    Pollution Science 101- California



                       Edited by: Michael Ross
               Website: MonsantoInvestigation.com

                 Release date: November 1st, 2019

    Open Edit {Check back for more updated content}

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The following article is part 2 of Pollution Science 101 - Cancer Investigated ( California)

PollutionScience101CancerInvestigated.Blogspot.com

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Pollution Science 101 - Mexico

PollutionScience101Mexico.Blogspot.com

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Pollution Science 101 - Texas

PollutionScience101Texas.Blogspot.com

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Section 1: Current News

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15,000 Perfectly Circular Holes Appeared on the Ocean Floor off the California Coast

Feb 29, 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhYrN3AnZ_0

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The World Is Hemorrhaging Methane, and Now We Can See Where

January 13, 2016

The Aliso Canyon breach is accidental, but thousands of other sites are flaring off methane intentionally, as waste.

WATCH: Infrared footage captured by Earthworks shows the release of methane gas from a leak at the Aliso Canyon Underground Storage Field in Los Angeles County.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2016/01/150113-methane-aliso-canyon-leak-noaa-flaring-map/

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The Blob (Pacific Ocean)

The Blob was a large mass of relatively warm water in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of North America. It was first detected in late 2013 and continued to spread throughout 2014 and 2015.[1][2]It is also known as a marine heatwave.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blob_(Pacific_Ocean)

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‘Blob’ of warm Pacific water is back — could be trouble for marine life and weather

Sep. 10, 2019

https://www.sfchronicle.com/environment/article/Blob-of-warm-Pacific-water-is-back-14426451.php

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A giant mass of warm water off the Pacific Coast could rival ‘the blob’ of 2014-15

9/2/2019

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-09-05/second-blob-may-be-coming

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A Changing Ocean: Warm Pacific Temperatures Could Signal a Return of 'The Blob'

Sep 13, 2019

The marine heat wave that persisted for three years had dramatic effects on ocean life and fishing along the California coastline

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/A-Changing-Ocean-Warm-Pacific-Temperatures-Could-Signal-a-Return-of-The-Blob-560167301.html

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How A Marine Heatwave Brought Dozens Of Warm-Water Species to Northern California

A mosaic of animals observed in central/northern California during the 2014-2016 marine heatwave.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/priyashukla/2019/03/12/how-a-marine-heatwave-brought-dozens-of-warm-water-species-to-northern-california/#59c5a6da374d

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The ocean is cooking off the Southern California coast. Here's why.

Aug 10, 2018

https://mashable.com/article/record-ocean-heat-southern-california/

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El Niño ocean warming 'causing havoc' for seals off California coast

Unprecedented numbers of dead or starving seals washing ashore as Pacific Ocean warms, with experts saying they are ‘preparing for the worst’ in 2016

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/30/el-nino-ocean-warming-seals-california-pacific

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A Marine Heat Wave Intensifies, with Risks for Wildlife, Hurricanes and California Wildfires

Sep 18, 2019

The last Pacific ‘warm blob’ killed seals and birds, shut down crab fisheries and also affected the land, worsening drought and wildfire risk in California.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17092019/marine-heat-wave-climate-change-pacific-coast-fish-wildlife-california-wildfires-hurricanes-hawaii

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Lack of Sardines Leaves California Sea Lions Starving

May 9, 2014

https://oceana.org/blog/lack-sardines-leaves-california-sea-lions-starving

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The Ripple Effect of Overfishing Our Oceans

There is a crisis occurring in the Bay Area: Since 2013, there has been a dramatic increase in sea lion strandings due to starvation.

April 21, 2015

https://earthjustice.org/blog/2015-april/the-ripple-effect-of-overfishing-our-oceans

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New report reveals high levels of fecal matter in water at beaches

Jul. 25, 2019 - 5:04 - Report reveals California beaches to be among the dirtiest; addiction medicine specialist Dr. Drew Pinsky weighs in on the dangers.

https://video.foxnews.com/v/6064118983001/#sp=show-clips

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‘What diluted sewage looks like.’ American River in Sacramento tainted with feces

September 12, 2019

https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/sacramento-tipping-point/article234440612.html

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More than half of U.S. beaches have fecal bacteria, environmentalists say

August 8, 2019

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/americas-dirtiest-beaches-half-of-u-s-beaches-have-e-coli-fecal-bacteria-environmentalists-say/

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2018 is only halfway over, but a troubling climate change trend is already apparent

Jul 18, 2018

https://mashable.com/2018/07/18/global-warming-trend-nasa-charts/

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NASA: California Drought Causing Valley Land to Sink

Aug. 19, 2015

https://www.nasa.gov/jpl/nasa-california-drought-causing-valley-land-to-sink

As Californians continue pumping groundwater in response to the historic drought, the California Department of Water Resources today released a new NASA report showing land in the San Joaquin Valley is sinking faster than ever before, nearly 2 inches (5 centimeters) per month in some locations.

The report, Progress Report: Subsidence in the Central Valley, California, prepared for DWR by researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, is available at:

http://water.ca.gov/groundwater/docs/NASA_REPORT.pdf

“Because of increased pumping, groundwater levels are reaching record lows -- up to 100 feet (30 meters) lower than previous records,” said Department of Water Resources Director Mark Cowin. “As extensive groundwater pumping continues, the land is sinking more rapidly and this puts nearby infrastructure at greater risk of costly damage.”

Sinking land, known as subsidence, has occurred for decades in California because of excessive groundwater pumping during drought conditions, but the new NASA data show the sinking is happening faster, putting infrastructure on the surface at growing risk of damage.

NASA obtained the subsidence data by comparing satellite images of Earth’s surface over time. Over the last few years, interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) observations from satellite and aircraft platforms have been used to produce maps of subsidence with approximately centimeter-level accuracy. For this study, JPL researchers analyzed satellite data from Japan's PALSAR (2006 to 2010); and Canada's Radarsat-2 (May 2014 to January 2015), and then produced subsidence maps for those periods. High-resolution InSAR data were also acquired along the California Aqueduct by NASA's Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) (2013 to 2015) to identify and quantify new, highly localized areas of accelerated subsidence along the aqueduct that occurred in 2014. The California Aqueduct is a system of canals, pipelines and tunnels that carries water collected from the Sierra Nevada Mountains and Northern and Central California valleys to Southern California.

Using multiple scenes acquired by these systems, the JPL researchers were able to produce time histories of subsidence at selected locations, as well as profiles showing how subsidence varies over space and time.

"This study represents an unprecedented use of multiple satellites and aircraft to map subsidence in California and address a practical problem we're all facing," said JPL research scientist and report co-author Tom Farr. "We’re pleased to supply the California DWR with information they can use to better manage California’s groundwater. It’s like the old saying: 'you can’t manage what you don’t measure'."

Land near Corcoran in the Tulare basin sank 13 inches (33 centimeters) in just eight months -- about 1.6 inches (4 centimeters) per month. One area in the Sacramento Valley was sinking approximately half-an-inch (1.3 centimeters) per month, faster than previous measurements.

Using the UAVSAR data, NASA also found areas near the California Aqueduct sank up to 12.5 inches (32 centimeters), with 8 inches (20 centimeters) of that occurring in just four months of 2014.

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California Sinking Faster Than Thought, Aquifers Could Permanently Shrink

August 21, 2015

https://www.livescience.com/51943-california-sinking-faster-than-thought.html

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Central California is sinking at an accelerated rate

Aug. 30, 2018

https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2018/08/30/Central-California-is-sinking-at-an-accelerated-rate/8561535646537/

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Water pumping causing Valley to sink, could trigger earthquakes

July 14, 2014

https://abc30.com/news/water-pumping-causing-valley-to-sink-could-trigger-earthquakes/186183/

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Central Valley groundwater depletion raises Sierra and may trigger small earthquakes

May 14, 2014

https://news.berkeley.edu/2014/05/14/central-valley-groundwater-depletion-raises-sierra-and-may-trigger-small-earthquakes/

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California’s water crisis has put farmers in a race to the bottom

Jun 3, 2019

https://grist.org/article/californias-water-crisis-has-put-farmers-in-a-race-to-the-bottom/

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Land Subsidence from Groundwater Use in California

April 2014

https://waterfdn.org/wp-content/uploads/PDF/1397858037-SubsidenceShortReportFINAL(00248030xA1C15).pdf

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GPS Imaging of vertical land motion in California and Nevada: Implications for Sierra Nevada uplift

12 October 2016

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016JB013458

Abstract

We introduce Global Positioning System (GPS) Imaging, a new technique for robust estimation of the vertical velocity field of the Earth's surface, and apply it to the Sierra Nevada Mountain range in the western United States. Starting with vertical position time series from Global Positioning System (GPS) stations, we first estimate vertical velocities using the MIDAS robust trend estimator, which is insensitive to undocumented steps, outliers, seasonality, and heteroscedasticity. Using the Delaunay triangulation of station locations, we then apply a weighted median spatial filter to remove velocity outliers and enhance signals common to multiple stations. Finally, we interpolate the data using weighted median estimation on a grid. The resulting velocity field is temporally and spatially robust and edges in the field remain sharp. Results from data spanning 5–20 years show that the Sierra Nevada is the most rapid and extensive uplift feature in the western United States, rising up to 2 mm/yr along most of the range. The uplift is juxtaposed against domains of subsidence attributable to groundwater withdrawal in California's Central Valley. The uplift boundary is consistently stationary, although uplift is faster over the 2011–2016 period of drought. Uplift patterns are consistent with groundwater extraction and concomitant elastic bedrock uplift, plus slower background tectonic uplift. A discontinuity in the velocity field across the southeastern edge of the Sierra Nevada reveals a contrast in lithospheric strength, suggesting a relationship between late Cenozoic uplift of the southern Sierra Nevada and evolution of the southern Walker Lane.

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Study Finds San Francisco Bay is Sinking Faster than Expected

April 30, 2019

Sea-Level Rise isn’t the Only Factor in Bay Area’s Future Flooding Risk

https://www.enr.com/articles/46789-study-finds-san-francisco-bay-is-sinking-faster-than-expected?v=preview

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ASU study: Parts of Valley sinking

Aug. 12, 2015

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/2015/08/12/asu-study-parts-metro-phoenix-area-sinking/31557593/

Parts of metro Phoenix are sinking by about three-quarters of an inch a year, according to new research by Arizona State University.

The culprit: large amounts of groundwater pumped years ago.

Scientists at ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration say ground-elevation levels in Apache Junction are seeing the fastest drop. Sun City West, Peoria and the north Valley are also descending.

People shouldn’t panic, said ASU researcher Megan Miller, co-author of the study published recently in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

“If anything this is slow. It’s rarely going to cause anything you would associate with a disaster. It can be a nuisance but has the potential to cause costly structural damages, and is something to keep an eye on,” she said.

The study didn’t examine whether people in the affected areas are seeing an impact.

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The ambitious plan to stop the ground from sinking

1st December 2017

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171130-the-ambitious-plan-to-stop-the-ground-from-sinking

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Oklahoma’s earthquake threat now equals California’s because of man-made temblors, USGS says

March 1, 2017

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-oklahome-earthquake-20170301-story.html

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Every three minutes, an earthquake strikes in California

April 18, 2019

A comprehensive new catalog that factors in "hidden" quakes is helping scientists better understand the planet's tectonic activity.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/04/every-three-minutes-one-earthquake-california/

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Induced seismicity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_seismicity

Induced seismicity refers to typically minor earthquakes and tremors that are caused by human activity that alters the stresses and strains on the Earth's crust. Most induced seismicity is of a low magnitude. A few sites regularly have larger quakes, such as The Geysers geothermal plant in California which averaged two M4 events and 15 M3 events every year from 2004 to 2009.[1]

Results of ongoing multi-year research on induced earthquakes by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) published in 2015 suggested that most of the significant earthquakes in Oklahoma, such as the 1952 magnitude 5.7 El Reno earthquake may have been induced by deep injection of waste water by the oil industry. "Earthquake rates have recently increased markedly in multiple areas of the Central and Eastern United States (CEUS), especially since 2010, and scientific studies have linked the majority of this increased activity to wastewater injection in deep disposal wells."[2][3][4][5][6][7]:2[8]

Induced seismicity can also be caused by the injection of carbon dioxide as the storage step of carbon capture and storage, which aims to sequester carbon dioxide captured from fossil fuel production or other sources in Earth's crust as a means of climate change mitigation. This effect has been observed in Oklahoma and Saskatchewan.[9] Though safe practices and existing technologies can be utilized to reduce the risk of induced seismicity due to injection of carbon dioxide, the risk is still significant if the storage is large in scale. The consequences of the induced seismicity could disrupt preexisting faults in the Earth's crust as well as compromise the seal integrity of the storage locations.[10]

The seismic hazard from induced seismicity can be assessed using similar techniques as for natural seismicity, although accounting for non-stationary seismicity.[11] It appears that earthquake shaking from induced earthquakes is similar to that observed in natural tectonic earthquakes,[12][13] although differences in the depth of the rupture need to be taken into account. This means that ground-motion models derived from recordings of natural earthquakes, which are often more numerous in strong-motion databases[14] than data from induced earthquakes, can be used. Subsequently, a risk assessment can be performed, taking account of the seismic hazard and the vulnerability of the exposed elements at risk (e.g. local population and the building stock).[15] Finally, the risk can, theoretically at least, be mitigated, either through modifications to the hazard[16][17] or a reduction to the exposure or the vulnerability.

