else happened? My car got absolutely coated in road salt from the kicked up spray, in the middle of March. There's no rain so the old brine just lingers, which surely can't be good for life at the road's edges when combined with the drought.
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But if you monitor the wells, you might have a problem. MUCH better off following current Republican orthodoxy and not look at all. That way, you never have a problem.
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You know what would really help this situation? More tax cuts, more double standards, and more freedom to do business or ignore any laws with which you disagree. Oh, and less non-white immigrants (they make the water dirtier).
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Typically the hydraulic gradient is from land to the sea with fresh groundwater discharging into the ocean.
But for salinity, you need to include density effects in where groundwater flows. Because seawater is more dense than freshwater, it sinks below fresh groundwater. The issue that sometimes happens is that a pumping well screen gets placed too close to the transition zone from fresh to saline groundwater and it pulls up seawater. When you increase water demand, you exacerbate that effect. With sea level rise, that fresh/saline transition zone moves closer to the surface and is more likely to encounter wells that were previously 'safe'. The saline gradient you speak of exists in terms of both depth and distance from the shoreline. Add to that multiple aquifer units and you end up with a salinity gradient dependent on your target formation and the hydraulic head in them.
I'm pretty sure Florida, despite the political leaning of the higher-ups, does have a monitoring network of wells. While you wouldn't pin the problem of saline groundwater on climate change, despite the data otherwise, I'm pretty sure that the people who live there still enjoy freshwater coming out of their taps.
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The city of Savannah, GA draws its municipal drinking water from the Savannah River, and that worked great for a hundred years. The problem was that due to sea level rise, at high tide the intake was beginning to draw salt water. That left them with the option of moving the intake further upstream, which would be expensive and might need to be done again and again, or installing expensive and finicky equipment to remove the salt.
I was involved with a third and much better alternative, which was a project to basically build them a 30-acre above-ground swimming pool and an associated pumping station. During times of low tide and low demand the city fills the reservoir, and draws from it during periods of high demand and high tides.
You can see the reservoir here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/WyC4u548uXGeMatg9
I was involved with a third and much better alternative, which was a project to basically build them a 30-acre above-ground swimming pool and an associated pumping station. During times of low tide and low demand the city fills the reservoir, and draws from it during periods of high demand and high tides.
You can see the reservoir here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/WyC4u548uXGeMatg9
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I'm not sure that you want desalination either. My understanding is that these estuaries are naturally brackish, and the article discusses how our own salt additions and rising sea levels are part of a much larger and more complex system.
Also, I think those estuaries are home to marshes that prevent flooding (at least in my neck of the woods), so desalination could potentially just add a whole new set of erosion-related and biodiversity-related problems.
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"Global sea levels rose faster than expected last year, largely due to warming ocean temperatures, a new NASA analysis found."
.06 inches faster to be precise.
.06 inches faster to be precise.
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I was today years old when it finally occurred to me that every winter we do what armies in antiquity considered acts of genocide on our own land.
But...I am not a microbiologist, but in my limited anecdotal observation, salted loam just seems to...actually, if it's had an effect I've yet to see it. I remember being skeptical back in high school that those techniques really worked but I suppose they do outside of subtropical rainforests?
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I don't like sandsalt. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.
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That just means only those with boats get votes. Maybe even one vote per boat, to make up for those that have no boats. The boated votes will surely do what's right by the unboated, they pinky-swear, and when was a rich person ever bad? George Soros excepted.
/s
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Psst... it was freeskier, and it doesn't seem intentional
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If Germany leaves the EU that will be the sign it's about to go off.
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Argh, you beet me to it. (And I finally saw autocorrect in the act of changing a properly spelled word to a different word. It changed beet to be. Until now I've only seen it after posting, and I was sure I had it right the first time but I never caught the actual moment of change. Bad autocorrect! You should only step in if it's not a real word!)
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On the bright side (?), in the three hurricanes that hit me last year (not a joke) the rain was a bigger factor than the storm surge, and I'm on the coast, and I think I was on the surge side of all three. Most people here still don't think it's real
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I'd like to see most roadways covered with solar panels - would eliminate blindness from the sun, lower temps of roads, make headlights less blinding, and there could even be multi-use trails built in. You could even have the utilities elevated and accessible without tearing up the streets. But it would have to be a high-tech, wealthy country to even experiment with something like that. I live in the United States
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Don't worry, we won't leave, we'll be like the Black Knight - "only me toes are wet!"
