Hyperactive Comets Hint at Origins of Earth’s Oceans

Nola Taylor
Scientific American

A new study suggests primordial seawater may lurk hidden at the hearts of many comets

The mysterious source of Earth’s water has intrigued generations of scientists. Learning how this liquid—the cornerstone of life as we know it—made its way to our planet has sweeping implications, for the possibility of alien biospheres not only elsewhere in the solar system but also on worlds orbiting other stars. But understanding how water arrived on Earth has proven surprisingly difficult.

After the sun formed from a cloud of dust and gas, the remaining protoplanetary disk of material was probably rich in water’s raw ingredients, hydrogen and oxygen. But conventional wisdom holds that the newborn star’s radiance boiled away much of those volatile gases from the inner solar system, leaving mostly dry material from which to build Earth and the other rocky planets. The majority of Earth’s moisture must have arrived later, by some other means.

For decades, scientists considered icy comets of the outer solar system as the most likely suspects, until observations revealed that most comets’ compositions did not quite match that of Earth’s oceans. And so consensus shifted toward asteroids as the source of Earth’s seas, since these rocky bodies also contain nontrivial amounts of water and are conveniently located close by, where they could have easily rained down on the young Earth. Now, however, an investigation of comet 46P/Wirtanen suggests that the bulk of Earth’s water may have come from comets after all, even though asteroids likely still played an important role.

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UN & World Bank Want to Tax Water

Armstrong Economics

Well, all the fools who believe in climate change/global warming will be ecstatic to know that they can help the planet through the new proposal from the United Nations and World Bank. These wonderful entities are now forecasting a shortage of water in places like the Middle East by 2050. The solution will be simple: they will tax the rest of us and raise the price of water so that we can “conserve” to help other counties from running out of water.

I really do not understand how raising taxes on water in the USA could help to preserve water in the Middle East — but hey, what do I know? What I do know is that Al Gore said New York would be under water by now because the ice caps were melting. That has not happened, yet now there will be a shortage of water? Does that imply that the ice caps grew larger? This is very confusing and the analysis is rather stupid. They assume whatever trend is in motion will remain in motion; so if the stock market rises today, well it will rise every day forever. Strange analysis.

California Water Wars: Another Form of Asset Stripping?

Ellen Brown
Web of Debt 

In California’s epic drought, wars over water rights continue, while innovative alternatives for increasing the available water supply go untapped.

Wars over California’s limited water supply have been going on for at least a century. Water wars have been the subject of some vintage movies, including the 1958 hit The Big Country starring Gregory Peck, Clint Eastwood’s 1985 Pale Rider, 1995’s Waterworld with Kevin Costner, and the 2005 film Batman Begins. Most acclaimed was the 1975 Academy Award winner Chinatown with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, involving a plot between a corrupt Los Angeles politician and land speculators to fabricate the 1937 drought in order to force farmers to sell their land at low prices. The plot was rooted in historical fact, reflecting battles between Owens Valley farmers and Los Angeles urbanites over water rights.

Today the water wars continue on a larger scale with new players. It’s no longer just the farmers against the ranchers or the urbanites. It’s the people against the new “water barons”  – Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Monsanto, the Bush family, and their ilk – who are buying up water all over the world at an unprecedented pace. 

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China has lost 55% of its most valuable resource

Sovereign Man

A few days ago I had a conversation with the Chief Operating Officer for our agricultural fund in Chile.

We were discussing water, and he told me that roughly 60% of California right now is suffering “extreme drought” conditions. 30% of the state is in “severe drought”. And 10% of the state is only under “drought”.

In other words, roughly the entire state– the 8th largest economy in the world– is facing a severe shortage of water.

But if you think that’s bad, China is about to take over the spotlight yet again.

A study by China’s Ministry of Water Resources found that approximately 55% of China’s 50,000 rivers that existed in the 1990s have disappeared.

Moreover, China is over-exploiting its groundwater by 22 billion cubic meters per year; yet its per-capita water consumption is less than one third of the global average.
This is astounding data.

More than 400 major cities in China are short of water, with some 110 facing “serious scarcity”.