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Study suggests earthquakes are triggered well beyond fluid injection zones

May 3, 2019

Computer model and field experiment data suggest a new link between subsurface injections and earthquake swarms.

https://now.tufts.edu/news-releases/study-suggests-earthquakes-are-triggered-well-beyond-fluid-injection-zones

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Oil Production Could Have Caused Century-Old California Earthquakes

If so, California’s “natural” quakes may be less frequent than thought

October 31, 2016

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/oil-production-could-have-caused-century-old-california-earthquakes/

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Did human activity trigger California earthquakes nearly 100 years ago?

October 31, 2016

https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/1031/Did-human-activity-trigger-California-earthquakes-nearly-100-years-ago

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Manmade and natural earthquakes not so different after all

August 02, 2017

Whether an earthquake occurs naturally or as a result of unconventional oil and gas recovery, the destructive power is the same, according to a new study appearing in Science Advances Aug. 2. The research concludes that human-induced and naturally occurring earthquakes in the central U.S. share the same shaking potential and can thus cause similar damage.

The finding contradicts previous observations suggesting that induced earthquakes exhibit weaker shaking than natural ones. The work could help scientists make predictions about future earthquakes and mitigate their potential damage.

“People have been debating the strength of induced earthquakes for decades – our study resolves this question,” said co-author William Ellsworth, a professor in the Geophysics Department at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences and co-director of the Stanford Center for Induced and Triggered Seismicity (SCITS). “Now we can begin to reduce our uncertainty about how hard induced earthquakes shake the ground, and that should lead to more accurate estimates of the risks these earthquakes pose to society going forward.”
Induced quakes

Earthquakes in the central U.S. have increased over the past 10 years due to the expansion of unconventional oil and gas operations that discard wastewater by injecting it into the ground. About 3 million people in Oklahoma and southern Kansas live with an increased risk of experiencing induced earthquakes.

“The stress that is released by the earthquakes is there already – by injecting water, you’re just speeding up the process,” said co-author Gregory Beroza, the Wayne Loel Professor in geophysics at Stanford Earth and co-director of SCITS. “This research sort of simplifies things, and shows that we can use our understanding of all earthquakes for more effective mitigation.”

Oklahoma experienced its largest seismic event in 2016 when three large earthquakes measuring greater than magnitude 5.0 caused significant damage to the area. Since the beginning of 2017, the number of earthquakes magnitude 3.0 and greater has fallen, according to the Oklahoma Geological Survey. That drop is partly due to new regulations to limit wastewater injection that came out of research into induced earthquakes.
Stress drop

To test the destructive power of an earthquake, researchers measured the force driving tectonic plates to slip, known as stress drop – measured by the difference between a fault’s stress before and after an earthquake. The team analyzed seismic data from 39 manmade and natural earthquakes ranging from magnitude 3.3 to 5.8 in the central U.S. and eastern North America. After accounting for factors such as the type of fault slip and earthquake depth, results show the stress drops of induced and natural earthquakes in the central U.S. share the same characteristics.

A second finding of the research shows that most earthquakes in the eastern U.S. and Canada exhibit stronger shaking potential because they occur on what’s known as reverse faults. These types of earthquakes are typically associated with mountain building and tend to exhibit more shaking than those that occur in the central U.S. and California. Although the risk for naturally occurring earthquakes is low, the large populations and fragile infrastructure in this region make it vulnerable when earthquakes do occur.

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The Next California Earthquake Could Be Caused by Human-Made Drought

05/15/2014

https://inhabitat.com/the-next-california-earthquake-could-be-caused-by-human-made-drought/manmade-earthquakes-in-california-drought-2

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How Man-made Earthquakes Could Cripple the U.S. Economy

Massive tanks in Oklahoma brim with unrefined oil, but they weren’t designed to handle the rash of seismic activity caused by fracking-related activity.

By KATHRYN MILES

September 14, 2017

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/14/earthquakes-oil-us-economy-fracking-215602

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Striking NASA Maps Reveal How The California Earthquakes Altered The Planet's Surface

10 JUL 2019

https://www.sciencealert.com/nasa-maps-reveal-how-the-california-earthquakes-altered-the-surface-of-the-planet

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3 questions seismologists are asking after the California earthquakes

July 12, 2019

Tectonic activity may be shifting very slowly away from the San Andreas Fault

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/california-earthquakes-raise-questions-future-tectonic-activity

Will these quakes trigger the Big One on the San Andreas?

Such large quakes inevitably raise these fears. Historically, the San Andreas Fault system has produced a massive quake about every 150 years. But “for whatever reason, it has been pretty quiet in the San Andreas since 1906,” when an estimated magnitude 7.9 quake along the northern portion of the fault devastated San Francisco, Hough says. And the southern portion of San Andreas is even more overdue for a massive quake; its last major event was the estimated magnitude 7.9 Fort Tejon quake in 1857, she says.

The recent quakes aren’t likely to change that situation. Subsurface shifting from a large earthquake can affect strain on nearby faults. But it’s unlikely that the quakes either relieved stress or will ultimately trigger another earthquake along the San Andreas Fault system, essentially because they were too far away, Hough says. “The disruption [from one earthquake] of other faults decreases really quickly with distance,” she says (SN Online: 3/28/11).

Some preliminary data do suggest that the magnitude 7.1 earthquake produced some slippage, also known as creep, along at least one shallow fault in the southern part of the San Andreas system. But such slow, shallow slips don’t produce earthquakes, Hough says.

However, the quakes could have more significantly perturbed much closer faults, such as the Garlock Fault, which runs roughly west to east along the northern edge of the Mojave Desert. That’s not unprecedented: The 1992 Landers quake may have triggered a magnitude 5.7 quake two weeks later along the Garlock Fault.

“Generations of graduate students are going to be studying these events — the geometry of the faults, how the ground moved,” even how the visible evidence of the rupture, scarring the land surface, erodes over time and obscures its traces, Bohon says.

At the moment, scientists are eagerly trading ideas on social media sites. “It’s the equivalent of listening in on scientists shouting down the hallway: ‘Here’s my data — what do you have?’ ” she says. Those preliminary ideas and explanations will almost certainly evolve as more information comes in, she adds. “It’s early days yet.”

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California quakes left a crack in the Earth so big it can be seen from space

July 9, 2019

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/07/09/satellite-images-show-crack-left-massive-california-earthquakes/1680733001/

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4.5 magnitude earthquake in western Colorado likely human caused

March 5, 2019

https://kdvr.com/2019/03/05/4-5-magnitude-earthquake-in-western-colorado-likely-human-caused/

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Drilling Is Making Oklahoma as Quake Prone as California

2016

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/us/earthquake-risk-in-oklahoma-and-kansas-comparable-to-california.html

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Man-made quakes shake the ground less than natural ones

18 August 2014

Seismic danger from oil and gas operations may be overestimated.

https://www.nature.com/news/man-made-quakes-shake-the-ground-less-than-natural-ones-1.15742

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California's Devastating Fires Are Man-Caused -- But Not In The Way They Tell Us

Jul 30, 2018

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2018/07/30/californias-devastating-fires-are-man-caused-but-not-in-the-way-they-tell-us/#3c0c646670af

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Newly Discovered Hot Magma Plume Beneath Yellowstone Volcano Stretches To Mexico

2018

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/223457/20180322/newly-discovered-hot-magma-plume-beneath-yellowstone-volcano-stretches-to-mexico.htm

New evidence on Yellowstone's volcanic activity might shed light on the long-debated theory on the presence of magma plume beneath the national park.

The Yellowstone caldera is a complex system of rock formations that sprung after a series of volcanic eruptions some 630,000 million years ago. This is the widely accepted theory, although there are some scientists who argue that the national park sits right on top of a "hot spot."

Results of the investigation conducted by Peter Nelson and Stephen Grand from the University of Texas' Jackson School of Geosciences supports the latter theory suggesting a massive magma plume beneath the park's surface. This plume, which is the technical word for a magma foundation, appears to extend as far as Mexico.

How Plumes Are Formed

In a geographic sense, a plume is an abnormality that exists when the earth's core rises through the mantle forming what it appears to be a foundation of hot magma.

The study, which was published in Nature Geoscience, reported that the probability of a magma plume underneath Yellowstone could explain the heat that influences ground activities such as the Boiling River. This latest claim debunks earlier explanations that the heat source is a by-product of lithospheric movements.

Nelson and Grand's team gathered seismic data using EarthScope's USArray, which showed a "long, thin, sloping zone" that measured about 72 kilometers long and 55 kilometers wide. Because seismic patterns travel slower in this region of the mantle, it is understandable that it can be up to 800 degrees Celsius higher than its surrounding areas.

The emerging image revealed a 350-kilometer cylinder formation that runs all the way to the California-Mexico border.

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Yellowstone's Steamboat Geyser Is Incredibly Active Right Now, and We Don't Know Why

June 26, 2019

https://www.livescience.com/65802-yellowstone-geyser-record.html

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California supervolcano may be as dangerous as Yellowstone's

2018

https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/long-valley-caldera-supervolcano-California-13265467.php

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NASA Study Connects Southern California, Mexico Faults

2018

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-study-connects-southern-california-mexico-faults

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This Quiet Fault in Southern California Hadn't Moved in 500 Years. Now It's Slipping.

Oct 17, 2019

Earthquake Pre-cursors? 'Slow slip Monitoring' {Video}

https://www.livescience.com/earthquakes-cause-fault-to-slip-in-california.html

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Mexico Earthquake Zone Linked to California Faults

https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/04/100405-mexico-california-baja-earthquake-aftershocks/

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Volcanoes of Mexico (42 volcanoes)

https://www.volcanodiscovery.com/mexico.html

Mexico's volcanoes are part of the Pacific Ring of Fire and formed on the North American continental tectonic plate under which the oceanic Pacific and (in the south) Cocos plates are being subducted.
The most active volcanoes of the country are Popocatepetl, Colima and El Chichon, which had a major eruption in 1982 that cooled the world's climate in the following year.
All active volcanoes of Mexico are listed.

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There are 48 active volcanoes in Mexico

2018

https://www.vallartadaily.com/volcanoes-in-mexico/

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List of volcanoes in Mexico

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_volcanoes_in_Mexico

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Mexico's deadliest volcano

2018

https://theweek.com/articles/805797/mexicos-deadliest-volcano

On the clear-sky morning of December 21st, 1994, Claus Siebe was standing at the foot of Popocatépetl, watching as elephantine plumes of black smoke and heaps of pyroclastic flow spewed out of Mexico's largest active volcano. Siebe stood silently next to a group of mountaineers, all of whom had their heads cocked upward. He'd never witnessed an eruption on this scale before; he was floored. Recalling that day now, nearly 24 years later, Siebe describes a scene of awe and confusion. "Everybody was watching," Siebe says. "Nobody panicked. We were all just kind of surprised that this was happening."

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1943-1952

The eruption of Parícutin

https://mashable.com/2017/06/24/eruption-of-paricutin/

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The Surprising Threat from Mexico's Awakened Volcano

2012

https://www.livescience.com/31391-popocatepetl-mudflow-threat.html

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Mexico raises alert level for Popocatepetl volcano as activity intensifies

March 28, 2019

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-volcano/mexico-raises-alert-level-for-popocatepetl-volcano-as-activity-intensifies-idUSKCN1R9256

Mexican volcano erupts multiple times in a day
The Popocatépetl volcano in central Mexico erupted three times on Nov. 24.

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The effects of volcanoes on health: preparedness in Mexico.

1996

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9170236

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Colima Volcano blasts ash, lava in western Mexico

2015

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/colima-volcano-blasts-ash-lava-western-mexico

MEXICO CITY – A volcano in western Mexico has erupted, spewing ash more than 4 miles (7 kilometers) into the air and sending lava down its flanks.

The activity at the Colima Volcano began Thursday and continued Friday morning. The volcano is also known as the Volcano of Fire.

Luis Felipe Puente is director of Mexico’s civil protection agency. He tweeted Friday that preventive protocols were activated.

A statement from Colima state’s civil protection agency on Thursday said the initial eruption occurred just after 11 a.m. Ash was falling to the southwest of the crater. People were advised to recognize a 3-mile (5-kilometer) perimeter around the peak.

A state helicopter was making a reconnaissance flight Friday morning.

