This chimp may look innocent, but he may harbor any of dozens of diseases that infect humans. Photo by AfrikaForce

Anyone who has read a Richard Preston book, such as The Hot Zone or Panic in Level 4, knows the danger of tampering with wildlife. The story usually goes something like this: Intrepid explorers venture into a dark, bat infested cave in the heart of East Africa, only to encounter something unseen and living, which takes up residence in their bodies. Unknowingly infected, the happy travelers jump on a plane back to Europe or the States, spreading their deadly pathogen willy-nilly to every human they encounter upon the way. Those people, in turn, bring the novel virus or bacterium back home to strangers and loved ones alike. Before the world knows it, a pandemic has arrived.

This scenario may sound like fiction, but it’s exactly what infectious disease experts fear most. Most emerging infectious diseases in humans have indeed arisen from animals–think swine and bird flu (poultry and wild birds), SARS (unknown animals in Chinese markets), Ebola (probably bats) and HIV (non-human primates). Therefore, experts prioritize the task of figuring out which animals in which regions of the world are most prone to delivering the latest novel pathogen to hapless humanity.

With this in mind, researchers at Harvard University, the University of Granada and the University of Valencia set out to develop a new strategy for predicting the risk and rise of new diseases transmitted from animals before they happen, describing their efforts in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

To narrow the hypothetical disease search down, the team chose to focus on non-human primates. Because monkeys and great apes are so closely related to us, their potential for developing and transmitting a pathogen suited to the human body is greater than the equivalent risk from animals such as birds or pigs. As a general rule, the more related species are, the greater the chances they can share a disease. The researchers gathered data from 140 species of primates. They overlaid that information with more than 6,000 infection records from those various primate species, representing 300 different pathogens, including viruses, bacteria, parasitic worms, protozoa, insects and fungus. This way, they could visualize which pathogens infect which species and where.

Like mapping links between who-knows-who in a social network, primates that shared pathogens were connected. This meant that the more pathogens an animal shared with other species, the more centrally located it was on the tangled web of the disease diagram.    

A diagram depicting shared parasites among primate species. Each bubble represents one species, with lines connecting species by shared pathogens. The larger the bubble, the more emerging infectious diseases that species harbors. The dark blue bubbles represent the top 10 primates that share the most emerging infectious diseases with humans. Photo by Gomez et al., via PNAS

From studying these charts, a few commonalities emerged. Animals at the center of the diagram tended to be those that lived in dense social groups and also covered a wide geographic range (yes, similar to humans). These species also tended to harbor parasites that are known to infect humans, including more pathogens identified as emerging infectious diseases. In other words, those species that occurred in the center of the diagram are the best positioned to kick off the next pandemic or horrific infectious disease, and thus should be the ones that experts should keep the closest watch on.

Such animals could qualify as “superspreaders,” or those that receive and transmit pathogens very often to other species.”The identification of species that behave as superspreaders is crucial for developing surveillance protocols and interventions aimed at preventing future disease emergence in human populations,” the authors write.

Apes appeared in the heart of the disease diagram and are among the species we should be most worried about, which is not surprising considering that diseases such as malaria and HIV first emerged from these animals. On the other hand, some non-ape primates, including baboons and vervet monkeys, also popped up in the center of the diagram and turn out to harbor many human emerging disease parasites. 

Currently, our ability to predict where, when and how new emerging infectious diseases might arise is “remarkably weak,” they continue, but if we can identify those sources before they become a problem we could prevent a potential health disaster on a regional or even global scale. This new approach for identifying animal risks, the authors write, could also be applied to other wildlife groups, such as rodents, bats, livestock and carnivores. “Our findings suggest that centrality may help to detect risks that might otherwise go unnoticed, and thus to predict disease emergence in advance of outbreaks—an important goal for stemming future zoonotic disease risks,” they conclude. 

Drought and an increased demand for water have stressed the Colorado River, which flows nearly 1,500 miles through seven states and Mexico. Photo by Flickr user Alex E. Proimos

When Alexandra Cousteau, granddaughter of Jacques, recently went to Mexico to explore the southern terminus of the Colorado River, she found mud, sand and dust where water once raged. The expedition was videotaped for a short film (viewable below) produced in conjunction with Cousteau’s nonprofit, Blue Legacy, which raises awareness about water issues. The video was called Death of a River: The Colorado River Delta.

That title, it turns out, is an apt one: Today, the conservation organization American Rivers released its annual ranking of America’s most endangered rivers, and the Colorado topped the list.

The group cites outdated water management as the main malady attacking the Colorado’s health. “A century of water management policies and practices that have promoted wasteful water use have put the river at a critical crossroads,” a statement (PDF) released by the organization reads. “Demand on the river’s water now exceeds its supply, leaving the river so over-tapped that it no longer flows to the sea.”

At one time, the river emptied into the Gulf of California, between mainland Mexico and the Baja Peninsula. In fact, this river mouth can still be found on maps, including Google’s, because it’s supposed to be there. But a recent study (PDF) conducted by the Bureau of Reclamation (a division of the U.S. Department of Interior) determined that the entire river and its tributaries are siphoned off to meet the drinking, bathing and toilet-flushing needs of 40 million Americans throughout seven states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. It also irrigates 5.5 million acres of land and helps meet the electrical-power appetite of much of the West through hydro-power facilities. Nearly two dozen Native American tribes depend on it, and it’s the centerpiece of 11 national parks, most famously the Grand Canyon.

“Growing demands on the Colorado River system, coupled with the potential for reduced supplies due to climate change may put water users and resources relying on the river at risk of prolonged water shortages in the future,” the study authors write. “Ultimately,” they add, “the Study [sic] is a call to action.”

Low water levels at the Colorado River’s Hoover Dam, on the Arizona-Nevada border. Photo by Flickr user Remon Rijper

But what action is needed? Water conservation, water reuse and water augmentation–replacing water drawn from wells–the authors say. Specifically, landowners and municipalities must boost their agricultural, municipal and industrial water conservation agendas, as well as improve their energy water-use efficiency. Solutions for the most challenging regions include finding ways to import water, reuse waste water and desalinize ocean and brackish water.

Scientists acknowledge some solutions they’ve looked into are easier said than done and that not all are viable in every region. For instance, options like importing water to Southern California via submarine pipelines, water bags and icebergs (PDF), along with watershed management techniques like weather modification (aka cloud-seeding) are a bit pie-in-the-sky.

The Colorado isn’t the only endangered river, by far. Georgia’s Flint River, the San Saba River in Texas, Wisconsin’s Little Plover River, the Catawba River in the Carolinas and Minnesota’s Boundary Waters were all also red-flagged by American Rivers this year.