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It's been ten years since I've realized it too. Nine years since I realized we were going to collectively stick our fingers in our ears and shout "lalalala I can't hear you". My first realization didn't even come from the news, it came from physics, chemistry, and various marine sciences while getting my degree. It's one reason I wish I hadn't gone to school. I learned the full scale of enthalpy of phase change, Lavoisier's principle, the fact that the ocean floor should be pretty warm if there weren't cold water descending upon it, satellite observation and climate/weather models were using planar approximations instead of volumetric measures (meaning 7% more water in air per degree doesn't actually work), and professors who talked about sea ice loss seemed to focus solely on the change in albedo. Ohhh crap. Then Trump got elected and I knew fate was sealed. Not to mention cognitive changes in humans at 500ppm CO² making for worse critical thinking and more stress/anger.
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That's the sort of thing that Big Government would provide, and a Deep State to report the results, which would always be It's Worse Now. None of that is happening in the new regime!
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Deathsentence will soon promote Florida's "new boater" voter law, only those with a boat are allowed to get registered to vote...
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Yep. We are screwed. How quickly and how badly remains to be seen. My prediction? Kinetic interventions will be widespread in much of the US in less than 2 years time. Massive mobilizations by top tier governmental militaries in less than 5 years. You know those "supply chain issues" from Covid? As the Guess Who song said cYou ain't seen nuthin yet".
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Desalination plants? FTW? Isn't this an obvious fix for the humans... the part that matters to other humans.
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I've been driving for a lot of years, mostly in areas that received moderate to heavy snowfall (Central Pennsylvania, Rhode Island in the Pittsburgh area). Back in the day, salt was never used on the roads. They were plowed after the snow stoped coming down and, in the case of icy conditions of forming, cinders were scattered to provide traction.
In those days, most vehicles were rear wheel drive and anybody who routinely had to drive in the winter equipped vehicles with positive traction rear differentials. Most folksAlso equipped their vehicles with snow tires in the fall and carried chains to be used for deep snow or icy conditions. Most vehicles also had enough ground clearance to deal with 6; to 8' inches of snow. Four-wheel-drive vehicles such as jJeeps and pickup trucks were also pretty popular if you had routinely be out on the roads in the wintertime.
Then came front wheel drive vehicles,Despite reams of propaganda and countless advertisements on radio and television, if you are driving a front wheel drive vehicle and lose traction to the front wheels you are in serious trouble. Rearwheel drive vehicles can actually be steered with the throttle in slippery conditions but 2 palm-sizedpatches of rubber on the road that provide traction, braking andsteeringare barely up to the task on dry roads let alone snow and ice.
Enter the so-called 'black roads' polies, mandating that within 12 hours of a snowfall, the roads must be clear down to the asphalt (or concrete). The only way to accomplish this is with many tons of salt-slathered on roadways.. It doesn't work below 20° but that doesn't seem to bother local road maintenance authorities. Once the roads have dried out, driving usuallyproduces a cloud of dusty salt which plays hell with human sinuses!
Mandating all-wheel-drive vehicles in snow country; plowing roads with skids on the bottom of the plows and using cinders or rough-grained sand for traction on ice would be helpfu lbut I'm just cynical enough to believe none of this will ever occur.
In those days, most vehicles were rear wheel drive and anybody who routinely had to drive in the winter equipped vehicles with positive traction rear differentials. Most folksAlso equipped their vehicles with snow tires in the fall and carried chains to be used for deep snow or icy conditions. Most vehicles also had enough ground clearance to deal with 6; to 8' inches of snow. Four-wheel-drive vehicles such as jJeeps and pickup trucks were also pretty popular if you had routinely be out on the roads in the wintertime.
Then came front wheel drive vehicles,Despite reams of propaganda and countless advertisements on radio and television, if you are driving a front wheel drive vehicle and lose traction to the front wheels you are in serious trouble. Rearwheel drive vehicles can actually be steered with the throttle in slippery conditions but 2 palm-sizedpatches of rubber on the road that provide traction, braking andsteeringare barely up to the task on dry roads let alone snow and ice.
Enter the so-called 'black roads' polies, mandating that within 12 hours of a snowfall, the roads must be clear down to the asphalt (or concrete). The only way to accomplish this is with many tons of salt-slathered on roadways.. It doesn't work below 20° but that doesn't seem to bother local road maintenance authorities. Once the roads have dried out, driving usuallyproduces a cloud of dusty salt which plays hell with human sinuses!
Mandating all-wheel-drive vehicles in snow country; plowing roads with skids on the bottom of the plows and using cinders or rough-grained sand for traction on ice would be helpfu lbut I'm just cynical enough to believe none of this will ever occur.
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