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Colima eruption is a reminder that Mexico is a land of volcanoes

2016

http://theconversation.com/colima-eruption-is-a-reminder-that-mexico-is-a-land-of-volcanoes-66478

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The possible influence of volcanic emissions on atmospheric aerosols in the city of Colima, Mexico.

2004

http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/14568726

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Mexico’s Popocatepetl Volcano Erupts, Residents Prepare for More Volcanic Activity

March 29, 2019

https://fox28spokane.com/mexicos-popocatepetl-volcano-erupts-residents-prepare-for-more-volcanic-activity/

Areas in Central Mexico are preparing for the worst after Mexico’s Popocatepetl volcano unleashed a powerful explosion Thursday evening.

Mexican authorities had just raised the alert level for the volcano, indicating an increase in the intensity of activity, when the volcano exploded.

Witnesses in the area say they saw a large flash of light followed by incandescent material spilling out from the crater and down the mountainside. Reports show the explosion sent a massive column of gas and ash 8,200 feet above the volcano’s crater.

Mexico’s National Center for Disaster Prevention have warned residents to stay away from the volcano. Scientists monitoring Popocatepetl have observed more than 200 discharges from the volcano in the past 24 hours.

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New satellite-based study of Latin America volcanoes could help researchers better predict eruptions

April 04, 2019

https://reliefweb.int/report/world/new-satellite-based-study-latin-america-volcanoes-could-help-researchers-better-predict

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Mud volcano

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mud_volcano#Yellowstone's_%22Mud_Volcano%22

Mud volcano in the Gulf of Mexico sea bottom

Two seismic-reflection scans of a fault zone in the Gulf of Mexico. A. Chirp seismic-reflection B. Water gun seismic-reflection. Chirp seismic-reflection show a likely mud volcano adjacent to the fault zone where near-surface seismic-reflection amplitudes are high and the seafloor is disrupted. Water gun data illustrate that the high-amplitude reflections extend downward in two zones, one that projects steeply (i.e., the master fault with likely gas/fluid) and another that projects laterally along apparent stratigraphy (i.e., a potential gas/fluid charged stratal unit). The fault zone has high backscatter at the sea floor, and is an area of likely upward migrating gases, fluids, and mobilized sediment, with contributions from the two subsurface high-amplitude zones.

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New evidence suggests volcanoes caused biggest mass extinction ever

April 15, 2019

Mercury found in ancient rock around the world supports theory that eruptions caused 'Great Dying' 252 million years ago.

The mass extinction occurred at what scientists call the Permian-Triassic Boundary. The mass extinction killed off much of the terrestrial and marine life before the rise of dinosaurs. Some were prehistoric monsters in their own right, such as the ferocious gorgonopsids that looked like a cross between a sabre-toothed tiger and a Komodo dragon.

The eruptions occurred in a volcanic system called the Siberian Traps in what is now central Russia. Many of the eruptions occurred not in cone-shaped volcanoes but through gaping fissures in the ground. The eruptions were frequent and long-lasting and their fury spanned a period of hundreds of thousands of years.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190415122249.htm

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Dinosaur asteroid hit 'worst possible place'

2017

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39922998

The researchers recovered rocks from under the Gulf of Mexico that were hit by an asteroid 66 million years ago.

The nature of this material records the details of the event.

It is becoming clear that the 15km-wide asteroid could not have hit a worse place on Earth.

The shallow sea covering the target site meant colossal volumes of sulphur (from the mineral gypsum) were injected into the atmosphere, extending the "global winter" period that followed the immediate firestorm.

Had the asteroid struck a different location, the outcome might have been very different.

"This is where we get to the great irony of the story – because in the end it wasn’t the size of the asteroid, the scale of blast, or even its global reach that made dinosaurs extinct – it was where the impact happened," said Ben Garrod, who presents The Day The Dinosaurs Died with Alice Roberts.

"Had the asteroid struck a few moments earlier or later, rather than hitting shallow coastal waters it might have hit deep ocean.

"An impact in the nearby Atlantic or Pacific oceans would have meant much less vaporised rock – including the deadly gypsum. The cloud would have been less dense and sunlight could still have reached the planet’s surface, meaning what happened next might have been avoided.

"In this cold, dark world food ran out of the oceans within a week and shortly after on land. With nothing to eat anywhere on the planet, the mighty dinosaurs stood little chance of survival."

Ben Garrod spent time on the drill rig that was stationed 30km off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula in April/May last year, to better understand the aims of the project; Alice Roberts visited widely separated fossil beds in the Americas, to get a sense of how life was upended by the impact.

Rock cores from up to 1,300m beneath the Gulf were recovered.

The lowest sections of this material come from a feature within the crater called the peak ring.

This is made from rock that has been heavily fractured and altered by immense pressures.

By analysing its properties, the drill project team - led by Profs Jo Morgan and Sean Gulick - hope to reconstruct how the impact proceeded and the environmental changes it brought about.

They know now the energy that went into making the crater when the asteroid struck - equivalent to 10 billion Hiroshima A-bombs. And they also understand how the depression assumed the structure we observe today.

The team is also gaining insights into the return of life to the impact site in the years after the event.

One of the many fascinating sequences in the BBC Two programme sees Alice Roberts visit a quarry in New Jersey, US, where 25,000 fossil fragments have been recovered - evidence of a mass die-off of creatures that may have been among the casualties on the day of the impact itself.

"All these fossils occur in a layer no more than 10cm thick," palaeontologist Ken Lacovara tells Alice.

"They died suddenly and were buried quickly. It tells us this is a moment in geological time. That's days, weeks, maybe months. But this is not thousands of years; it's not hundreds of thousands of years. This is essentially an instantaneous event."

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Asteroid strike made 'instant Himalayas'

2016

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-38019604

Scientists say they can now describe in detail how the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs produced its huge crater.

The reconstruction of the event 66 million years ago was made possible by drilling into the remnant bowl and analysing its rocks.

These show how the space impactor made the hard surface of the planet slosh back and forth like a fluid.

At one stage, a mountain higher than Everest was thrown up before collapsing back into a smaller range of peaks.

"And this all happens on the scale of minutes, which is quite amazing," Prof Joanna Morgan from Imperial College London, UK, told BBC News.

The researchers report their account in this week's edition of Science Magazine.

Their study confirms a very dynamic, very energetic model for crater formation, and will go a long way to explaining the resulting cataclysmic environmental changes.

The debris thrown into the atmosphere likely saw the skies darken and the global climate cool for months, perhaps even years, driving many creatures into extinction, not just the dinosaurs.

The team spent April to May this year drilling a core through the so-called Chicxulub Crater, now buried under ocean sediments off Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula...

The analysis of the core materials now fits an astonishing narrative.

This describes the roughly 15km-wide stony asteroid instantly punching a cavity in the Earth's surface some 30km deep and 80-100km across.

Unstable, and under the pull of gravity, the sides of this depression promptly started to collapse inwards.

At the same time, the centre of the bowl rebounded, briefly lifting rock higher than the Himalayas, before also falling down to cover the inward-rushing sides of the initial hole.

"If this deep-rebound model is correct (it's called the dynamic collapse model), then our peak ring rocks should be the rocks that have travelled farthest in the impact - first, outwards by kilometres, then up in the air by over 10km, and back down and outwards by another, say, 10km. So their total travel path is something like 30km, and they do that in under 10 minutes," Prof Gulick told the BBC's Science in Action programme.

Imagine a sugar cube dropped into a cup of tea. The drink's liquid first gets out of the way of the cube, moves back in and up, before finally slopping down.

When the asteroid struck the Earth, the rocks it hit also behaved like a fluid.

"These rocks must have lost their strength and cohesion, and very dramatically had their friction reduced," said Prof Morgan. "So, yes, temporarily, they behave like a fluid. It's the only way you can make a crater like this."

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Asteroid that killed the dinosaurs caused a mile-high tsunami around the Earth

2019

The researchers noted that the impact tsunami in the Yucatán Peninsula was 2,600 times more energetic than the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004, one of the largest tsunamis recorded in modern history.

https://www.foxnews.com/science/asteroid-that-killed-the-dinosaurs-caused-a-mile-high-tsunami-around-the-earth

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Animals in North Dakota Died from Chicxulub Asteroid in Mexico

April 2019

Fossils reveal the quick death of plants and animals from a massive surge of water after the impact 66 million years ago, which is thought to have spelled the demise of dinosaurs.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/animals-in-north-dakota-died-from-chicxulub-asteroid-in-mexico-65684

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The buried secrets of the deadliest location on Earth

2018

Chicxulub Puerto, Mexico, is the centre of the impact crater that scientists believe was made when the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs smashed into the Earth’s surface.

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20181111-the-buried-secrets-of-the-deadliest-location-on-earth

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Chicxulub crater

The Chicxulub crater is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.
Its center is located near the town of Chicxulub, after which the crater is named.[5] It was formed by a large asteroid or comet about 11 to 81 kilometres (6.8 to 50.3 miles) in diameter, the Chicxulub impactor, striking the Earth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater

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This Is Why The Earth Could Explode Soon

Feb 2019

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP4e0Uh6lAg

{Is it true that the Earth's crust is currently cracking open slowly, while letting more water drain inside of the inner Earth. Water and oil act like lubrication to tectonic plates}.

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Trillions Of Tonnes Of Water Is Being Swallowed Into The Earth's Interior

November 24th, 2018

http://www.ladbible.com/news/interesting-trillions-of-tonnes-of-water-is-being-swallowed-into-earths-interior-20181124

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Earth is Eating Its Oceans Way Faster Than Originally Thought, Study Finds

November 19 2018

https://weather.com/news/news/2018-11-19-earth-eating-oceans-mariana-trench

Three times more ocean water than originally thought is being swallowed by the Earth as the planet's tectonic plates sink below one another, a new study discovered.

Published in the journal Nature, a team of researchers took an estimate of how much water is being sucked into the Earth's interior through subduction zones — where two continental plates meet and one is being drawn downward.

Researchers used data recorded by seismographs along the Mariana Trench — a subduction zone where the Pacific Plate is subducted beneath the Philippine Plate — to analyze a year's worth of measurements that enabled them to draw a better picture of just how much water the rocks inside the plates could hold. The determination was made by recording the speed at which seismic waves travel through the rocks.

Near the Mariana Trench, at least 4.3 times more ocean water is subducted than previously thought.

This discovery bodes large in understanding the Earth's deep water cycle, said Columbia University's Donna Shillington. A marine geology and geophysics researcher, Shillington said the water beneath the Earth's surface can aid in the development of magma and could lubricate faults, making earthquakes more likely.

Using velocity measurements stretching down to 18 miles below the surface in a combination of known temperatures and pressures, researchers were able to calculate that subduction zones swallow 3 billion teragrams of water into the crust every million years. A teragram is one trillion grams.

Unlike the old adage "what goes up must come down," the opposite applies here. Most of the water being subducted into the Earth is believed to be emitted back into the atmosphere as water vapor in volcanic eruptions, according to a Washington University release.

The amount of ocean water ingested by the Earth and the amount emitted isn't equal. In fact, the amount going in wildly exceeds the amount coming out.

There's no missing water in the oceans, Cai said, so there must be something about the way water moves through the Earth's interior that scientists don't understand.

"Many more studies need to be focused on this aspect," said Cai.

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Texas

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Hidden homeless camps around Austin raising risk for crime, flooding

2018

https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/hidden-homeless-camps-around-austin-raising-risk-for-crime-flooding

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A Massive Change In Austin's Flood Map Says Thousands More Homes Are At High Risk

2018

https://www.kut.org/post/massive-change-austins-flood-map-says-thousands-more-homes-are-high-risk

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Oh, Crap: 60 Percent Of Austin's Creeks Had Unsafe Levels Of Fecal Bacteria Last Year

2018

https://www.kut.org/post/oh-crap-60-percent-austins-creeks-had-unsafe-levels-fecal-bacteria-last-year

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Under George W. Bush's leadership, Texas ranks number one in a many categories of pollution and environmental degradation. For example, Texas is:

    #1 in the Emission of Ozone Causing Air Pollution Chemicals
    #1 in Toxic Chemical releases into the Air
    #1 in use of Deep Well Injectors as method of Waste Disposal
    #1 in counties listed in top 20 of Emitting Cancer Causing Chemicals
    #1 in Total Number of Hazardous Waste Incinerators
    #1 in Environmental Justice Title 6 complaints
    #1 in production of Cancer causing Benzene & Vinyl Chloride
    #1 Largest Sludge Dump in Country

http://www.txpeer.org/Bush/

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TEXAS POLICE FORCE NEARLY WIPED OUT IN STRING OF ABUSE OF POWER INDICTMENTS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtj4HrZMmw8

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Bacterial Pollution Makes San Antonio Creeks and Rivers Not Swimmable

2018

https://therivardreport.com/bacteria-pollution-makes-san-antonio-creeks-rivers-not-swimmable/

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Uranium mining in Texas

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Energy's Latest Battleground: Fracking For Uranium

http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2013/01/23/fracking-for-uranium/

February 11, 2013

No tour of Uranium Energy Corp.’s processing plant in Hobson, Tex. is complete until CEO Amir Adnani pries the top off a big black steel drum and invites you to peer inside. There, filled nearly to the brim, is an orange-yellow powder that UEC mined out of the South Texas countryside.