The challenge for all of these rivers, including the Colorado, only grows in the future. Climate-change-induced drought is working against them. American Rivers notes (PDF) that changes to climate are expected to reduce the Colorado River’s flow by as much as 10 to 30 percent by the year 2050. It could leave yet more sand and mud behind, making parts of the American West and Southwest even more parched.

Wetlands, such as this marsh above, buffer communities against flooding. Photo by Flickr user daryl_mitchell

In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy last fall, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo joked to President Barack Obama that New York “has a 100-year flood every two years now.” On the heels of flooding from 2011′s Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee, it certainly seemed that way. Given that climate change has sparked multiple major storms and raised sea levels, and that urban and agricultural development have impeded our natural flood-management systems, chronic flooding could be here to stay.

Wetlands, which include swamps, lagoons, marshes and mangroves, help mitigate the problem by trapping floodwaters. “Historically, wetlands in Indiana and other Midwestern states were great at intercepting large runoff events and slowing down the flows,” environmental engineer Meghna Babbar-Sebens of Oregon State University said in a recent statement. ”With increases in runoff, what was once thought to be a 100-year flood event is now happening more often.”

One key problem is that most of our wetlands no longer exist. By the time the North American Wetlands Conservation Act (PDF) was passed in 1989, more than half of the wetlands in the United States had been paved over or filled in. In some states, the losses are much greater: California has lost 91 percent of its wetlands, and Indiana, 85 percent. In recent years, scientists have been honing the art of wetlands restoration, and now a recent study published in the journal Ecological Engineering by scientists at Oregon State University is helping to make new wetlands easier to plan and design.

Scientists are using an Indiana watershed to study how wetlands can be created or restored to help stem the effects of climate change. Photo by Flickr user Davitydave

The research focused on Eagle Creek Watershed, ten miles north of Indianapolis, and identified nearly 3,000 potential sites where wetlands could be restored or created to capture runoff. Through modeling, the scientists discovered that a little wetland goes a long way. “These potential wetlands cover only 1.5% of the entire watershed area, but capture runoff from 29% (almost a third) of the watershed area,” the study authors wrote.

Their next step was to begin developing a web-based design system to allow farmers, agencies and others to identify areas optimal for new or restored wetlands and to collaborate in designing them. The recently launched system, called Wrestore, uses Eagle Creek as a test-piece.

A new web tool analyzes different components of a watershed; Indiana’s Eagle Creek Watershed steam network is pictured here. Map courtesy of Wrestore

The tool has a variety of functions: It helps identify a region’s rivers and streams, divides watersheds into smaller sub-watersheds and shows where runoff is likely to collect—places conducive to building wetlands. If a city wants to reduce flooding in its watershed, the site’s interactive visualization engine displays various conservation options and allows groups of city planners to collaborate on the design of new wetlands.

“Users can look at various scenarios of implementing practices in their fields or watershed, test their effectiveness via the underlying hydrologic and water quality models, and then give feedback to an ‘interactive optimization’ tool for creating better designs,” Babbar-Sebens, lead author of the study and the lead scientist on the web tool, told Surprising Science.

It provides an easy way for landowners to tackle such environmental challenges. “The reason we used a web-based design system is because it gives people the flexibility to try and solve their problems of flooding or water quality from their homes,” Babbar-Sebens said.

As the spring flood season approaches and environmental degradation continues throughout the nation, a new tool for mitigating wetland loss with targeted, minimal wetland gain is certainly a timely innovation. Babbar-Sebens and her team have been testing it out on Eagle Creek Watershed and will be fine-tuning it throughout the spring. ”There is a lot of interest in the watershed community for something like this,” she said.

Landslides can be both sudden and devastating to people living in the shadows of mountains. This one, which slid in 2006 in the Philippine province of Southern Leyte, killed more than 1000 people. Image via U.S. Marine Corps/Raymond D. Petersen III

Imagine a 100-million-ton mass of rock, soil, mud and trees sliding off a mountain 30 miles from a major city, and no one knowing that it happened until days later.

Such was the case after Typhoon Morakot hit Taiwan in 2009, dumping around 100 inches of rain in the southern regions of the island over the course of 24 hours. Known as the Xiaolin landslide, named for the village it hit and obliterated, the thick carpet of debris it left behind smothered 400 people and clogged a nearby river. Though only an hour’s drive outside of the crowded city of Tainan, officials didn’t know about the landslide for two days.

“To be that close and not know that something catastrophic had happened is just amazing,” notes Colin Stark, a geomorphologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO). But now, “seismology allows us to report on such events in real time.” Research published last week in Science by Stark and lead author Göran Ekström, an LDEO seismologist, show that scientists armed with data from the Global Seismographic Network can not only pinpoint where a large landslide occurred, but also can reveal how fast the churning mass traveled, how long it ran out, its orientation within the landscape and how much material moved.

All this can be done remotely, without visiting the landslide. Moreover, it can be done quickly, in stark contrast to the more tedious methods typically used to estimate characteristics of a landslide. In the past, scientists had to wait for reports of a landslide to filter back to them, and once alerted they searched for photos and satellite images of the slide. If they could, they coordinated trips to the landslide tongue—well after the event—to estimate the mass of disturbed rock.

But the new method puts landslide detection and characterization in line with how scientists currently track earthquakes from afar. Just as seismometers tremble when energy from a strong quake hits their locations, allowing seismologists to determine the precise location, depth and direction of rupture as well as the amount of energy released during the quake and the type of fault tectonic plates slid along, these same seismometers move during a landslide. The shaking isn’t the frenetic twitches typically seen in seismographs of earthquakes or explosions—the signatures are long and sinuous.

Ekström and colleagues have spent many years combing through reams of seismic data in search of unusual signatures that can’t be traced to typical earthquakes. Previously, their work on seismic signatures in tectonically dead Greenland classified a new type of shaking, called “glacial earthquakes.” But the genesis of the recent research on landslides can be traced back to Typhoon Morakot.

After the storm hit Taiwan, Ekström noticed something strange on global seismic charts—their wiggles indicated that a cluster of events, each with shaking exceeding a magnitude 5 earthquake, had occurred somewhere on the island. “Initially, no other agency had detected or located the four events that we had found, so it seemed very likely that we had detected something special,” Ekström explained.  A few days later, news reports of landslides—including the monster that swept through Xiaolin—began to pour in, confirming what the scientists hypothesized about the events’ source.

A view within the debris of Taiwan’s Xiaolin landslide. Photo by David Petley

Equipped with seismic data from the Xiaolin landslide, the authors developed a computer algorithm to search for telltale seismic signatures of large landslides in past records and as they happened. After collecting information from the 29 largest landslides that occurred around the world between 1980 and 2012, Ekström and Stark began to deconstruct seismic wave energies and amplitudes to learn more about each.