Beijing and other northern cities get most of their water from underground aquifers. Over the last five decades, China has had to drill increasingly deeper to gain access to water.

Another challenge China faces is logistics. More than 60% of China’s water is in the southern part of the country, but most of the usage is in the north and along the coastlines.

When you consider that this is a country that has almost one fifth of the world’s population and is soon to become the world’s biggest economy, this is rapidly becoming a global problem.

The Chinese are of course well aware of this and are trying to mitigate the consequences by diversifying internationally, or as I call, planting multiple flags.
In China’s case, it’s a ‘water flag’.

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New evidence for 'oceans' of water deep in Earth: Water bound in mantle rock alters view of Earth's composition

Science Daily

Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico report evidence for potentially oceans worth of water deep beneath the United States. Though not in the familiar liquid form -- the ingredients for water are bound up in rock deep in the Earth's mantle -- the discovery may represent the planet's largest water reservoir.

The presence of liquid water on the surface is what makes our "blue planet" habitable, and scientists have long been trying to figure out just how much water may be cycling between Earth's surface and interior reservoirs through plate tectonics.

Northwestern geophysicist Steve Jacobsen and University of New Mexico seismologist Brandon Schmandt have found deep pockets of magma located about 400 miles beneath North America, a likely signature of the presence of water at these depths. The discovery suggests water from the Earth's surface can be driven to such great depths by plate tectonics, eventually causing partial melting of the rocks found deep in the mantle.

The findings, to be published June 13 in the journal Science, will aid scientists in understanding how the Earth formed, what its current composition and inner workings are and how much water is trapped in mantle rock.

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The ‘Drinkable Book’ Could Save Millions Of Lives

Inspire More

The revolutionary Drinkable Book, created by Dr. Theresa Dankovich, is a project that will have great impact in the developing world.

Important highlights about the book:

• costs only cents to make
• each filter can sustain a person for 30 days
• each book contains enough filters to sustain a person for 4 years
• bacteria count reduced by 99%, making previously contaminated water of equivalent quality to U.S. tap water
• filters and kills waterborne diseases like cholera, typhoid and E. coli.

World Bank wants water privatized, despite risks

Al Jazzera

Humans can survive weeks without food, but only days without water — in some conditions, only hours. It may sound clichéd, but it’s no hyperbole: Water is life. So what happens when private companies control the spigot? Evidence from water privatization projects around the world paints a pretty clear picture — public health is at stake. 

In the run-up to its annual spring meeting this month, the World Bank Group, which offers loans, advice and other resources to developing countries, held four days of dialogues in Washington, D.C. Civil society groups from around the world and World Bank Group staff convened to discuss many topics. Water was high on the list.

It’s hard to think of a more important topic. We face a global water crisis, made worse by the warming temperatures of climate change. A quarter of the world’s people don’t have sufficient access to clean drinking water, and more people die every year from waterborne illnesses — such as cholera and typhoid fever — than from all forms of violence, including war, combined. Every hour, the United Nations estimates, 240 babies die from unsafe water.

The World Bank Group pushes privatization as a key solution to the water crisis. It is the largest funder of water management in the developing world, with loans and financing channeled through the group’s International Finance Corporation (IFC). Since the 1980s, the IFC has been promoting these water projects as part of a broader set of privatization policies, with loans and financing tied to enacting austerity measures designed to shrink the state, from the telecom industry to water utilities.
But international advocacy and civil society groups point to the pockmarked record of private-sector water projects and are calling on the World Bank Group to end support for private water.

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areThis Copy and Paste

The Cochabamba Water War of 2000 in 2014

Narco News

Today’s Betrayers Will Not Erase Our Memory 

By Oscar Olivera 

Spokesman for the Water War Coordinating Committee in 2000

Today’s betrayers will not erase our memory: Fourteen years ago we won, today it seems like we lost, but we have to rise again to win, and we already know how to do it.

From April 4 to 14 in the year 2000 the so-called “Final Battle” was waged in Cochabamba, Bolivia to prevent the privatization of our water. It was part of a strategy designed by the people of Cochabamba in the “Water War” that started on November 12, 1999.

Today, after fourteen years of this historic struggle, the people’s demands are still the same: democracy, transparency, participation and an economic model that allows us all to enjoy the riches that our Mother Earth generously provides for the benefit of all.