From the 1950s through the early 1980s big oil and chemical companies like Union Carbide, Exxon, Chevron, Conoco and even U.S. Steel mined uranium in South Texas. Not only did they find a lot of the stuff while hunting for oil and gas, but the federal government, amid the Cold War, even required that they also run tests in every oil and gas well to check for the presence of uranium. The oil companies sold their yellowcake to the government for the production of nuclear weapons and reactor fuel. “Back then every company was down here,” recalls Anthony, who was a young engineer for Union Carbide. “This was the stomping ground.”

But in the process, they made a mess, gouging out muddy pit mines and building tailings ponds to hold toxic sludge left over from processing ore with acid. A uranium mine in Karnes County was designated a Superfund site; it remains polluted, as does the nearby Falls City uranium mill site, where, the Department of Energy says, “contaminants of potential concern are cadmium, cobalt, fluoride, iron, nickel, sulfate and uranium.”

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Texas Sees Renewed Push for Uranium Mining

April 15, 2012

At the back of a South Texas uranium processing facility, a few dozen black container drums stood outside, waiting to be shipped. Each was filled with about $50,000 worth of yellowcake, a powdery substance created from raw uranium.

“That’s pretty close to a Lexus in every drum,” said Gregory Kroll, the superintendent of the site, which is run by Corpus Christi-based Uranium Energy Corporation. The company mines the uranium in Duval County and brings it here for processing, before sending it on to a plant in Illinois, where it is further refined.
Company officials hope that the Hobson plant will increase its yellowcake production, now at 200,000 to 250,000 pounds per year, far below the plant's capacity. Uranium has been mined in Texas for decades, but companies see a potential hike in demand for their product. They are ramping up for a new push, despite concerns from environmental groups that past operations have not been sufficiently cleaned up and pose a threat to aquifers that people drink from.

https://www.texastribune.org/2012/04/15/texas-sees-renewed-push-uranium-mining/

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Uranium Mining Pollution
near the King Ranch

http://www.txpeer.org/toxictour/uri.html

This week's stop on the Texas Toxic Tour takes us to Kleberg County, in Southeast Texas, near the famous King Ranch. This is the story of Teo Saenz and his family and neighbors, who are struggling to protect their land and water from pollution from Uranium Resources Inc.'s underground mine, and from regulatory neglect from the state government. Listen and watch this story unfold through interviews with area residents and pictures of URI's mining operations.

Arriving in 1839, Teo's family was among the first settlers in the area. "My wife's grandfather came to this area, so we all have a very deep respect for the land, and the future for our kids, and the next generation," he says. Now Teo and his neighbors live next to an underground or "in-situ" uranium mine run by Uranium Resources Inc.

Teo's family and neighbors and the City of Kingsville use the Goliad aquifer for their drinking water. Because of concerns about contamination from radioactive and chemically toxic substances such as arsenic, molybdenum, and selenium caused by uranium mining operations, several of Teo's neighbors have had to shut down their water wells. "We're about three quarters of a mile from the [mining] production area, so we would be the first ones hit by any migration of uranium or radium or arsenic," explains Teo.

For years Teo and his neighbors have tried to get Uranium Resources Inc. to clean up the heavy metals and radioactive materials created during the their mining operation as required by their Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission (TNRCC) permit, to no avail. Now the company is on the verge of declaring bankruptcy, ceasing operations, and leaving Texas taxpayers with a massive pollution clean-up job.

Radioactive Spills

Spills of highly radioactive water containing the leached-out uranium, other toxic materials and uranium-heavy process fluids are common in the in-situ uranium mining process. Hundreds, if not thousands of spills have occurred at the Texas mines, documented in part by thousands of pages of self-reporting sent to the TNRCC by the mining companies. In the recent 5-month period from January to May 1999 at the URI mine, at least three spills totaling 15,000 gallons of uranium-contaminated water have occurred.

Winning the Battle -- Losing the Aquifer?
Over two years after the TNRCC allowed Area 3 mining to begin, Kleburg County and Teo Saenz and his neighbors won the legal battle for the right to a contested case hearing to decide whether the permit should have ever been approved. The Travis County District Court ruled on February 29, 2000 that the TNRCC must grant a hearing on URI's plan to open a new uranium mining area. This ruling marks the sixth time in the last several years that a court has had to step in to protect citizens rights to participate in permit decisions implemented by the Bush-appointed TNRCC Commissioners.
But the damage had already been done. After mining as much uranium as it could from Area 3, URI stopped mining months ago. In a March 31, 2000 press release, URI admits, "the company has exhausted all of its available sources of cash to support continuing operations and will be unable to continue in business beyond June 2000 unless it can secure a cash infusion."

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Uranium Mining in Texas

History of Uranium Mining in Texas
Corporations began mining uranium in Texas in the mid-1950's. The industry's early history of unregulated open pit mining resulted in companies dumping tons of radioactive and heavy metal waste in towns south and southeast of San Antonio -- most notably, at the Conoco/Conquista site in Karnes County, at the Chevron site in Panna Maria, also in Karnes County, and at Exxon's Ray Point site in Live Oak, County. (Source: 71st Texas State Legislature Report on Regulation of Uranium Mill Tailings and Waste...). In one lawsuit with plaintiffs numbering over 1,000 and another suit with approximately 600 plaintiffs, workers and their family members and citizens in the areas of the mining alleged personal injury and property damage.
Live Oak County farmer/rancher Jeff Sibley's family lived through this early history. He wrote an account, 'Uranium Mining in Texas', drawing from his own experiences and from his research of Texas State agency records.

http://www.uraniuminfo.org/uranium-mining-texas

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How

Is Uranium Mined in Texas ?

http://www.tgpc.state.tx.us/subcommittees/POE/FAQs/Uhow_mined_FAQ.pdf

The two uranium mining techniques that have been used in Texas are open pit mining and in situ mining. Shallow uranium deposits that occurred above groundwater at depths typically no deeper than 300 feet in Karnes County were mined simply by digging open pits. Most of the open pit mining for uranium occurred in Karnes County, although some occurred in Gonzales, Atascosa, Live Oak, and McMullen counties. Deeper deposits in Brooks, Kleberg, Jim Hogg, Duval, Webb, Bee, Live Oak, and Karnes counties have been mined using in situ mining techniques.

In situ mining involves injecting fluids into the ground to dissolve minerals, then

pumping the fluids to the surface where they are processed to recover the minerals.

In situ mining for uranium generally reverses the process by which nature formed the uranium deposits. A leaching solution is injected into the uranium-bearing zone through injection wells arranged in a pattern designed to efficiently recover the uranium. The leaching solution circulates through the uranium-bearing zone and dissolves the uranium.

The uranium-bearing solution is then recovered through production wells (see Figure 1). In the past, the leaching solution was an acid solution. More recently, the leaching solution typically consists of groundwater supplemented with oxygen and bicarbonateions, which is safer and better for the environment. At the surface, this solution is processed to remove the uranium. The water is then refortified with oxygen and bicarbonate ions and reused for additional in situ mining.

Exploration drilling for uranium and open pit mining of uranium are regulated by the Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC). There are no longer any active open pit uranium mines in Texas. Most of the old open pit mines and mill sites have been reclaimed through a program managed by the RRC.

In situ mining and uranium processing plants are regulated by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). There are five active in situ uranium mining sites in the state – one in Brooks County, one in Kleberg County, and three in Duval County – and one inactive in situ processing facility in Karnes

County, presently undergoing license renewal. In addition, an in situ uranium mining permit application for a site in Goliad County is pending.

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In Texas, Abandoned Oil Equipment Spurs Pollution Fears

Abandoned oil field equipment is a common problem in Texas, which is home to vast numbers of old wells that were never properly sealed. Some remain from the heady decades of the early- to mid-20th century, before current standards kicked in. In recent decades, regulators have worked to plug the old wells so they do not act as a conduit for liquid pollutants to enter groundwater. But some fear that the recent surge in oil drilling, brought about by the modern practice of hydraulic fracturing, will set off worrisome encounters with the old wells.

“Not every unplugged well leads to pollution, but a high percentage of wells that are left unplugged do present pollution hazards,” said Scott Anderson, an oil and gas expert based in Austin with the Environmental Defense Fund.

http://www.texastribune.org/2013/06/09/texas-abandoned-oil-equipment-spurs-pollution-fear/

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Uranium series disequilibrium in the Bargmann property area of Karnes County, Texas

http://www.osti.gov/scitech/biblio/631192

Historical evidence is presented for natural uranium series radioactive disequilibrium in uranium bearing soils in the Bargmann property area of karnes County on the Gulf Coastal Plain of south Texas. The early history of uranium exploration in the area is recounted and records of disequilibrium before milling and mining operations began are given. The property contains an open pit uranium mine associated with a larger ore body. In 1995, the US Department of Energy (DOE) directed Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to evaluate the Bargmann tract for the presence of uranium mill tailings (ORNL 1996). There was a possibility that mill tailings had washed onto or blown onto the property from the former tailings piles in quantities that would warrant remediation under the Uranium Mill Tailings Remediation Action Project. Activity ratios illustrating disequilibrium between {sup 226}Ra and {sup 238}U in background soils during 1986 are listed and discussed. Derivations of uranium mass-to-activity conversion factors are covered in detail.

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PANTEX: Pollution in the Panhandle

The Texas Toxic Tour stops this week in the Texas Panhandle--home to the nation's nuclear weapons disassembly and temporary plutonium storage facility. This is the story of Doris and Phil Smith, farmers living next to the plant, whose well water may soon be contaminated with the creeping plume of contaminants emanating from the plant. Watch the video interview with the Smiths to hear a moving and informative firsthand account of their fight against not only the weapons plant, but also against the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission. "A farmer spends his entire life propagating life," muses Phil Smith in the video, "and right across the road we're combating a facility that has no other means than death."

Nukes in North Texas

Just 17 miles north of Amarillo sits the Pantex Nuclear Weapons Plant, a Department of Defense facility which formerly assembled nuclear weapons now dismantles old ones and maintains newer ones. "Pantex is scheduled to store in excess of 20,000 plutonium pits. At present there are 12,000 pits that are stored in above ground earthen bunkers that were used back in 1942 during the war times. They were used to store conventional weapons, they were not ever intended to store plutonium pits that have a half-life of 24,000 years," explains Doris. Designated as a Superfund cleanup site by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1994 after years of contaminating the region, Pantex is currently regulated by the federal Department of Energy (DOE), along with statewide oversight by the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission (TNRCC).(1)

Aquifer at Risk

The Pantex facility rests on 16, 000 acres(2) directly above the Ogallala Aquifer, the primary source of water in the region. Local residents, some of whom are located within a half-mile of the facility,(3) get their drinking water from wells which tap into the Ogallala. The aquifer also supplies the City of Amarillo. Not only is the Panhandle rich farm country, but large numbers of beef cattle are raised there. "This 26-county area produces twenty-five percent of the nation's" fed beef," explains Phil. "Iowa beef [a local producer] is three miles from the Pantex site. The water they are using comes directly from the Pantex site... Over 5,000 cows are processed there each day," Doris adds.

http://www.txpeer.org/toxictour/pantex.html

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Revealed: Texas officials covered up dangerously radioactive tap water for years

12 Nov 2010

Texas officials charged with protecting the environment and public health have for years made arbitrary subtractions to the measured levels of radiation delivered by water utilities across the state, according to a series of investigative reports out of Houston.

Those subtractions, based on the test results’ margin of error, made all the difference for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ): without the reduction, demonstrated levels of dangerous radiation would have been in excess of federal limits for years.
This was being done in direct contravention of an order by the US Environmental Protection Agency, which told state regulators in 2000 to stop subtracting the margin of error.-

- Thanks to the TCEQ’s under-reporting of radioactive content, one particular water provider in Harris County was able to skirt needed maintenance for years, even though uncensored tests showed radiation was almost always above legal limits.
Independent tests, the station noted, showed that some of the radiation contained harmful alpha particles, which can cause cell mutations and increase the risk of cancer.
The practice of under-reporting radiation continued until last year, when the EPA once again demanded Texas comply with the law.
The state, governed a large majority of Republicans, has long flouted the EPA’s air quality standards, with TCEQ officials claiming the federal agency does not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
“What was illegal and a bad idea yesterday is illegal and a bad idea today,” TCEQ chairman Bryan W. Shaw told The Dallas Morning News. “We won’t see any environmental benefits from this. We’ll just see the additional bureaucracy associated with permitting in this state and across the U.S.” -

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/texas-tap-water-contaminated-radiation-independent-tests-find/

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Spatial Distribution of Orofacial Cleft Defect Births in Harris County, Texas, and Radium in the Public Water Supplies: A Persistent Association?

http://www.texmed.org/Template.aspx?id=7287#sthash.8WFGENB4.dpuf

Spatial Distribution of Orofacial Cleft Defect Births in Harris County, Texas, and Radium in the Public Water Supplies: A Persistent Association? - See more at: http://www.texmed.org/Template.aspx?id=7287#sthash.8WFGENB4.dpuf

Geospatial tools were used to evaluate radioactivity in drinking water and an association with cleft birth defects. From the use of a space-time clustering program (SaTScan), a significantly increased relative risk of 3.0 (95% CI, 1.8-4.3) for cleft births in northwest Harris County was previously reported for the period from 1990 through 1994. This cluster occurred in an area containing water wells with alpha radiation that exceeded allowed standards.