The guiding principles behind their method can be traced to Newton’s third law of motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. “For instance, when rock falls off a mountainside, the peak is suddenly lighter,” explains Sid Perkins of ScienceNOW. The mountain “springs upward and away from the falling rock, generating initial ground motions that reveal the size of the landslide as well as its direction of travel.”

Looking across all their analyses, Ekström and Stark find that, regardless of whether the landslide was triggered by an erupting volcano or a scarp saturated with rainwater, landslide characteristics are governed by the length of the mountainside that broke off to start the landslide. This consistency hints at hitherto elusive broad principles that guide landslide behavior, which will help scientists to better assess future hazards and risk from failing slopes.

For those who study landslides, the paper is seminal for another reason. David Petley, a professor at the U.K.’s Durham University, writes in his blog that “we now have a technique that allows large landslides to be automatically detected. Given that these tend to occur in very remote areas, they often go unreported.”

Petley, who studies landslide dynamics, wrote a companion piece to Ekström’s and Stark’s paper, also published in Science, that provides a bit of perspective to the new results. He notes that “the technique currently overdetects large, fast landslides by an order of magnitude, requiring considerable work, for example, with satellite imagery to filter out the false-positive events. Nevertheless, it opens the way to a true global catalog of rock avalanches that will advance understanding of the dynamics of high mountain areas. It may also enable the real-time detection of large, valley-blocking landslides, providing a warning system for vulnerable communities downstream.”

Pre- and post-views of landlsides that slid in 2010 on Siachen Glacier in northern Pakistan. Image via Science/Ekström and Stark

The insight gained by Ekström’s and Stark’s method is readily seen in a striking example of a landslide that occurred in northern Pakistan in 2010. Satellite images of debris flow, which is spread on the flanks of the Siachen Glacier, suggest that the event was triggered by one, maybe two episodes of slope failure. However, Ekström and Stark show that the debris slid from seven large landslides over the course of a few days.

“People rarely see large landslides happen; they typically only see the aftereffects,” Ekström notes. But thanks to him and his co-author, scientists around the world can now quickly get a first glance.

Dead locusts litter Israel’s Negev desert after being sprayed with pesticide on Wednesday. Photo: Rachel Nuwer

Locusts have plagued farmers for millennia. According to the Book of Exodus, around 1400 B.C. the Egyptians experienced an exceptionally unfortunate encounter with these ravenous pests when they struck as the eighth Biblical plague. As Exodus describes, “They covered the face of the whole land, so that the land was darkened, and they ate all the plants in the land and all the fruit of the trees that the hail had left. Not a green thing remained, neither tree nor plant of the field, through all the land of Egypt.”

Locusts attacks still occur today, as farmers in Sudan and Egypt well know. Now, farmers in Israel can also join this unfortunate group. Earlier today, a swarm of locusts arrived in Israel from Egypt, just in time for the Jewish Passover holiday which commemorates Jews’ escape from Egyptian slavery following the ten Biblical plagues. “The correlation with the Bible is interesting in terms of timing, since the eighth plague happened sometime before the Exodus,” said Hendrik Bruins, a researcher in the Department of Man in the Desert at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. “Now we need to wait for the plague of darkness,” he joked.

With the help of the Lord, Moses delivers a plague of locusts upon the Egyptians, seen in the photo of a Bible page above. Photo via New York Public Library, Renaissance and medieval manuscripts collection

While the timing is uncanny, researchers point out that–at least in this case–locust plagues are a normal ecological phenomenon rather than a form of divine punishment. “Hate to break it to you, but I don’t think there’s any religious significance at all to insects in the desert, even a lot of them, and even if it seems reminiscent of a certain Biblically described incident,” said Jeremy Benstein, deputy director of the Heschel Center for Sustainability in Tel Aviv.

In this region of the world, locusts swarm every 10 to 15 years. No one knows why they stick to that particular cycle, and predicting the phenomena remains challenging for researchers. In this case, an unusually rainy winter led to excessive vegetation, supporting a boom in locust populations along the Egyptian-Sudanese border. As in past swarms, once the insect population devours all of the local vegetation, the hungry herbivores take flight in search of new feeding grounds. Locusts–which is just a term for the 10 to 15 species of grasshoppers that swarm–can travel over 90 miles in a single day, carried by the wind. In the plagues of 1987 and 1988 (PDF)–a notoriously bad period for locusts–some of the befuddled insects even managed to wash up on Caribbean shores after an epic flight from West Africa.

When grasshoppers switch from a sedentary, solo lifestyle to a swarming lifestyle, they undergo a series of physical, behavioral and neurological changes. According to Amir Ayali, chair of the Department of Zoology at Tel Aviv University, this shift is one of the most extreme cases of behavioral plasticity found in nature. Before swarming, locusts morph from their normal tan or green coloring to a bright black, yellow or red exoskeleton. Females begin laying eggs in unison  which then hatch in synch and fuel the swarm. In this way, a collection of 1 million insects can increase by orders of magnitude to 1 billion in a matter of months.

From there, they take flight, though the exact trigger remains unknown. Labs in Israel and beyond are working on understanding the mathematics of locust swarming and the neurological shifts behind the behaviors that make swarming possible. ”If we could identify some key factors that are responsible for this change, we could maybe find an antidote or something that could prevent the factors that transform innocent grasshoppers from Mr. Hyde to Dr. Jekyll,” Ayali said. “We’re revealing the secrets one by one, but there’s still so much more to find out.”

A swarm of locusts will consume any green vegetation in its path–even toxic plants–and can decimate a farmer’s field almost as soon as it descends. In one day, the mass of insects can munch its way through the equivalent amount of food as 15 million people consume in the same time period, with billions of insects covering an area up to the size of Cairo, Africa’s largest city. As such, at their worst locust swarms can impact some 20 percent of the planet’s human population through both direct and indirect damages they cause. In North Africa, the last so-called mega-swarm invaded in 2004, while this current swarm consists of a measly 30 to 120 million insects. 

Estimating the costs exacted by locusts swarms remains a challenge. While locust swarms reportedly cause more monetary damage than any other pest, it’s hard to put an exact figure on the problem. Totaling the true crost depends on the size of the swarm and where the winds carry it. To be as accurate as possible, costs of pesticides, food provided to local populations in lieu of wrecked crops, monitoring costs and other indirect effects must be taken into account. No one has yet estimated the cost of this current swarm, though the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) allots $10 million per year solely to maintain and expand current monitoring operations.

