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2005 U.S. water use, by percent (source: USGS)

The American population is getting more efficient at using our water supply. We used 410 billion gallons of water per day in 2005, according to new estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey, and this hasn’t changed much since the USGS first started reporting on the topic in 1950, despite a 30 percent increase in population since then.

It’s where our water goes that made me blink: 49 percent is used in the production of electricity and another 31 percent for irrigation in agriculture. The stuff we drink and wash our clothes in and water our lawns with is only a small percentage. The irrigation number isn’t too shocking as agriculture is a huge industry in this country. But I had no idea we were using so much water to turn on our lights. The USGS explains:

Water for thermoelectric power is used in generating electricity with steam-driven turbine generators….Cooling-system type is the primary determinant for the amount of consumptive use relative to withdrawals. Once-through (also known as open-loop) cooling refers to cooling systems in which water is withdrawn from a source, circulated through heat exchangers, and then returned to a surface-water body. Large amounts of water are needed for once-through cooling…Recirculation (also known as closed-loop) cooling refers to cooling systems in which water is withdrawn from a source, circulated through heat exchangers, cooled using ponds or towers, and then recirculated. Subsequent water withdrawals for a recirculation system are used to replace water lost to evaporation, blowdown, drift, and leakage. Smaller amounts of water are withdrawn for recirculation cooling than for once-through cooling.

The amount of our water that goes to power generation has increased over the last 20 years. The industry as a whole has become more efficient in its water use (the average amount of water used in the production of a kilowatt-hour of electricity has declined since 1950), but that is because there are more power plants that use recirculation cooling in which the water is used over and over.

Climate change is likely to change our available water supply over the next century. Greater efficiency can only help in the management of this resource, especially if it becomes more scarce. I’ll make no recommendations about how to change our water management, but just looking at the chart above gives me some ideas about where we should target our efforts.

ASTER image of Morenci open-pit copper mine in southeast Arizona (credit: NASA)

Splatter of colors
Seen high up from outer space
Pretty like a rainbow
–Natalie, age 8, Illinois

Mining doesn’t generally result in a prettier landscape, but it seems when you view the landscape through NASA’s ASTER instrument on the satellite Terra, beauty easily emerges. The image above is the Morenci open-pit copper mine in southeast Arizona. The mine is the largest producer of copper in North America. (The author of the poem is a Girl Scout; NASA partnered with some scouts last year and challenged them to write poems based on the agency’s images.) NASA highlights this and other images from its vast library in the NASA Images blog, which was begun earlier this year.

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The National Science Foundation and the journal Science have held the International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge each year since 2003. They award images in five categories (photographs, illustrations, informational graphics, interactive media and non-interactive media), and the winners each year are truly wonderful. This image, “Autumn color, Estonian bog” by James S. Aber of Emporia State University, won first place in the Photography category in 2005.

With its intricate patterns-within-patterns and striking colors the winning photograph bears a distinct resemblance to a fractal. But scale back to about 150 meters above the ground and the sinuous landforms of Estonia’s Mannikjarve bog begin to reveal themselves. In the peat bogs of east-central and southwestern Estonia, the autumn works a change in the color scheme: Cotton grass turns gold, hardwoods in surrounding forests turn orange and red, and pine trees remain silvery green. The bog water, is sharp contrast, stays an acidic brown. Geologist James Aber of Emporia State University in Kansas recognized the potential beauty in the landscape and used a digital camera in an unusual setting to capture it.

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The Sydney sky this morning (courtesy of flickr user Nico Nelson)

Australia is a strange but beautiful place. The continent is full of odd plants and animals—many of which can kill you, or at least hurt you a lot—in some of the most gorgeous scenery on the planet.

But it got even stranger in Sydney and much of eastern Australia this week as a powerful dust storm has turned the skies red. Much of the continent has been experiencing bad drought conditions; earlier this year, the country outside Melbourne had particularly bad bushfires. Now strong winds over Australia’s interior have kicked up tons of the continent’s famous red soil high into the air where winds carried it to the east. From the Associated Press:

The dust storms stripped valuable topsoil from primary eastern farmlands. At one stage up to 75,000 tonnes of dust per hour was blown across Sydney and dumped in the Pacific Ocean, but the exact amount of dust dumped on Sydney was still being calculated.

“We’ve got a combination of factors which have been building for 10 months already — floods, droughts and strong winds,” said Craig Strong from DustWatch at Griffith University in Queensland.

“Add to these factors the prevailing drought conditions that reduce the vegetation cover and the soil surface is at its most vulnerable to wind erosion.”

Though it may look a little like the end of the world, it’s not much more than a bad spot of weather. Flights have been diverted or canceled, and the local health department has warned people to stay indoors. That said, it’s really creepy, isn’t it?

Could you live without a car? (courtesy of flickr user Caleb Lost)

I walked to work yesterday morning and back home in the evening. The weather was beautiful—sunny and in the 70s. The path is only about two miles long and takes me past some of the most glorious bits of Washington’s architecture. Most days, though, I’ll take Metro to work. Sometimes I take the bus to get around town. And there are Zipcars to rent in case I need to go someplace outside of the range of public transportation or buy something heavy like kitty litter.