New data for a decade later (from 1999 through 2002) from the recently formed Texas Birth Defects Registry and concurrent data for radium in tap water from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality made it possible to conduct a follow-up investigation. Rates of cleft birth defects were again significantly ( P <.001) greater both in ZIP codes and census tracts with elevated radium concentration in drinking water. Adjustment for sex of newborn, maternal age, race, and educational achievement did not remove this association. A persistent pattern in two separate study periods makes the reported association more robust and noteworthy for the attention of Texas physicians.

Geospatial tools were used to evaluate radioactivity in drinking water and an association with cleft birth defects. From the use of a space-time clustering program (SaTScan), a significantly increased relative risk of 3.0 (95% CI, 1.8-4.3) for cleft births in northwest Harris County was previously reported for the period from 1990 through 1994. This cluster occurred in an area containing water wells with alpha radiation that exceeded allowed standards.
New data for a decade later (from 1999 through 2002) from the recently formed Texas Birth Defects Registry and concurrent data for radium in tap water from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality made it possible to conduct a follow-up investigation. Rates of cleft birth defects were again significantly ( P <.001) greater both in ZIP codes and census tracts with elevated radium concentration in drinking water. Adjustment for sex of newborn, maternal age, race, and educational achievement did not remove this association. A persistent pattern in two separate study periods makes the reported association more robust and noteworthy for the attention of Texas physicians.
- See more at: http://www.texmed.org/Template.aspx?id=7287#sthash.8WFGENB4.dpuf

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Effect of biogas generation on radon emissions from landfills receiving
radium-bearing waste from shale gas development

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10962247.2012.696084

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Radon Distribution in Domestic Water of Texas

https://info.ngwa.org/GWOL/pdf/882546405.PDF

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Radon in Ground Waters of the South Texas Uranium District

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB4QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.researchgate.net%2Fprofile%2FPhilippe_Tissot%2Fpublication%2F228567249_Radon

_in_Ground_Waters_of_the_South_Texas_Uranium_District%2Flinks%2F0c960519ef69ecb1bc000000.

pdf&ei=XEq5VJ2vI4W0ogSKs4D4Aw&usg=AFQjCNE7O6ipMtSAHzOGeNCJb19KmOgH0g&sig2=PaMLh9H3RRGxvMAFGlL5yQ

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EPA's Map of Radon Zones Texas

http://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyNET.exe/000008NB.TXT?ZyActionD=ZyDocument&Client=EPA&Index=1991+Thru+1994&Docs=&Query=&Time=&EndTime=&SearchMethod=1&TocRestrict=n&Toc=&TocEntry=&QField=&QFieldYear=&QFieldMonth=&QFieldDay=&IntQFieldOp=0&ExtQFieldOp=0&XmlQuery=&File=D%3A\zyfiles\Index%20Data\91thru94\Txt\00000006\000008NB.txt&User=ANONYMOUS&Password=anonymous&SortMethod=h|-&MaximumDocuments=1&FuzzyDegree=0&ImageQuality=r75g8/r75g8/x150y150g16/i425&Display=p|f&DefSeekPage=x&SearchBack=ZyActionL&Back=ZyActionS&BackDesc=Results%20page&MaximumPages=1&ZyEntry=1&SeekPage=x&ZyPURL

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Radioactive landfills & injection wells in Texas

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Are Drilling Waste Pits a Threat to Texas Groundwater?

April 2014

http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2014/04/01/are-drilling-waste-pits-threat-to-texas-groundwater/

In one of the hottest plays for natural gas drilling, Bob Patterson wonders if what the drilling industry leaves behind will come back to haunt the community.

“It’s just a ticking time bomb before we have major aquifer contamination,” Patterson told StateImpact.

Patterson manages the Upper Trinity Groundwater Conservation District. His office monitors the drilling industry in North Texas, home to the Barnett Shale, which is producing some of the greatest volumes of natural gas in the country.

Reserve Pits

Patterson’s fear is about what are called reserve pits. The earthen pits are dug on the site of a drilling rig. Into the pits go thousands of barrels-worth of drilling waste. The waste comes back up out of the well as the drill cuts thousand of feet down into the earth. The waste can be a muddy, oily mix of saltwater, sand, and drilling fluids and can contain chemicals and diesel fuel.

Texas does little to regulate the pits. For most reserve pits, Texas does not require permits or inspection. They can be left unlined (as compared with sanitary landfills for household trash which are extensively regulated). Texas rules do state that the pits shouldn’t pollute surface or groundwater.

“Generally speaking, it is a very precarious situation. It’s sort of a toss of a coin if the regulations have any effectiveness at all,” Patterson told StateImpact Texas.

Concern over Leaching

The pits have caused concern for decades. A 1987 national report to Congress by the U.S. Environmental Protection agency, which was recently published by the New York Times, said that “leaching of reserve pit constituents into ground water and soil is a problem in the Texas/Oklahoma zone. Reserve pit liners are generally not required in Texas and Oklahoma.” (Most states do not allow unlined pits according to an overview by a Houston law firm).

The EPA report said that without the benefit of a liner, there was a “higher potential” for pollution including “barium, chromium, and arsenic” to reach groundwater.

Six years ago, New Mexico issued a “pit rule” that all but banned drilling sites from using reserve pits that were dug near rigs. The drilling industry complained the ban was driving up the cost of drilling and prompting drillers to head to Texas. Last year, New Mexico relaxed some of the restrictions.

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Injection Wells: The Poison Beneath Us

In September 2003, Ed Cowley got a call to check out a pool of briny water in a bucolic farm field outside Chico, Texas. Nearby, he said, a stand of trees had begun to wither, their leaves turning crispy brown and falling to the ground.
Chico, a town of about 1,000 people 50 miles northwest of Fort Worth, lies in the heart of Texas' Barnett Shale. Gas wells dot the landscape like mailboxes in suburbia. A short distance away from the murky pond, an oil services company had begun pumping millions of gallons of drilling waste into an injection well.
Regulators refer to such waste as salt water or brine, but it often includes less benign contaminants, including fracking chemicals, benzene and other substances known to cause cancer.

The well had been authorized by the Railroad Commission of Texas, which once regulated railways but now oversees 260,000 oil and gas wells and 52,000 injection wells. (Another agency, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, regulates injection wells for waste from other industries.)
Before issuing the permit, commission officials studied mathematical models showing that waste could be safely injected into a sandstone layer about one-third of a mile beneath the farm. They specified how much waste could go into the well, under how much pressure, and calculated how far it would dissipate underground. As federal law requires, they also reviewed a quarter-mile radius around the site to make sure waste would not seep back toward the surface through abandoned wells or other holes in the area.

Yet the precautions failed. "Salt water" brine migrated from the injection site and shot back to the surface through three old well holes nearby.

http://www.propublica.org/article/injection-wells-the-poison-beneath-us

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At Least 40% of Active Texas Landfills are Leaking Toxins -

December 17, 2013

AUSTIN, Texas – As the battle over the site of a proposed landfill in central Texas continues, a new analysis is raising concerns statewide.

The study finds that 40 percent of active landfills in the state that monitor their impact on groundwater are leaking toxins, and James Abshier, founder of a group called Environmental Protection in the Interest of Caldwell County, says it's likely more.

"That's just landfills that have measurement devices,” he points out. “Active, running landfills. That's not closed landfills and it's just the ones where the contamination has reached the sensors."

The new data on contamination is from Texas Campaign for the Environment, and it comes as Caldwell County considers a plan for a new landfill that would take in 25 million tons of trash and operate for 40 years.

The company proposing the landfill wants it located just off Texas State Highway 130, which Abshier and others have been fighting against because, he says, the land in the area is unstable and three major aquifers run through or nearby.

"One is the Carrizo-Wilcox, which is a major aquifer for over 12 million people,” he says. “And the landfill is going to be right over the Leona. The Leona is an aquifer that feeds the Carrizo-Wilcox, so there's definitely a chance of contamination into the water system."

AUSTIN, Texas – As the battle over the site of a proposed landfill in central Texas continues, a new analysis is raising concerns statewide.

The study finds that 40 percent of active landfills in the state that monitor their impact on groundwater are leaking toxins, and James Abshier, founder of a group called Environmental Protection in the Interest of Caldwell County, says it's likely more.

"That's just landfills that have measurement devices,” he points out. “Active, running landfills. That's not closed landfills and it's just the ones where the contamination has reached the sensors."

The new data on contamination is from Texas Campaign for the Environment, and it comes as Caldwell County considers a plan for a new landfill that would take in 25 million tons of trash and operate for 40 years.

The company proposing the landfill wants it located just off Texas State Highway 130, which Abshier and others have been fighting against because, he says, the land in the area is unstable and three major aquifers run through or nearby.

"One is the Carrizo-Wilcox, which is a major aquifer for over 12 million people,” he says. “And the landfill is going to be right over the Leona. The Leona is an aquifer that feeds the Carrizo-Wilcox, so there's definitely a chance of contamination into the water system."
- See more at: http://www.publicnewsservice.org/2013-12-17/waste-reduction-recycling/at-least-40-of-active-texas-landfills-are-leaking-toxins/a36302-1#sthash.ui72bayo.dpuf

http://www.publicnewsservice.org/2013-12-17/waste-reduction-recycling/at-least-40-of-active-texas-landfills-are-leaking-toxins/a36302-1#sthash.ui72bayo.dpuf

At Least 40% of Active Texas Landfills are Leaking Toxins - See more at: http://www.publicnewsservice.org/2013-12-17/waste-reduction-recycling/at-least-40-of-active-texas-landfills-are-leaking-toxins/a36302-1#sthash.ui72bayo.dpuf

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UPDATED: Problems With a West Texas Radioactive Waste Dump Get Buried

The preferred method for getting rid of radioactive waste is to bury it deep underground and hope to never see it again. Texas’ approach to regulating radioactive waste is similar. Instead of a public airing, problems with a burgeoning West Texas nuclear dump often get buried.

Case in point: In 2011, the Texas Legislature tasked the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) with studying whether Waste Control Specialists, the company that owns the dump in Andrews County, could cover potential liabilities and decommissioning costs.

It’s an important question because although the dump’s profits flow to its owner, Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, the state and federal governments will eventually own the dump and its millions of cubic feet of radioactive waste. In other words, the taxpayers could be on the hook for a lot of dough. What’s to guarantee that Waste Control won’t take the profits and run? What if the dump leaks? What if the company goes belly-up? That’s where, in theory, financial assurance comes in. Typically, high-risk facilities like those for hazardous and radioactive waste are secured with a bond, letter of credit or insurance. But in November 2011, TCEQ allowed Waste Control to use 12 million shares of Titanium Metals Corp., another Simmons company, to provide financial assurance for the dump.
It was a highly unorthodox arrangement that critics panned as a “polluters’ dream.” Titanium Metals’ stock plummeted not long after the deal was sealed. (Eventually, in November, another company purchased Titanium Metals for $2.9 billion. Simmons now uses 9.8 million shares of Kronos, another of his companies, to secure the dump.)

http://www.texasobserver.org/problems-with-a-west-texas-radioactive-waste-dump-get-buried/

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County of 95 Sees Opportunity in Toxic Waste

AUG. 7, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/us/a-texas-county-sees-opportunity-in-toxic-waste.html?_r=0

MENTONE, Tex. — Loving County is big, dry and stretches for miles, and is the perfect place, local officials say, to store high-level radioactive waste.

Officials here hope to entice the federal government — with $28 billion to spend on the disposal of high-level radioactive waste — into considering the possibility...

About midway between El Paso and Midland-Odessa, Loving County, population 95, according to the Census Bureau, is spread across 650 square miles or so, about twice the size of New York City. The population could grow 40 times larger and still meet the government definition of “highly rural.” Mentone, the county seat, has a courthouse, a single gas station, a food truck and not much else.

“There are no lawyers, no bank, no hospital, no real estate agency, nothing,” said Mozelle Carr, the county clerk. Ms. Carr is Mr. Jones’s sister. There are not even enough people for a fully independent local government.