Locusts covering a bush during the 2004 swarm near the Red Sea cost in Israel. Photo: Amir Ayali

This morning, the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture sprayed pesticides on an area of around 1,000 hectares near the Egyptian border. To quell a plague of locusts, pest managers have to hit the insects while they’re still settled on the ground for the night and before they take flight at dawn. So far, pesticide spraying is the only option for defeating the bugs, but this exacts environmental tolls. Other invertebrates, some of them beneficial, will also shrivel under the pesticide’s deadly effects, and there’s a chance that birds and other insectivores may eat the poisoned insect corpses and become ill themselves. Researchers are working on ways to develop fungus or viruses that specifically attack locusts, but many of those efforts are still in initial investigative stages. However, the company Green Muscle developed a commercially available fungus that affects only locusts.

Even better, however, would be a way to stop a swarm from taking flight from the very beginning. But this requires constant monitoring of locust-prone areas in remote corners of the desert, which is not always possible. And since the insects typically originate from Egypt or Sudan, politics sometimes get in the way of quashing the swarm before it takes flight. “We really want to find them before they swarm, as wingless nymphs on the ground,” Ayali said. “Once you miss that window, your chances of combating them are poor and you’re obliged to spray around like crazy and hope you catch them on the ground.”

In this case, Egypt and Israel reportedly did not manage to coordinate locust-fighting efforts to the best of their abilities. “If you ask me, this is a trans-boundary story,” said Alon Tal, a professor of public policy at Ben-Gurion University. “This is not a significant enemy–with an arial approach you can nip locusts in the bud–but the Egyptian government didn’t take advantage of the fact that they have quite a sophisticated air force and scientific community just to the north.”

Ayali agrees that the situation could have been handled better. He also sees locusts as a chance to foster regional collaboration. Birders and ornithologists from Israel, Jordan and Palestine often cooperate in monitoring migratory avian species, for example, so theoretically locusts could likewise foster efforts. “Maybe scientists should work to bridge the gaps in the region,” Ayali said. “We could take the chance of this little locust plague and together make sure we’re better prepared for the next.”

For now, the Israelis have smote the swarm, but Keith Cressman, a senior locust forecasting office at the FAO’s office in Rome warns that there is still a moderate risk that a few more small populations of young adults may be hiding out in the desert. This means new swarms could potentially form later this week in northeast Egypt and Israel’s Negev region. His organization warned Israel, Egypt and Jordan this morning of the threat, and Jordan mobilized its own locust team, just in case.

For those who do come across the insects (but only the non-pesticide covered ones!), Israeli chefs suggest trying them out for taste. Locusts, it turns out, are the only insects that are kosher to eat. According to the news organization Haaretz, they taste like “tiny chicken wings,” though they make an equally mean stew. “You could actually run out very early before they started spraying and collect your breakfast,” Ayali said. “I’m told they’re very tasty fried in a skillet, but I’ve never tried them myself.”

A swarm of locusts descends upon Israel. Photo by Amir Ayali

Sign up for our free newsletter to receive the best stories from Smithsonian.com each week.

Hydraulic fracturing for natural gas may increase the risk of earthquake, a new study finds. Photo via Wikimedia Commons/Richard Bartz

Hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a. “fracking”) recovery techniques for oil and natural gas are a controversial business. The practice—in which a mix of water, sand and chemicals is injected deep into bedrock at high pressure to create fractures, allowing gas and oil to flow upward—was developed in the late 1990s and has become more and more common across the United States over the past few years, opening up geologic areas such as the Bakken Shale in North Dakota and the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, New York and West Virginia to dramatic increases in gas production.

On the one hand, proponents argue that hydraulic fracturing increases the amount of energy that can be economically produced in the United States, making oil and gas cheaper and reducing our dependency on foreign imports. Opponents, though, note that fracking causes dangerous chemicals to leach into groundwater, releases known carcinogens into the air and increases our contribution to climate change.

Alongside these observed problems, though, a different sort of worry has emerged: the idea that hydraulic fracturing can trigger an earthquake. Scientists have known for decades that injecting fluids into the earth could cause quakes, but we were uncertain just how much of an increase widespread fracking might cause. This past spring, USGS scientists decided that the recent dramatic increase in the number of small quakes in the United States is “almost certainly manmade,” but were unable to conclusively tie it to this particular activity.

Now, the evidence is starting to pile up. A study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds a correlation between dozens of small earthquakes in Texas’ Barnett Shale region—the site of intensive hydraulic fracturing activity—and the locations of injection wells used to dispose of the wastes of this process. ”You can’t prove that any one earthquake was caused by an injection well,” says Cliff Frohlich, the University of Texas geologist who conducted the study, “but it’s obvious that wells are enhancing the probability that earthquakes will occur.”

To come to the finding, Frohlich analyzed two years’ worth of data from a network of extremely sensitive seismographs that was installed in the region in 2009. He discovered dozens of small earthquakes that had not been previously reported—and found that all 24 of the quakes for which he was able to establish an accurate epicenter occurred within two miles of an injection well.

One important distinction is that these wells were the disposal sites for waste fluids that had already used to fracture rock, rather than the original wells used to extract the gas. Although the actual gas extraction wells cause many microearthquakes by their very nature (they literally crack the bedrock to release gas and oil), these are far too small to be felt by humans or cause any damage. The fluid disposal wells, though, are more likely to cause earthquakes of significance, because they are sites of injection for a longer duration over time.

Image via Wikimedia Commons/Mike Norton

The waste fluids may trigger earthquakes by acting as lubricants in pre-existing faults deep underground, allowing masses of rock to slide past each other more easily and relieve built-up pressure. All of the wells that Frohlich found correlated with quakes were home to high rates of injection (more than 150,000 barrels of fluid per month). However, there were other wells in the area with similar rates of injection that did not correlate with increased seismic activity. ”It might be that an injection can only trigger an earthquake if injected fluids reach and relieve friction on a nearby fault that is already ready to slip,” explains Frohlich.

The good news is that all of these earthquakes were still relatively small, with magnitudes of less than 3.0 on the Richter scale, unlikely to cause any damage on the surface. Seismologists, though, are concerned that fluid injection could cause larger quakes if the fluid migrates into older, deeper rock formations beyond the local shale, which are home to larger fault lines. A number of earthquakes that occurred in Ohio last year, including one with a 4.0 magnitude, were linked to disposal of fracking fluids.

Frohlich notes that much more research is needed to help us understand exactly why some wells are more likely to cause earthquakes than others. For those already concerned about fracking, though, his new research adds another major concern to a growing list.

Anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are increasing ocean acidity at an alarming pace. A new study offers hope that some species may survive as a result of rapid adaptation. Photo courtesy of Flickr user JamesDPhotography.