It will be two years next month, you see, since I gave up my car.

Could you give up your car? Today is World Car Free Day, an effort that began in 2000 and encourages people to rethink their transportation options. In rural America and much of suburbia, giving up your car is likely not an option. We need to get to work, take the kids to school, pick up groceries. But in many places, giving up your car is easy. It just takes some patience.

Relying on public transportation can leave me waiting for quite a while. That’s why I often carry a book with me to take advantage of the free time. Walking or taking Metro is definitely slower than if I drove. And I occasionally feel guilty asking friends who live in the suburbs and have a car for a ride. But I never have to circle endlessly looking for a parking space, I don’t have a car or insurance payment to worry about, and I get plenty of exercise without ever seeing the inside of a gym.

I know that my father, the ultimate car guy, finds the car-less lifestyle more than a bit odd and could never give his up. I found it pretty easy, though, and not having to deal with traffic—other than dodging the occasional crazy taxi driver—has resulted in far less stress in my life. The reduction in my carbon emissions is just icing on the cake.

So I encourage everyone, in the spirit of World Car Free Day, to look at your own life and think about how you could drive less, even if you couldn’t go completely car free. Walk to the library, take a bus to the mall, bike to the park, or take the train to work. You might like it.

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Humans have a huge impact on our environment, but visualizing the extent of that impact is rarely easy. Artist Chris Jordan, though, has attempted to depict it by creating beautiful images out of specific quantities of ordinary things, such as thirty seconds’ worth of U.S. aluminum can consumption (106,000) or the number of plastic cups used on U.S. airline flights every six hours (one million). Jordan writes on his web site:

[The images visually examine] these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

In his new series Running the Numbers II, Jordan ramps up his numbers to the global scale. The image above is Gyre, 2009, which measures 8 by 11 feet in real life and depicts 2.4 million pieces of plastic, the estimated amount of plastic pollution that enters the world’s oceans every hour. All of the plastic pieces in the image were collected from the Pacific Ocean, home to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. On Jordan’s web site, he zooms in on the images so objects like a comb, toothbrush and hanger can all be seen.

Jordan is one of five artists currently documenting the Pacific’s plastic problem from Midway Island. He writes:

I envision our project not as being a bunch of professional media people tramping around the island with cameras; instead I hope it will be an emotional and spiritual journey by a deeply connected group of artists, to honor the the issues that Midway represents. Maybe it is not too ambitious to hope—if we can fully rise to the occasion—that we might be able to co-create a multi-media work of art that tenderly witnesses this middle point that humanity finds itself at right now. And in the eye of the storm—the apex of the Gyre—perhaps our collaborative efforts can create a container for healing that might have some small effect on the collective choice that is to come.

Image credit: Chris Jordan

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A living root bridge in the Khasi Hills, Meghalaya, India (courtesy of flickr user Seema K K)

In the United States, the lowly ficus sits quietly in the corners of our homes and offices, providing some much needed greenery and oxygen to our indoor spaces. But in the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya, where Ficus elastica are large, native outdoor trees that live near water, the local people have been using the ficus’s roots as bridges for generations.

These aren’t trees that have fallen naturally over streams, though, which are commonly used as bridges in other places. Instead, the people train the trees’ roots to grow over the streams, guiding them over a period of 20 or so years into the shapes of paths and handrails until they have a bridge strong enough to carry many people at once. And as the tree grows, so does the bridge, gaining in strength over time, as the magazine Geographical noted earlier this year:

Once the roots have been trained across the stream bed, they anchor in the soil of the opposite bank, providing the foundations for a living bridge. Usually, several roots are threaded together for strength, while others provide handrails and supports for longer spans. Flat stones from the stream bed are used to fill gaps in the bridge floor and, in time, these are engulfed by woody growth and become part of the fabric of the bridge itself.

A root bridge takes around 20 years to become fully functional. Once complete, however, it will probably last for several hundred years and, unlike its non-living counterparts, will actually increase in strength with age.

Known in the Khasi language as jingkieng deingjri (‘bridge of the rubber tree’), the bridges may be anywhere from ten to 30 metres in span. Unlike most artificial structures, they are able to withstand the high level of soil erosion brought about by monsoon rains and, being living material rather than dead wood, are resistant to the ravages of termites.

There is even a double-decker bridge supposedly capable of handling the weight of 50 people at a time.

On May 29, 2006, hot mud began to erupt within the city of Sidoarjo, in eastern Java, Indonesia. The mud volcano (also known as the Lapindo mud flow, or Lusi) hasn’t stopped since then, spewing thousands of cubic feet of material every day. Nearly 2,000 acres of land have been covered with mud, burying roads, homes and factories and displacing almost 60,000 people so far. In the image above, you can see the mud contained by levees built to hold back the flow. (In this false-color image, vegetation appears red and mud is colored gray.)

Lusi’s origin was debated at first, and geologists wondered if an earthquake two days earlier 155 miles away might have triggered the event. But they determined that the eruption was actually triggered by oil and gas drilling just 650 feet from where the mud began to flow. The Indonesians, however, have ruled the incident a natural disaster and halted their criminal probe earlier this month.

NASA image created by Jesse Allen, using data from NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and the U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team.

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