The family, which makes up about a quarter of the voters in the county, is not unanimous in its support of a storage site. Their father, Elgin R. Jones, who goes by Punk and was sheriff from 1965 to 1992, said he foresaw trouble in anything radioactive. But he admits to being in the minority; even his wife, Mary Belle Jones, the mother of Ms. Carr and Skeet Jones, is wavering. While any decision is in the hands of the county commission, with so few residents, the opinion of the public — and the family — is crucial.

The cancellation of the federal government’s plan to bury high-level radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada means that the waste will remain at about 70 reactor sites around the country until there is some other plan. Loving County has visions of storing spent fuel from closed reactors in aboveground casks, and later, building a processing plant that would recover unused uranium, and plutonium for reuse, making the rest easier to bury. County officials are working with a company that is hoping to negotiate a deal with the state and federal governments. Two counties just across the state line in New Mexico are also seeking to become storage sites.

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Texas leaking landfills list 2013

http://www.texasenvironment.org/landfill_reports.cfm

This spreadsheet uses data from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and shows the list of Texas landfills that are leaking hazardous materials into groundwater monitoring wells. This is the 2013 report, using data from 2012.

CITY OF WEATHERFORD LANDFILL
CITY OF DALLAS MCCOMMAS BLUFF LANDFILL
MESQUITE CREEK LANDFILL
CITY OF LUBBOCK LANDFILL
CITY OF AMARILLO LANDFILL
CITY OF SAN ANGELO LANDFILL
CITY OF BROWNSVILLE
ALTAIR DISPOSAL SERVICES LLC LANDFILL
CITY OF KINGSVILLE LANDFILL
WMTX AUSTIN COMMUNITY RECYCLING & DISPOSAL FACILITY
BFI MCCARTY RD LANDFILL
CITY OF ALICE LANDFILL
CITY OF BIG SPRING LANDFILL
CITY OF ARLINGTON LANDFILL
CITY OF LAMESA LANDFILL
WASTE MANAGEMENT HILLSIDE LANDFILL
NORTH TEXAS MUNICIPAL WATER DISTRICT LANDFILL/MCKINNEY LANDFILL
WASTE MANAGEMENT NEW BOSTON LANDFILL
CITY OF NACOGDOCHES LANDFILL
CITY OF EDINBURG LANDFILL
CITY OF GRAND PRAIRIE LANDFILL
DFW RECYCLING AND DISPOSAL FACILITY (WASTE MANAGEMENT)
REPUBLIC MALOY LANDFILL
WM ATASCCOCITA RECYCLE DISPOSAL FACILITY
CITY OF FARMERS BRANCH CAMELOT LANDFILL
POLK COUNTY LANDFILL
SUNSET FARMS LANDFILL
PARIS LANDFILL
CITY OF SNYDER LANDFILL
CITY OF KERRVILLE LANDFILL
CITY OF VICTORIA LANDFILL
MEXIA LANDFILL
REGIONAL LANDFILL OF BROWNWOOD
BUFFALO CREEK LANDFILL
CITY OF DENTON LANDFILL
CITY OF MIDLAND LANDFILL
LACY-LAKEVIEW RECYCLING AND DISPOSAL FACILITY
BFI SOUTHWEST LANDFILL
FORT HOOD LANDFILL
GREEWOOD FARMS LANDFILL
AGNELINA COUNTY LANDFILL
CITY OF CORSICANA LANDFILL
CASCO HAULING AND EXCAVATION LANDFILL
CITY OF SAN ANTONIO PEARSALL ROAD LANDFILL
CASTLE/CITY OF GARLAND LANDFILL

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ERE Student Stepp on WRE article, Phantom Springs Cave Becomes Deepest Underwater Cave in The U.S.

Texas, where cave divers measured a new depth of the cave to be approximately 140 meters; this new measurement makes Phantom Springs Cave the deepest known underwater cave in America!

April 30, 2013

The current drought in Texas threatens Phantom Springs because Texans get the majority of their water from aquifers, and this water scarcity is a major societal and economic issue. In addition to groundwater extraction, Texas’ dependence on oil is negatively affecting the status of the protected property due to more than 10 confirmed natural gas wells between Phantom Springs and the nearest town of Pecos (Iliffe, 2013). The threat of hydraulic fracturing is very high because the process requires an abundance of water, and the used and polluted water is generally disposed into nearby wells (“Hydro-Fracking”, 2013). Groundwater flow can transport solutes to nearby water sources, which puts the cave at risk of contamination (Wurbs et al., 2002). The drought has also caused the water levels inside the cave to drop, and any pumping of upstream or downstream connections can cause the water level to possibly drop below the water table. This would cause the cave to breakdown, which would destroy the unique system present in the cave, prevent scientists from further studies, and cause sinks on the surface that can destroy nearby landowner’s properties.

http://erengineering.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/ere-student-stepp-on-wre-article-phantom-springs-cave-becomes-deepest-underwater-cave-in-the-u-s/

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Journey Into Lechuguilla Cave

Posted 10.01.02

Lechuguilla lies within this ancient coral-reef-turned-mountain range, the Guadelupe Mountains, which straddle the Texas-New Mexico border. Here, the Texas peak known as El Capitán.

Eaten by acid

The massive gypsum deposits lining Lechuguilla's limestone walls had suggested to some geologists that its tunnels were carved not by runoff flowing from the surface—as was long considered the case with all limestone caves—but by strong chemical reactions between ancient groundwater and hydrogen sulfide rising from a deep subterranean source. Hydrogen sulfide associated with petroleum deposits in the rich Delaware Basin field was believed to have been chemically converted to sulfuric acid, which could eat into limestone like gasoline poured into a styrofoam cup. In the early 1980s, few in the geological establishment had accepted this theory, originally applied to Carlsbad Cavern. But then the discovery and early exploration of Lechuguilla had confirmed it.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/journey-into-lechuguilla-cave.html

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What Exactly is Karst?

Why is Karst Important?

Two million people in central Texas get their drinking water from the karst aquifer known as the Edwards Aquifer (Sharp and Banner, 1997). This resource is especially important for central Texas as the region becomes more urbanized. With a higher density of people, central Texas will face higher demand and increased pollution. Just like rainwater, pollutants can easily pass through the karstified limestone. Another difficulty is that streams and surface runoff entering the aquifer via sinkholes and caves bypass the natural filtration produced by seeping through soil and bedrock. This direct recharge quickly replenishes the water supply; however, it also leaves the aquifer particularly vulnerable to contamination (Drew and Hötzl, 1999).

http://www.esi.utexas.edu/outreach/caves/karst.php

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Texas study shows water pollution near gas drilling

The effort focused on water quality in the Barnett Shale, a gas-rich geologic formation that underlies a 5,000-square-mile area in 17 counties of north Texas.
Researchers sampled 100 water wells from the Trinity and Woodbine aquifers, overlying the Barnett Shale and, as "reference sites" from the Nacatoch aquifer east of the Barnett Shale.

One piece of potential good news was that the study detected none of the family of BTEX chemicals - benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and zylenes - in the drinking water, a possible indication that chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking" process had not migrated into the water wells.

But, researchers detected the highest levels of metal contaminants within 3 kilometers of natural gas wells, including several samples that had arsenic and selenium above concentrations considered safe by EPA. Areas lying outside of active drilling areas or outside the Barnett Shale did not contain the same elevated levels for most of the metals.

http://www.wvgazette.com/News/201307260097

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How Oil and Gas Disposal Wells Can Cause Earthquakes

http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/tag/earthquake/

How Fracking Disposal Wells Can Cause Earthquakes

The culprit of earthquakes near fracking sites is not believed to be the act of drilling and fracturing the shale itself, but rather the disposal wells. Disposal wells are the final resting place for used drilling fluid. These waste wells are located thousands of feet underground, encased in layers of concrete. They usually store the waste from several different wells.There are more than 50,000 disposal wells in Texas servicing more than 216,000 active drilling wells, according the the Railroad Commission. Each well uses about 4.5 million gallons of chemical-laced water, according to hydrolicfracturing.com.
“The model I use is called the air hockey table model,” says Cliff Frohlich, a research scientist at the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas at Austin. “You have an air hockey table, suppose you tilt it, if there’s no air on, the puck will just sit there. Gravity wants it to move but it doesn’t because there friction [with the table surface].”
But if you turn the air on for the air hockey table, the puck slips.

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As Texas Towns Shake, Regulators Sit Still

December 6, 2013

http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2013/12/06/as-north-texas-shakes-railroad-commission-sits-still/

State Oil and Gas Regulator Says No Changes Needed After Latest Earthquake Swarm

After twenty minor earthquakes in a month, residents in the small towns of Azle and Springtown outside of Fort Worth are understandably confused about why their once-stable region is now trembling on a near-daily basis.
Teachers in the Azle school district are taking a page from the California playbook and holding earthquake drills for students. Inspectors are making regular visits to the earthen Eagle Mountain Lake dam, as well as others in the area, checking for damage. (So far they’ve found none.) And locals like Rebecca Williams are constantly looking at their own homes for damage. So far she’s found cracks in her home, driveway and in a retaining wall in her backyard.
The quakes have been small, below the threshold that is known to cause significant damage. But they’ve unnerved residents like Williams, who moved out to Eagle Mountain Lake looking for some peace and quiet.
“You can actually see my house rocking from side to side,” Williams says. She was at home when the largest of the quakes (magnitude 3.6) struck on the evening of November 19th. “I tried to get up and run downstairs,” she says. “And for a moment, I couldn’t run, because the house was shaking so bad!”
So what’s behind the tremors?
There were no quakes in the Dallas-Fort Worth and surrounding areas (including Azle) before 2007, according to records from the United States Geological Survey. But the region is part of the Barnett Shale, where the drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” has taken off in recent years, leading some to question whether or not fracking is at fault.
Fracking is probably not directly causing the quakes. But a byproduct of all that drilling – wastewater – could be the culprit. Studies of other earthquake swarms in this region of Texas, as well as in other states like Arkansas and Ohio, have shown that the injection of that drilling wastewater deep underground can cause faults to slip, triggering quakes.
When drillers go after deposits of oil and gas through fracking, they’re typically using water to do it — millions of gallons per well. When that water comes back up, it’s called “flowback.” And when drillers reach the oil and gas deposits, a large amount of dirty water mixed with the oil and gas comes back up with it, called “produced water.” The standard industry practice is to dispose of that wastewater (both the fracking flowback and produced water) by injecting it deep underground.
The amount of wastewater produced by oil and gas drilling in Texas is substantial. The state is currently disposing of some 290 million barrels (or nine billion gallons) of wastewater a month. To put that number into perspective, a year’s worth of the drilling wastewater being disposed of in Texas is close to the same amount of water currently sitting in Lake Buchanan, a large reservoir that provides drinking water for Central Texas.

In some areas of Texas where that wastewater is injected into existing faults (some of which have been dormant until now) at high pressure, quakes can occur. At the same time, there are tens of thousands of disposal wells in Texas, and the geology varies across the state. Not all of them are causing quakes.
Texas also isn’t alone in seeing more shaking than its used to. ”The number of earthquakes has increased dramatically over the past few years within the central and eastern United States,” the United States Geological Survey says on its website. “More than 300 earthquakes above a magnitude 3.0 occurred in the three years from 2010-2012, compared with an average rate of 21 events per year observed from 1967-2000.” The USGS says that at some of those locations, disposal wells are behind the quakes.

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Amid a New Swarm of Quakes, Researchers Head to Irving

January 5, 2015

http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2015/01/05/amid-a-new-swarm-in-quakes-researchers-head-to-irving/

Updated 1/6/14 with more comment from Railroad Commission and information on Tuesday January 6th earthquake.

A team of seismologists headed to the North Texas town of Irving Monday. Like some other Texas towns, Irving has experienced scores of small earthquakes lately, 20 since last September, including a magnitude 3.5 quake that struck on January 6th. And the city is hoping to figure out what’s behind the shaking.
The upsurge in quakes started in Texas around the time the oil and gas boom took hold several years ago. Residents in many parts of the state blame the them on wastewater disposal wells, where fluid byproducts of oil and gas drilling are pumped deep into the ground. Scientists have shown how injecting fluid into the ground can cause earthquakes.

After a spate of quakes in the North Texas town of Azle, the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state’s oil and gas regulator, hired a seismologist, Dr. David Craig Pearson, and passed new regulations for disposal wells. The Commission says it is not investigating the Irving quakes.

“The Railroad Commission is not investigating seismic activity around Irving,” Ramona Nye, a spokesperson for the Commission wrote in an email to StateImpact Texas. “Specifically, there are no disposal wells in Dallas County, and there is only one natural gas well in the vicinity, and it is an inactive well.”