Since the Industrial Revolution, ocean acidity has risen by 30 percent as a direct result of fossil-fuel burning and deforestation. And within the last 50 years, human industry has caused the world’s oceans to experience a sharp increase in acidity that rivals levels seen when ancient carbon cycles triggered mass extinctions, which took out more than 90 percent of the oceans’ species and more than 75 percent of terrestrial species.

Rising ocean acidity is now considered to be just as much of a formidable threat to the health of Earth’s environment as the atmospheric climate changes brought on by pumping out greenhouse gases. Scientists are now trying to understand what that means for the future survival of marine and terrestrial organisms.

In June, ScienceNOW reported that out of the 35 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide released annually through fossil fuel use, one-third of those emissions diffuse into the surface layer of the ocean. The effects those emissions will have on the biosphere is sobering, as rising ocean acidity will completely upset the balance of marine life in the world’s oceans and will subsequently affect humans and animals who benefit from the oceans’ food resources.

The damage to marine life is due in large part to the fact that higher acidity dissolves naturally-occurring calcium carbonate that many marine species–including plankton, sea urchins, shellfish and coral–use to construct their shells and external skeletons. Studies conducted off Arctic regions have shown that the combination of melting sea ice, atmospheric carbon dioxide and subsequently hotter, CO2-saturated surface waters has led to the undersaturation of calcium carbonate in ocean waters. The reduction in the amount of calcium carbonate in the ocean spells out disaster for the organisms that rely on those nutrients to build their protective shells and body structures.

The link between ocean acidity and calcium carbonate is a directly inverse relationship, which allows scientists to use the oceans’ calcium carbonate saturation levels to measure just how acidic the waters are. In a study by the University of Hawaii at Manoa published earlier this year, researchers calculated that the level of calcium carbonate saturation in the world’s oceans has fallen faster in the last 200 years than has been seen in the last 21,000 years–signaling an extraordinary rise in ocean acidity to levels higher than would ever occur naturally.

Coral reef ecosystems, such as Palmyra Atoll, located 1,000 miles south of Hawaii, will dwindle as adequately nutrient-rich waters will be diminished to five percent of the world’s oceans. Photo courtesy of Flickr user USFWS Pacific.

The authors of the study continued on to say that currently only 50 percent of the world’s ocean waters are saturated with enough calcium carbonate to support coral reef growth and maintenance, but by 2100, that proportion is expected to drop to a mere five percent, putting most of the world’s beautiful and diverse coral reef habitats in danger.

In the face of so much mounting and discouraging evidence that the oceans are on a trajectory toward irreparable marine life damage, a new study offers hope that certain species may be able to adapt quick enough to keep pace with the changing make-up of Earth’s waters.

In a study published last week in the journal Nature Climate Change, researchers from the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies found that baby clownfish (Amphiprion melanopus) are able to cope with increased acidity if their parents also lived in higher acidic water, a remarkable finding after a study conducted last year on another clownfish species (Amphiprion percula) suggested acidic waters reduced the fish’s sense of smell, making it likely for the fish to mistakenly swim toward predators.

But the new study will require further research to determine whether or not the adaptive abilities of the clownfish are also present in more environmentally-sensitive marine species.

While the news that at least some baby fish may be able to adapt to changes provides optimism, there is still much to learn about the process. It is unclear through what mechanism clownfish are able to pass along this trait to their offspring so quickly, evolutionarily speaking. Organisms capable of generation-to-generation adaptations could have an advantage in the coming decades, as anthropogenic emissions push Earth to non-natural extremes and place new stresses on the biosphere.

One of the hundreds of trees lost to Friday night’s derecho (courtesy of flickr user woodleywonderworks).

The Washington, DC area has seen its fair share of destructive storms–we get hurricanes, tornadoes and even the rare snowpocalypse. But on Friday night we got hit with another type of storm–one that I’d never heard of–called a derecho (pronounced ”deh-REY-cho”).

The storm swept through the area late Friday evening, bringing an incredible amount of thunder and lightning, winds up to 80 mph and sheets of rain. By morning, hundreds of trees had been blown down, millions were left without power and several people were dead. Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram had all been taken down by Amazon server outages caused by the storm. The Smithsonian Folklife Festival had to shut down for a day to clean up the mess. We were all left wondering, “what in the world had happened?”

Friday’s derecho originated near Chicago and raced southeast towards Washington, DC (courtesy of NOAA)

The stifling heat wave that we’d been suffering through, which had stretched from the Midwest through the mid-Atlantic to the Southeastern United States and brought temperatures in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, was to blame for the fast-moving band of thunderstorms. The Capitol Weather Gang explains:

As this stifling air bubbled northward, clashing with the weather front draped from near Chicago to just north of D.C., thunderstorms erupted. They grew in coverage and intensity as they raced southeast, powered by the roaring upper level winds and fueled by the record-setting heat and oppressive humidity in their path.

The coverage and availability of this heat energy was vast, sustaining the storms on their 600 mile northwest to southeast traverse. The storms continually ingested the hot, humid air and expelled it in violent downdrafts – crashing into the ground at high speeds and spreading out, sometimes accelerating further.

Though unfamiliar to those of us here on the East Coast, derechos occur more commonly in the Corn Belt, which runs from Mississippi into the Ohio Valley, but even there they are relatively infrequent. They can wreak their havoc at any time of the year but are most likely to occur during May, June and July. Derechos get their starts in curved bands of thunderstorms called “bow echoes,” which are perhaps better known for their ability to spawn tornadoes. But instead of rotating cells of winds, derechos blow and travel in straight lines.

Derechos have a long history here in the United States. The term “derecho” was coined by University of Iowa physics professor Gustavus Hinrichs in an 1888 paper in the American Meteorological Journal in which he illustrated the path of such a storm that had crossed over Iowa on July 31, 1877. The storm’s straight path across the state gave Hinrichs the inspiration for the storm’s name–”derecho” means “straight” in Spanish. But path alone isn’t quite enough for a storm to qualify as a derecho; wind speeds must also reach a minimum of 57 mph.

Given that derechos are associated with warmer weather, could they become more common as the United States heats up due to climate change? Tom Kines, senior meteorologist at AccuWeather.com, told the Guardian: “If indeed we are seeing global warming, then it will certainly increase the risk of something like this happening again.”

Some scientists have suggested the weight of water in the lake created by the Zipingpu Dam in China triggered the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (courtesy of flickr user TaylorMiles)

Update on April 16, 2012: A new study by the U.S. Geological Survey to be presented Wednesday indicates that the “remarkable increase” in earthquakes in the continental United States that rate greater than 3 on the Richter Magnitude Scale is “almost certainly manmade.” The authors note that although it is unclear whether new hydrofracturing (a.k.a. fracking) techniques to recover natural gas are to blame, “the increase in seismicity coincides with the injection of wastewater in deep disposal wells.” —Joseph Stromberg

On Saturday, a magnitude 4.0 earthquake shook eastern Ohio, a week after a smaller temblor in the region worried officials so badly that they halted work on a fluid-injection well in Youngstown.

This wasn’t the first case in which the injection of fluids into the earth has been linked with earthquakes. In April, for example, the English seaside resort town of Blackpool shook from a magnitude 2.3 earthquake, one of several quakes now known to have been caused by hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking,” which involves pumping large amounts of fluid into the ground to release natural gas) in the area. The link has been known for decades—a series of quakes in the Denver, Colorado, region in 1967 was caused by fluid injection.

The phenomenon is so well known that Arthur McGarr, a geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California, has developed a method to predict the highest magnitude of an earthquake that could be produced by hydraulic fracturing, carbon sequestration, geothermal power generation or any method that involves injecting fluid deep into the earth. Though the method doesn’t allow scientists to predict the likelihood that such a quake would occur, it will let engineers better plan for worst-case scenarios, McGarr told Nature.

Hydraulic fracturing naturally causes small tremors, but bigger quakes may occur if the liquid migrates beyond the area where it’s injected. The New York Times reports:

The larger earthquakes near Blackpool were thought to be caused the same way that quakes could be set off from disposal wells—by migration of the fluid into rock formations below the shale. Seismologists say that these deeper, older rocks, collectively referred to as the “basement,” are littered with faults that, although under stress, have reached equilibrium over hundreds of millions of years.

“There are plenty of faults,” said Leonardo Seeber, a seismologist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “Conservatively, one should assume that no matter where you drill, the basement is going to have faults that could rupture.”

Earthquakes caused by fracking are of particular interest right now because the number of wells, particularly in the United States, has been skyrocketing (along with reports of nasty environmental consequences, such as flammable water). But this is only one way that humans are causing the earth to quake. Mining (taking weight from the earth), creating lakes with dams (adding weight on top of the earth) and extracting oil and gas from the earth have caused at least 200 earthquakes in the last 160 years, Columbia University earthquake scientist Christian Klose told Popular Science.

Klose’s research has demonstrated that coal mining was responsible for Australia’s most damaging earthquake in recent memory, the magnitude 5.6 Newcastle earthquake of 1989. And in 2009, he was one of several scientists who suggested that the magnitude 7.9 earthquake in China’s Sichuan Province in 2008, which left 80,000 dead, could have have been triggered by the Zipingpu Dam. (That wasn’t the first time a dam was linked to an earthquake—Hoover Dam shook frequently as Lake Mead filled.)

It can be easy to look at our planet and think we’re too small to really do much damage, but the damage we can do can have severe consequences for ourselves. ”In the past, people never thought that human activity could have such a big impact,” Klose told Wired, “but it can.”

The Islamic Empire (top) and Baghdad (bottom), circa 770-910 AD. Images courtesy of the journal Weather

How do scientists reconstruct the climate of the past? They often turn to ice cores or growth rings from trees or deep-sea corals. But a new study gleans a wealth of weather intel from a largely untapped source: old documents.

Researchers from Spain scoured manuscripts from 9th- and 10th-century Baghdad, in modern-day Iraq, for references to the weather. Baghdad, where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers meet, was at that time the new and bustling capital of the vast Islamic Empire, which stretched from India to the Atlantic Ocean. Much was written about the city and why it was chosen as the capital, including its population size, agricultural potential and climate.

In the 10 analyzed texts, most of which give exhaustive political histories of the region, the researchers found 55 meteorological citations, many of which were referring to the same event. The study points out that although the social and religious content of the documents is probably biased, the historians weren’t likely to fabricate an off-hand mention of a drought, hail storm or solar eclipse.

The researchers were shocked by the number of references to cold periods in this notoriously hot and dry region. They identified 14 chilly periods in all: five in winter, two in spring, one in summer and two that denoted cold weather for a whole year. Some of the descriptions specified snowfalls, ice and frozen rivers.

For instance, an entry from December 23, 908, noted when “four fingers of snow accumulated on the roofs,” and another, on November 25, 1007, that the snow reached somewhere between 30 and 50 inches. One particularly odd event was in July 920, when it was too cold for people to sleep on their roofs, as they did on most summer nights. This temperature drop could have been caused by a volcanic eruption the previous year, the researchers speculate.

In any case, it seems safe to say that the weather of that Islamic Golden Age was much more variable than it is today. The only time that snow has hit Baghdad in modern memory was on January 11, 2008, melting as soon as it hit the ground.

Images from Domínguez- Castro et al., ”How useful could Arabic documentary sources be for reconstructing past climate?” appearing in Weather, published by Wiley.

The Caldera of Santorini is today a ring of islands in the Aegean. Photograph by Flickr member EmreKanik.

A caldera is a very large crater that forms after a very large volcanic eruption. The eruption is explosive and ejects a lot of material. Most of what comes out of the volcano is blown a great distance into the atmosphere and over a large area, so a huge volume of the local landscape is simply gone—thus the large crater.

Many people know about the Yellowstone Caldera because it is the location of a lot of interesting ongoing thermal and volcanic activity, some of which has been in the news lately, and it has even been featured in a recent epic disaster fiction film called 2012 in which the re-explosion of the Yellowstone Caldera is only one problem of many faced by the film’s heroes and heroines.

Somewhat less known but still famous is the Santorini Caldera. It is in the Aegean Sea, in Greece, near the island of Crete. Santorini blew about 1,600 B.C. and seems to have caused the end of the Minoan Civilization; the edge of the volcano’s caldera is now a ring of islands. By comparison with Yellowstone, Santorini is small. The Yellowstone Caldera is about 55 by 72 kilometers in size, while Santorini’s is about 7 by 12 kilometers.

Santorini is the subject of an investigation just reported in the journal Nature. The volcano has blown numerous times in the past. The investigation shows that the last explosion, the one at about 1,600 B.C., was preceded by a stunningly short period of build-up of underground magma. It seems as though the magma, enough for a very large eruption, moved into the zone beneath the caldera in two or more events less than 100 years prior to the explosion, with a significant amount of the magma moving into place just a few years before the blast.

If we go back a decade or so, volcanologists thought that the buildup to a major eruption like this would take more time, perhaps many centuries. Various lines of evidence have caused scientists to start to think that the buildup to blast-time might be shorter than that, and the present report is an excellent direct measurement of the timing which seems to confirm these growing suspicions.