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Sinkholes in Texas

October 3, 2014 |

A massive sinkhole near Daisetta, Texas is seen Wednesday afternoon, May 7, 2008. The sinkhole swallowed up oil field equipment and some vehicles in southeast Texas and continued to grow.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/slideshow/Sinkholes-in-Texas-94886/photo-6948939.php

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Red Tides: California

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Ocean ecosystems plagued by agricultural runoff

March 10, 2005

Researchers have long suspected that fertilizer runoff from big farms can trigger sudden explosions of marine algae capable of disrupting ocean ecosystems and even producing "dead zones" in the sea. Now a new study by Stanford University scientists presents the first direct evidence linking large-scale coastal farming to massive algal blooms in the sea.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/march16/gulf-030905.html

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Harmful Algae & Red Tide Regional Monitoring Program News

19 October 2012 - The Symposium of the Conference

Harmful Algal Blooms in the California Current

http://www.sccoos.org/data/habs/news.php

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Could it be a combination of pollution, including harmful algal blooms, that continues to make animals, including people ill, that go swimming for certain parts of the year.

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Red tide

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_tide

- The debate over the cause of red tides is controversial. Red tides occur naturally off coasts all over the world. Not all red tides have toxins or are harmful. -

The occurrence of red tides in some locations appears to be entirely natural (algal blooms are a seasonal occurrence resulting from coastal upwelling, a natural result of the movement of certain ocean currents) while in others they appear to be a result of increased nutrient loading from human activities. The growth of marine phytoplankton is generally limited by the availability of nitrates and phosphates, which can be abundant in agricultural run-off as well as coastal upwelling zones. Coastal water pollution produced by humans and systematic increase in sea water temperature have also been implicated as contributing factors in red tides. Other factors such as iron-rich dust influx from large desert areas such as the Saharan desert are thought to play a major role in causing red tides. Some algal blooms on the Pacific coast have also been linked to occurrences of large-scale climatic oscillations such as El Niño events. While red tides in the Gulf of Mexico have been occurring since the time of early explorers such as Cabeza de Vaca, it is unclear what initiates these blooms and how large a role anthropogenic and natural factors play in their development. It is also debated whether the apparent increase in frequency and severity of algal blooms in various parts of the world is in fact a real increase or is due to increased observation effort and advances in species identification methods...

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California Lake’s Toxic Algae Among Worst in U.S.

KQED Science | September 24, 2013

A lake near Santa Cruz has the highest levels of toxic algae in the state, and some of the highest in the country, according to a new study by the National Wildlife Federation and the San Francisco-based Resource Media, a non-profit outreach firm that specializes in environmental issues.

The report highlights Pinto Lake, which is in a park just outside of Watsonville, near the Monterey coast. Every year, it suffers from blooms of cyanobacteria which can sicken people and kill animals. The health risks for humans range from rashes and nausea to liver or kidney damage.

http://blogs.kqed.org/science/2013/09/24/california-lakes-toxic-algae-among-worst-in-u-s/

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On Calif. coast, biotoxins cause deadly sea lion seizures, seafood scare

August 26, 2014

An outbreak of algae-produced biotoxins that attack animals' brains also poses a grave risk to humans

The genesis of domoic acid

While the algae in Monterey, produced by the Pseudo-nitzschia genus of phytoplankton, are a common occurrence along the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines and around the world, its production of domoic acid is not.

First discovered in 1987 when 107 people on Prince Edward Island fell ill after eating mussels harboring domoic acid, the algae occasionally produce this deadly toxin, which scientists believe is triggered by changing ocean conditions and surges of nitrogen into bodies of water.

Once produced by the algae, domoic acid quickly works its way up the food chain, first gobbled up by shellfish and plankton-eating fish, like sardines and anchovies, that harbor the toxin in their guts. Next in line are sea lions, brown pelicans, otters, whales and dolphins, all of which have been stranding in large numbers recently, or, in the case of pelicans, literally dropping dead out of the sky.

Once ingested, the toxin immediately attacks the brain by rapidly shrinking the hippocampus, causing loss of motor coordination, amnesia, violent seizures, vomiting, permanent neurological damage and even heart failure within two days.

But domoic acid also poses a grave risk to humans, which is why the California Department of Public Health closed certain fisheries up the coast in Monterey and Santa Cruz counties in April after high levels of the acid were reported by a team of marine scientists at University of California, Santa Cruz, that has been monitoring domoic acid for 14 years.

“The danger lies in the accumulation,” said Clarissa Anderson, one of the marine scientists in Santa Cruz tracking the growth of domoic acid events. “It's not horribly toxic unless it accumulates at high levels.”

But Anderson says that concentrations reached dangerously high levels this spring all over the California coast, particularly in Monterey.

More research needed

Part of the problem is that monitoring of domoic acid is limited to wharfs close to shore, but the fish harboring the toxins – and the algae producing the toxic blooms – may be living just offshore, where sampling tends to be either too expensive or too technically difficult to do regularly.

http://www.care2.com/news/member/914755234/3799239

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Wedge of warm seawater known as 'the blob' blamed for marine havoc

Apr 24, 2015

http://phys.org/news/2015-04-wedge-seawater-blob-blamed-marine.html?utm_source=menu&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=item-menu

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Mercury in coastal fog linked to upwelling of deep ocean water

December 4, 2012

http://phys.org/news/2012-12-mercury-coastal-fog-linked-upwelling.html#nRlv

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Mexico City: water torture on a grand and ludicrous scale
http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/feb/05/mexico-city-water-torture-city-sewage

Floating within the city's water supply are also endocrine disruptor compounds, such as certain insecticides, hydrocarbons, polyaromatics, as well as pharmaceuticals and steroids that can disrupt the normal activity of human hormones, and can affect several inner organs and even reproductive organs (causing lower sperm count or fecundity). These aggressive chemicals commonly found in tap water aren't eliminated by saturated carbon or ozone filters or by boiling and thus are often present in tap water in buildings such as mine and even in the water distributed in plastic jugs.

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Water Cut Off to 5 Million People in Mexico City

Water to 5 million of Mexico city’s residents will be cut off for 36 hours over Easter weekend due to record low water reserves.

http://ecolocalizer.com/2009/04/11/water-cut-off-to-5-million-people-in-mexico-city/

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Water Pressure in Baja California Sur

by Bryan Jáuregui The first half of this article, Arsenic and Old Mines, was published in the Fall 2013 issue of the Journal del Pacifico.

http://tosea.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/water-pressure-in-baja-california-sur/

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Many people in Mexico rely on certain rivers in America that flow in through Mexico, this has been going on for hundreds of years. Recently, some have claimed that certain natural rivers that used to go into Mexico are now lacking enough water for the people of Mexico to use. This water crisis has caused a problem for many people living in Mexico that now question where they will get their water from. This has also caused a dispute for water rights on the American and Mexican international borders. Many people from Mexico want to leave Mexico and go to other countries to seek a better quality of life. We need to reform the government of Mexico and end the corruption in the political system. We should ensure that every person in every country in the world has access to clean drinking water and a good quality of life.

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Pollution Science 101 - Mexico

PollutionScience101Mexico.Blogspot.com

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Water Quality Issues of the California-Baja California Border Region

http://books.google.com/books?id=2Q5S1FR9neMC&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=baja+california+pollution&source=bl&ots=t0-2ZXkzk6&sig=2x3POnz4DEQcpeb67kD8DgHLsHg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=3BYvU_HDCYmD2gWk9YH4Aw&ved=0CFgQ

6AEwBjgK#v=onepage&q=baja%20california%20pollution&f=false

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Risk screening for exposure to groundwater pollution in a wastewater irrigation district of the Mexico City region.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1566683/

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Mexico's vaquita on brink of extinction

http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/aug/10/vaquita-porpoise-brink-extinction-gulf-california/?st

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Marine biotoxins and harmful algal blooms in Mexico’s Pacific littoral

http://www.monae.org/documents/hab_mexico.pdf

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The Importance of Having Insects

May 1, 2019

A number of sensational new papers warn of a global insect die-off. Has the apocalypse arrived in California?

https://baynature.org/2019/05/01/the-importance-of-having-insects/

In 1962, at the dawn of the American environmental movement, Rachel Carson imagined a scene in which the widespread use of pesticide had killed so many birds that the traditional melodic arrival of migratory songbirds to small town America would instead become a “silent spring.”

“No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world,” Carson wrote. “The people had done it themselves.”

Carson, and the science, conservation and government groups that took the problem of DDT pesticide seriously, are often credited as the reason we have pelicans, eagles, osprey, condors, and peregrine falcons flying in California today. As far as slowing what Carson labeled “the fad of gardening by poison,” however, Silent Spring changed little. Global pesticide production has skyrocketed since the 1960s. The use of the pesticides called neonicotinoids increased dramatically in California from their introduction in the 1990s to a high of 450,000 pounds applied in 2015. Habitat destruction has proceeded apace. And meanwhile, in a problem Carson didn’t foresee, the Earth has warmed.

Nearly 60 years after the book’s publication, the last year has seen a widespread revival of popular concern about a silent spring. This time it’s insects, the largely unnoticed yet critical food for birds and much of the rest of life on Earth, that seem to be disappearing. Once again, many of the scientists sounding the alarm also suggest it is human choices to blame.

The concern rests on a number of observations, but scientifically primarily on four recent papers. In the first, in 2017, European scientists showed that insect biomass had declined by 75 percent in measurements taken 27 years apart in a series of German nature reserves. In the second paper, in 2018, scientists showed that arthropods in the soil had declined between measurements 36 years apart in a Puerto Rican rainforest, which the authors attributed to warming temperatures in the tropics. In the third, in January 2019, a research team tallied up all the scientific papers they could find about insect population declines, some 73 in total, to see where around the world the insect decline had been reported. They reported that the answer was pretty much everywhere people had looked, though with a bias toward developed countries, which meant 40 percent of insects were near extinction, with biomass declining at a rate of 2.5 percent per year. The blame this time went to all of the above: pesticide use and pollution, habitat loss, climate change. And then in March 2019, scientists at the University of New Hampshire reported that after examining 119 species of New Hampshire bees in museum collections, 14 were in significant decline.

It appears humanity has triggered an “Insect Apocalypse,” as an eye-popping June 2018 piece in the New York Times Magazine labeled it. “Insect Armageddon,” the scientist behind the German bioreserve study called it in the Guardian. Although the studies and stories have been largely global, in Northern California, the West Coast monarch’s reported 99.4-percent decline from the 1980s to 2018 seemingly fit right into the widespread gloom that we’re witness to things falling apart. “An alarming, precipitous drop in the western monarch butterfly population,” Peter Fimrite wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2019, “could spell doom for the species, a scenario biologists say could also plunge bug-eating birds and other species into similar death spirals.”

With considerably less fanfare other butterflies mirrored the monarch in 2018. Art Shapiro, a professor of entomology at UC Davis and one of Northern California’s foremost butterfly authorities, started his annual population survey report, “It was a terrible — perhaps even catastrophic — butterfly year at all elevations and no, we don’t know why.” For the first time since he “became butterfly aware” as an eight year old, Shapiro wrote, he didn’t see a single monarch egg or larvae. And what better ambassador for the decline of insects than the beautiful, fragile butterfly?

But the headlines have generated a critique of the science and the reporting of it that manages to be both less apocalyptic and more unsettling, and that boils down to, in essence, if all the insects on earth were declining how would we really even know? Each of the scientific studies, provocative as they are, has methodological limitations that prevent easy global conclusions. The more you’d like to pin the story down to a particular region or particular cause, the harder it becomes. Even the headlines about collapse and apocalypse aren’t particularly novel. If 2018 was a catastrophic year for butterflies, as Shapiro wrote, so was 1986, when John Garth and J.W. Tilden wrote in a field guide called California Butterflies, “Something sinister is happening to California’s butterflies. If one returns to a locality in which a butterfly was found fifty, twenty-five, or even ten years ago, it may not be found there now.”

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More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas

October 18, 2017

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809

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What’s Causing the Sharp Decline in Insects, and Why It Matters

July 6, 2016

Insect populations are declining dramatically in many parts of the world, recent studies show. Researchers say various factors, from monoculture farming to habitat loss, are to blame for the plight of insects, which are essential to agriculture and ecosystems.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/insect_numbers_declining_why_it_matters

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Decline in insect populations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations

Several studies report what appears to be a substantial decline in insect populations. Some of the insects most affected include bees, butterflies, moths, beetles, dragonflies and damselflies. Anecdotal evidence has been offered of much greater apparent abundance of insects in the 20th century; recollections of the windscreen phenomenon are an example.[2]

Possible causes of the decline have been identified as habitat destruction, including intensive agriculture, the use of pesticides (particularly insecticides), urbanization, and industralization; introduced species; and climate change.[3] Not all insect orders are affected in the same way; many groups are the subject of limited research, and comparative figures from earlier decades are often not available. The decline of the scientific field of entomology may also be contributing to errors in data analysis and overgeneralization from limited findings, resulting in exaggeration of the decline in insect populations.