How can scientists tell that it happened this way? Using volcano forensics, of course! Here’s the basic idea:

When shocking events happen, such as the intrusion of a bunch of magma into an area of rock, or associated seismic activities, the various chemicals in magma become “zoned.” Waves of energy passing through the molten rock cause bands of specific types of chemicals to form. During a period of no shocks, if the temperature is high enough, these bands dissipate. Some bands dissipate in very short periods of time, others over very long periods of time. If at any point the magma is released in a volcanic explosion such as the type that forms a caldera, the material suddenly cools and the state of the bands, dissipated to a certain degree, is preserved. Later, sometimes thousands of years later, geologists can study the rocks and estimate the amount of time between shock event and the volcanic explosion by measuring how much dissipation has occurred. It is a sort of magma-based clock.

In the case of Santorini, everything seems to have happened well within a century. This formation of a magma chamber large enough to cause a major eruption occurred after an 18,000-year-long dormant period. So, if we were thinking that the long period of time between caldera eruptions was characterized by a slow and steady buildup of magma, we were probably wrong. The real significance of this is that we can’t look at a caldera that is known to have erupted multiple times and rule out a future eruption simply on the basis of a low level of current activity. And of course, we are left wondering what initiates this rather rapid recharge of the magma underneath a caldera.

It’s a good thing that scientists are studying and monitoring these volcanoes!

Druitt, T., Costa, F., Deloule, E., Dungan, M., & Scaillet, B. (2012). Decadal to monthly timescales of magma transfer and reservoir growth at a caldera volcano Nature, 482 (7383), 77-80 DOI: 10.1038/nature10706

Cats and earthquakes were popular subjects this year. (image courtesy of flickr user 37prime)

It’s that time of year when journalists and bloggers put together their reviews of the past 12 months. But the list below is unlike any other. You may have noticed that Surprising Science tends to cover science a bit differently than other blogs and publications do. Combine that with a diverse (and, of course, fabulous) readership, and you’ve got an interesting list of most-read stories for the year. (If you’re looking for a more traditional 2011 retrospective, we recommend the lists from Discover, Scientific American and Science.)

#10 Earthquake in Washington, D.C.: On August 23, the Smithsonian offices, along with a good portion of the Northeast, shook due to a magnitude 5.8 earthquake in Mineral, Virginia. In a weird coincidence, I had been researching earthquakes in unexpected places when the quake took place, and so people in my office jokingly blamed me for the incident.

#9 14 Fun Facts About Chickens: Following the earthquake and Hurricane Irene, we took a break from natural disasters with weird chicken facts. My favorite? That a female bird can eject the sperm of a rooster if she decides she doesn’t want his chicks.

#8 The Science Behind the Japanese Earthquake: On the morning of March 11, we woke up to news of a powerful earthquake off the coast of Japan. That shaking, however, would soon be overshadowed by the devastating tsunami and nuclear disaster that followed.

#7 Examining Telecommuting the Scientific Way: Unfortunately this post did not have the result I’d hoped, and I’m still not allowed to telecommute. (But if anyone has been successful in using these arguments, please let us know in the comments below.)

#6 The Secret Lives of Feral Cats: After a study in which scientists tracked feral kitties, we weighed in on the question of whether it was better to trap the cats, spay/neuter them and release them back into the wild or, as some advocate, euthanize any found. The blog came down on the side of catch and release, but we discovered many readers who have a serious hatred for these felines.

#5 The Curious World of Zombie Science: We examined an interesting trend in science, the study of human zombies, including computer models of the spread of the zombie disease, potential ways zombies could be created and how math could save you from a zombie attack.

#4 The Myth of the Frozen Jeans: Levi’s and the New York Times claimed that freezing your jeans would kill the germs that make them smell. Scientists who study bacteria disagree.

#3 Five Historic Female Mathematicians You Should Know: Our list, a companion to a top ten list of historic female scientists, included the creator of the world’s first computer program and a contemporary of Albert Einstein.

#2 Life Without Left Turns: A study that found that intersections constructed to eliminate dangerous left turns were more efficient than traditional intersections added to my convictions that getting rid of left turns would be a good thing. But not all my readers agreed.

And #1 The Glow-in-The-Dark Kitty: A story about Mayo Clinic researchers who created a fluorescing cat as part of their studies on feline HIV, which they hope would lead to insight on human HIV and AIDS, sparked a debate in the comments about the ethics of the research.

A map of extreme weather events in the United States, January to October 2011 (credit: NRDC)

The United States may not have seen anything like Hurricane Katrina this year, but it’s been a bad year for extreme weather events nonetheless. High heat, drought and wildfires in Texas. Flooding in the Midwest and Northeast. Deadly tornadoes. The Natural Resources Defense Council found nearly 3,000 broken weather records throughout the United States, and that count went only through the end of October. A map compiling the locations of these events is above; an interactive version that lets you visualize the events through time can be found on the NRDC website.

Scientists are reluctant to say any specific weather event is the result of climate change (weather and climate are, after all, not interchangeable). But they do largely agree that extreme weather events, such as the ones we’ve seen this year, will become more and more common because of climate change.

And those events come with a price. NRDC provided an estimate of $53 billion associated with the events in the group’s tally–if climate change contributed even a fraction to these events, we’re looking at potentially billions of dollars lost. And a country climbing out of a recession could surely use that money elsewhere.

What will humankind do about this? Well, 15,000 delegates are currently meeting in Durban, South Africa, to discuss just that, but little is expected to come out of the meeting. Christie Aschwanden at The Last Word on Nothing thinks part of the reason for current inaction is how we look at the whole situation:

The problem can seem insurmountable, and it’s possible that it is—not because there is no solution, but because we are incapable of choosing it. There’s a one-word solution to the climate (and energy) problem staring us in the face—restraint. Simply consuming less. It’s too late to talk about carbon emissions. With a population catapulting toward nine billion or more, it’s time to focus on carbon omissions.

Restraint is not the easy, no-need-to-change-a-thing solution that people keep pretending we will find. But it’s a reality-based solution that will happen whether we want it to or not. We can plan for it and make the hard choices ourselves, or we can wait for them to be forced upon us. Using less doesn’t necessarily mean lowering our quality of life, it means redefining how we measure our wellbeing.

I’m not sure “restraint” will be any easier of a message to sell to a global population, and particularly a U.S. population, than “reducing carbon emissions,” but it’s an interesting way to look at the problem. If the old ideas aren’t working, we need new ones.

So here’s the challenge: How should we go about addressing climate change? Are global agreements worth the time, energy and carbon emissions it takes to make them? Do small changes made in your own home make any difference? If you were in charge, what would you do? I’m really hoping that one of you has a good answer (tell us in the comments below), because these extreme weather events are taking a toll and humans need to do something to prevent the worst from happening.