In 2018 the German government initiated an "Action Programme for Insect Protection",[4][5] and in 2019 a group of 27 British entomologists and ecologists wrote an open letter calling on the research establishment in the UK "to enable intensive investigation of the real threat of ecological disruption caused by insect declines without delay".[6]

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As Insect Populations Decline, Scientists Are Trying to Understand Why

November 1, 2018

The real story behind reports of an “insect Armageddon” is more nuanced—but probably just as unsettling

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/as-insect-populations-decline-scientists-are-trying-to-understand-why/

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Last year, 40% of honey-bee colonies in the US died. But bees aren't the only insects disappearing in unprecedented numbers.

Jun 21, 2019

https://www.businessinsider.com/insects-dying-off-sign-of-6th-mass-extinction-2019-2

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Plummeting insect numbers 'threaten collapse of nature'

Feb 10, 2019

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/plummeting-insect-numbers-threaten-collapse-of-nature

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California power shutdowns raise air pollution worries

October 12, 2019

https://phys.org/news/2019-10-california-power-shutdowns-air-pollution.html

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What the West's Ancient Droughts Say About Its Future

February 15, 2014

The American West could face centuries of parched land, as it has in the past.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/2/140214-drought-california-prehistory-science-climate-san-francisco-2/

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Finding California's Climate Past and Future Inside of Its Trees

In order to better understand just how extreme the state's weather has gotten, scientists looked to the ring patterns of 500-year-old oaks.


    Jan 18, 2018

https://psmag.com/environment/finding-climate-change-answers-in-the-trees

Reading in the Rings

Griffin and a colleague, Kevin Anchukaitis, collected pencil-thin cores from living Blue Oaks, as well as cross sections from stumps of trees that have been dead for decades or centuries. By matching up the patterns of wide and narrow rings among their samples, living and dead, Griffin created a 1,200-year chronology of Blue Oak growth in California. In some years, large growth rings across all the samples indicated excellent moisture conditions for the trees. In other years, called "pointer years," dry conditions caused tiny rings, sometimes only a couple cell layers thick.

Griffin has these pointer years memorized, a dendrochronologist's party trick. "1580, 1613, 1654, 1795..." he recited, "There's a long list of these individual years that were really hard on all the trees."

But to determine whether any past droughts, indicated by poor tree growth, were more severe than the California drought as of 2018, Griffin had to get quantitative. Griffin carefully measured the exact width of every annual growth ring from his samples, and then correlated ring size with rainfall for each year in the past century, when precipitation has been measured directly.

Once he calibrated this relationship between tree growth and precipitation, Griffin could use the size of the Blue Oak rings to estimate precipitation for the entire 1,200-year length of his tree ring chronology.

The trees revealed that the 2012–14 drought period was not the driest in the last millennium in terms of precipitation. Two separate spans, each lasting three years, had even less rainfall: 1898–1900 and 1527–29.

However, precipitation doesn't tell the whole story of a drought. High temperatures accelerate the evaporation of what little moisture might be available to plants in the soil, and California has warmed in recent decades.

"Temperature is playing an increasing role in soil moisture and water balance," Griffin said.

So he and Anchukaitis decided to re-run their analysis using another environmental variable besides precipitation. They chose the Palmer Drought Severity Index, an estimate of soil moisture that accounts for the combined effects of precipitation and temperature. Compared to precipitation alone, PDSI paints a more realistic picture of drought as experienced by Blue Oak trees—or humans, for that matter.

In terms of PDSI, Griffin and Anchukaitis found that the 2012–14 drought was the most severe three-year span in the last millennium in California. Soils in 2014 were drier than any single year in the 1,200-year tree growth chronology. California's recent drought was a truly extreme event, even before it stretched into 2015 and 2016.

"The high temperature was something different about this particular drought," Griffin said.

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Evidence of Ancient Abrupt Climate Change Found in Arctic

Jul 09, 2018

Sought for decades, the physical traces of a profound climate feedback event are located

https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/evidence-ancient-abrupt-climate-change-found-arctic

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Cloned ancient redwood trees could be the key to fighting climate change

January 10, 2019

https://nypost.com/2019/01/10/cloned-ancient-redwood-trees-could-be-the-key-to-fighting-climate-change/

Trees cloned from ancient redwood DNA could help combat climate change, according to arborists from a nonprofit group.

An environmental organization called Archangel Ancient Tree Archive planted a “super grove” of 75 redwood saplings in San Francisco’s Presidio park on Dec. 14. Saplings from the project are also developing in groves in Canada, England, France, New Zealand and Australia, Quartz reported.

If the trees grow as planned, each mature redwood could pull as much as 250 tons of carbon dioxide from the air, according to the group.

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From Lake Elsinore, ancient tales of climate change

July 7, 2013

https://www.ocregister.com/2013/07/07/from-lake-elsinore-ancient-tales-of-climate-change/

As the glaciers of the last ice age retreated across North America, the region that would become Southern California experienced two sharp drops in available freshwater – the result of climate change driven in part by rising greenhouse gases, according to a newly published study.

And while the study, led by a Cal State Fullerton researcher, does not attempt to project future climate effects, it does reveal an ancient record of sudden, climate-driven changes in water supplies.

The slower, natural buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, as the last ice age closed, also could have implications for how similar changes might unfold amid the much more rapid, human-driven buildup taking place today.

The new data emerged from cores of sediment drilled from the bottom of Lake Elsinore, offering glimpses of the Southern California environment tens of thousands of years ago.

“Different lakes tell us different stories,” said Matthew Kirby, an associate geological sciences professor at Cal State Fullerton and lead author of the study. “Some tell us really good stories about floods, some tell us really good stories about droughts, some tell us really good stories about changes in vegetation.

“By looking at these sites, we’ve put together this remarkable picture of what the Southern California climate was like for the past 33,000 years.”

In this case, Kirby and his team focused on Lake Elsinore’s tales of rainfall and river flows: where the rain was coming from, and how strongly the San Jacinto River was flowing.

At two critical points, 14,700 and 12,900 years ago, freshwater flows dropped suddenly. And in each case, these dramatic shifts took less than 70 years.

“That is actually something, in our lifetime, that we would notice,” Kirby said. “We’re talking about fundamental shifts in the state of the climate. Once it shifted, it didn’t return back to pre-existing conditions.”

Kirby and his fellow researchers used two proxy measurements to detect past climate shifts. One was the number of sand grains in the sediment cores; more sand equals stronger water flows.

The other involved the tracking of hydrogen isotopes – different forms of hydrogen atoms – found in the wax of leaves that washed into the lake and became trapped in the mud at its bottom, eventually becoming part of the deep sediment.

Lighter versions of hydrogen atoms are found in rainstorms originating in the North Pacific, while the heavier version, known as deuterium, is more common in monsoon moisture from the south.

“Different storms from different regions have characteristic fingerprints,” said Sarah Feakins, an assistant professor of earth sciences at USC and a co-author of the study.

The two methods also complement each other. The sand-grain measurements reveal abrupt shifts, while the leaf-wax method reveals more gradual changes.

As the glaciers retreated and greenhouse gases built up, storm tracks from the subtropical Pacific came to dominate Southern California – an effect that continues today, Kirby said.

The region also became significantly drier between 19,000 and 9,000 years ago.

Separate studies using computer models of climate have shown that Southern California appears to be in for another drying episode as the climate warms.

“I think the caution is, we are going to get drier,” Kirby said. “Our practices of water in Southern California will have to be more like the water practices in Phoenix – less natural grass, less water-dependent vegetation.”

And if the past is any indication, sharp drops in freshwater availability can happen suddenly, in a matter of decades – perhaps causing further strain in a region that is already experiencing tightened supplies.

Those same climate models also might need updating, Kirby said. Modelers trying to predict future climate effects typically consider Southern California and the rest of the Southwest as a single unit, governed by the same climate forces, he said.

But while both areas are strongly influenced by large-scale changes in North Atlantic ocean circulation, winter storms and monsoons from the south prevail in the interior Southwest, such as Arizona and New Mexico, while winter storms alone dominate in the coastal Southwest.

“We need to start to break apart these regional patterns of climate change,” Kirby said. “We need to talk about climate change on very specific scales.

“What makes Southern California really specialized is it’s a winter-dominated hydrological regime,” he said. “You can’t just say what happens in the interior Southwest is the same thing that happens here.”

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This Ancient Fruit Holds Secrets for How to Farm in Climate Change

October 4, 2019

Respect your elder-berries.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2019/10/elderberries-drought-climate-change-berries-syrup-kernza-california-cloverleaf-farming/

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Click here for part 1 of "Pollution Science 101 - Cancer Investigated (California."

                     PollutionScience101CancerInvestigated.Blogspot.com

Pollution Science 101 - California

Friday, November 1, 2019

NASA Study Connects Southern California, Mexico Faults

Energy's Latest Battleground: Fracking For Uranium

http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2013/01/23/fracking-for-uranium/

February 11, 2013

No tour of Uranium Energy Corp.’s processing plant in Hobson, Tex. is complete until CEO Amir Adnani pries the top off a big black steel drum and invites you to peer inside. There, filled nearly to the brim, is an orange-yellow powder that UEC mined out of the South Texas countryside.

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Texas Sees Renewed Push for Uranium Mining

April 15, 2012

At the back of a South Texas uranium processing facility, a few dozen black container drums stood outside, waiting to be shipped. Each was filled with about $50,000 worth of yellowcake, a powdery substance created from raw uranium.

https://www.texastribune.org/2012/04/15/texas-sees-renewed-push-uranium-mining/

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Uranium Mining Pollution near the King Ranch

Uranium Mining Pollution near the King Ranch

http://www.txpeer.org/toxictour/uri.html

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Uranium Mining in Texas

http://www.uraniuminfo.org/uranium-mining-texas

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http://www.tgpc.state.tx.us/subcommittees/POE/FAQs/Uhow_mined_FAQ.pdf

Exploration drilling for uranium and open pit mining of uranium are regulated by the Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC). There are no longer any active open pit uranium mines in Texas. Most of the old open pit mines and mill sites have been reclaimed through a program managed by the RRC.

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Uranium series disequilibrium in the Bargmann property area of Karnes County, Texas

http://www.osti.gov/scitech/biblio/631192

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PANTEX: Pollution in the Panhandle

PANTEX: Pollution in the Panhandle

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Revealed: Texas officials covered up dangerously radioactive tap water for years

12 Nov 2010

Texas officials charged with protecting the environment and public health have for years made arbitrary subtractions to the measured levels of radiation delivered by water utilities across the state, according to a series of investigative reports out of Houston.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/texas-tap-water-contaminated-radiation-independent-tests-find/

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Spatial Distribution of Orofacial Cleft Defect Births in Harris County, Texas, and Radium in the Public Water Supplies: A Persistent Association?

http://www.texmed.org/Template.aspx?id=7287#sthash.8WFGENB4.dpuf

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Effect of biogas generation on radon emissions from landfills receivingradium-bearing waste from shale gas development

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10962247.2012.696084

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Radon Distribution in Domestic Water of Texas

https://info.ngwa.org/GWOL/pdf/882546405.PDF

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Radon in Ground Waters of the South Texas Uranium District

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB4QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.researchgate.net%2Fprofile%2FPhilippe_Tissot%2Fpublication%2F228567249_Radon

_in_Ground_Waters_of_the_South_Texas_Uranium_District%2Flinks%2F0c960519ef69ecb1bc000000.

pdf&ei=XEq5VJ2vI4W0ogSKs4D4Aw&usg=AFQjCNE7O6ipMtSAHzOGeNCJb19KmOgH0g&sig2=PaMLh9H3RRGxvMAFGlL5yQ

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EPA's Map of Radon Zones Texas

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Radioactive landfills & injection wells in Texas

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Are Drilling Waste Pits a Threat to Texas Groundwater?

April 2014

http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/2014/04/01/are-drilling-waste-pits-threat-to-texas-groundwater/

Reserve Pits

Concern over Leaching

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Injection Wells: The Poison Beneath Us

http://www.propublica.org/article/injection-wells-the-poison-beneath-us

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At Least 40% of Active Texas Landfills are Leaking Toxins -

December 17, 2013

http://www.publicnewsservice.org/2013-12-17/waste-reduction-recycling/at-least-40-of-active-texas-landfills-are-leaking-toxins/a36302-1#sthash.ui72bayo.dpuf

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UPDATED: Problems With a West Texas Radioactive Waste Dump Get Buried

http://www.texasobserver.org/problems-with-a-west-texas-radioactive-waste-dump-get-buried/

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County of 95 Sees Opportunity in Toxic Waste

AUG. 7, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/us/a-texas-county-sees-opportunity-in-toxic-waste.html?_r=0

Uranium Mining Pollution
near the King Ranch

Uranium Mining Pollution
near the King Ranch

Effect of biogas generation on radon emissions from landfills receiving
radium-bearing waste from shale gas development