A nearly dry horseshoe lake at Brazos Bend State Park, Texas (photo by Sarah Zielinski)

“What is this, rain? I was promised a drought,” I joked to a friend as we drove through ten seconds of drizzle this weekend in Houston. I needn’t have worried–the rest of the day was sunny and warm. It was a pleasant diversion from the cooler temperatures of a mid-Atlantic fall, but in Texas, warm and dry has become a real worry. The entire state is in the midst of an exceptionally bad drought, as you’ve probably read in the news. But what does that look like on the ground?

In Houston itself, there isn’t too much evidence of the drought. Sure, the lawns and plants may look a little brown in places, and there’s the occasional sign notifying people of watering restrictions. But if your vision of drought is wildfires or the Sahara Desert, you’re bound to be disappointed.

An alligator suns itself on the edge of Elm Lake (photo by Sarah Zielinski)

Even outside the city things don’t seem so bad at first glance. It’s a bit dusty, and the cows are munching on bits of grass in rather brown fields. When we started walking around Brazos Bend State Park, however, the drought quickly made itself known. One horseshoe lake had water and made a nice home for several alligators, but the other was full of dead vegetation and had only one tiny little patch of water, barely suitable for small birds looking for a drink. The park’s largest body of water, Elm Lake, which appears as a large patch of blue on a map of hiking trails, had shrunk around the edges and the shallow water was often covered in a nasty green algae. On the bright side, the alligators clustered near the water along the edge of the lake, which made them easy for us to find.

The effects of a drought come in ways we often don’t expect. Migrating birds will be fewer in Texas this year, and they’ll have fewer places to stop. That will give hunters fewer opportunities to pursue their hobby. Migrating monarch butterflies will find it more difficult to cross the state on their way to Mexico; they’ve already had a bad year, dealing with the drought in the spring and a cooler summer around the Great Lakes. Cattle ranchers have sold off parts of their herds; with grass and water scarce, and importing hay from other states expensive, they can’t afford to keep so many animals. The price of beef, and other foodstuffs, will likely rise. Even drought-tolerant plants are not immune from a drought this bad. Power generation, heavily dependent on water, could take a hit. Communities are opposing new projects that would use up the little water available.

The last 12 months have been the driest since record-keeping began in 1895. And a few inches of rain will do little to alleviate the precipitation backlog (26 inches in Central Texas). But Texas, even the United States, isn’t alone in this problem. Climate change will likely bring more droughts around the world. As I reported last year in Smithsonian:

Other regions—the Mediterranean, southern Africa, parts of South America and Asia—also face fresh-water shortages, perhaps outright crises. In the Andes Mountains of South America, glaciers are melting so quickly that millions of people in Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador are expected to lose a major source of fresh water by 2020. In southwestern Australia, which is in the midst of its worst drought in 750 years, fresh water is so scarce the city of Perth is building plants to remove the salt from seawater. More than one billion people around the world now live in water-stressed regions, according to the World Health Organization, a number that is expected to double by 2050, when an estimated nine billion people will inhabit the planet.

“There’s not enough fresh water to handle nine billion people at current consumption levels,” says Patricia Mulroy, a board member of the Colorado-based Water Research Foundation, which promotes the development of safe, affordable drinking water worldwide. People need a “fundamental, cultural attitude change about water supply in the Southwest,” she adds. “It’s not abundant, it’s not reliable, it’s not going to always be there.”

Water, either too much or too little, is one of the biggest problems we can blame on climate change. At least in places like the United States and Australia, there is enough money for a drought to be no more than an inconvenience. In other parts of the world, however, water problems are going to end in human deaths.

A storm rolls in above Bangkok (courtesy of flickr user Dennis Wong)

I’m kind of obsessed with weather. There’s a practical side to this—I don’t own a car and getting caught in a rain or snow storm can be a problem—but I also a have quite a bit of awe for the power of nature. I once lived on the edge of Tornado Alley, and I’ve experienced ice storms, torrential downpours, high winds, blizzards and hurricanes. I always keep an eye on the weather and have a plan when something bad is predicted or formulate a plan when something bad starts to happen. But I’m realizing that I may be in the minority.

Back in January, a huge ice storm headed towards Washington, D.C. A local weather blog recommended people be off the streets by 4 p.m., but few heeded the warning. They headed out as the ice started to fall and it took some people eight hours or more to get home. If they made it at all.

When a hurricane heads towards land, some people call the local television station to ask if they should be boarding up their houses. And they get angry when the forecast turns out to be wrong, which can easily happen even with all of our modern prediction tools. That is understandable when a storm turns out to be worse than expected, but it can also be dangerous when it goes the other way. How many people who evacuated from New York City prior to Hurricane Irene, which didn’t bring as much flooding to the area as had been predicted, will heed future warnings?

The death toll from the May tornado in Joplin, Missouri was so high, in part, because people didn’t heed the warnings. There had been so many false alarms in the past that they didn’t think it necessary to take shelter.

In August, five people died and dozens were injured when an outdoor stage collapsed at the Indiana State Fair due to high winds. The sky had turned black as a storm rolled in and but few people left.

We have more weather information than at any time in our past. NOAA’s predictions of the paths of hurricanes get better and better. We get warnings that a tornado is headed our way with plenty of time to take shelter. We can learn to make our own predictions from the plethora of raw data available online and even have instant access to weather information on our computers and smartphones.

But that hasn’t made us immune to the dangerous and costly effects of weather. A study earlier this year [PDF] estimated the cost of weather in the United States may be as high as $485 billion a year. “It’s clear that our economy isn’t weatherproof,” says NCAR scientist Jeffrey Lazo, the study’s lead author. “Even routine changes in the weather can add up to substantial impacts on the U.S. economy.”

I don’t mean to imply that all those costs are avoidable, but surely there’s room for improvement, especially when it comes to personal safety. I worry that many people have become so dependent on technology and the forecasts and advice from others (whether professional meteorologists or friends and family) that we don’t look at the skies anymore. The wind kicks up, the skies turn black, and we don’t do anything. We don’t take shelter. We don’t change our schedules. We don’t slow our cars. And it’s no wonder when bad things happen.

What’s to be done? Well, take the time to educate yourself about the warning signs of severe weather. Learn about hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or any other type of weather event that may strike your area before the threat becomes real. Heed the warnings of professionals, even if they later turn out to be false. Take shelter when the weather takes a turn for the worse. Go home early, before a storm begins. And err on the side of caution. Because it’s better to waste a little time and money than end up dead.