Contradictorily, some people who are in government today – and who fought against the big transnational companies, against authoritarianism, against the ruling class’ contempt towards our communal ownership models, against corruption and inefficiency in public institutions – have reinstated with these great evils, with “greater efficiency,” against which the people of Cochabamba fought with their only weapons in 2000: their bodies, their blood and their dignity.

The “Mining Law” project in Bolivia is a clear sign of corruption, of public disregard, of imposition, of pride, of this government’s ignorance. But the most terrible thing is returning to the idea of privatizing our water and the complete disregard of our indigenous, farming and urban communities; of how they are being robbed of their unrestricted access to water and how their demands for a better quality of life are being criminalized. Even worse than that is the fact that the interest of these sacred rights and needs are being sacrificed to the needs and interests of a few businessmen, called “cooperatives”, that act as huge middle-men that allow big transnational companies to keep raiding our land. Today, in our April, our memory must remain intact, our victories have to be repeated and the betrayers condemned by our people.

May we have many more Aprils!

To victory, always!

 

Desert Billboard Makes Clean Drinking Water From Thin Air

gajitz.com
Access to potable water is a problem in much of the world, but the impact is felt especially hard in the coastal deserts of Peru. There, annual rainfall is a mere half an inch, but atmospheric humidity is abundant – about 98 percent. Researchers at Peru’s University of Engineering and Technology believed that they could turn that humidity into life-preserving water.

Before this experiment, the people in the villages surrounding Lima got their drinking water from wells. The wells were dirty and polluted, and certainly didn’t provide water that anyone would want to drink. Then a billboard went up that would make life easier for everyone in the area.

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Bottled Water Leeches 24,000 Chemicals into Your Body, Study Finds

 

Natural Society

Several companies have stopped using BPA in plastic production due to consumer outrage, but just because a plastic container says it is “BPA Free” doesn’t mean it’s free of potentially harmful chemicals. As a matter of fact, recent research out of Germany indicates there are more than 24,000 of such chemicals in any given bottle of water—with some of them causing serious hormone-disrupting effects.

According to the story from Goethe University Frankfort, the researchers tested 18 different bottled water products in an effort to look for endocrine disrupting chemicals, or EDCs. They found far more than expected, identifying 24,520 different chemicals in their testing. After isolating the chemicals and determining their impact on the body, the researchers narrowed down those with anti-estrogenic properties to one: DEHF or di(2-ethylhexyl) fumarate. This finding was of major concern.

Out of the 18 different bottled water products, 13 had “significant” anti-estrogenic activity, and 16 out of 18 inhibited the body’s androgen receptors by 90%. In other words, the bottled water was largely wrecking havoc on the human body.

Video: Dangers of Tap Water and How to Protect Yourself

In addition to DEHF, however, the researchers determined there is some yet-unidentified EDCs at work. Something else is causing anti-androgenic effects.

“We confirmed the identity and biological activity of DEHF and additional isomers of dioctyl fumarate and maleate using authentic standards,” the researchers reported in the online journal PLOS One. “Since DEHF is anti-estrogenic but not anti-androgenic we conclude that additional, yet unidentified EDCs must contribute to the antagonistic effect of bottled water.”

Hormone disruption has the potential to cause serious effects on human life, from early maturation in children, to increased risks of certain types of cancers. You can see one of Mike Barrett’s earlier posts outlining some of the nasty effects of BPA. The findings of this recent study, therefore, are nothing to take lightly. We’ve discussed here before how the bottled water industry may encourage you to hydrate while offering a less-than-pure, expensive product.

Read: The Bottled Water Industry Scam

The researchers concluded:

“Moreover, the antagonist activity was very potent. An equivalent of 3.75 ml bottled water inhibited estrogen and androgen receptor by up to 60 and 90 percent. Bottled water from six different countries has been found to contain estrogenic, antiestrogenic, as well as androgenic, progestagenic, and glucocorticoid-like chemicals. This demonstrates that a popular beverage is contaminated with diverse-acting EDCs.”

NASA Spacecraft Data Suggest Water Flowing on Mars

NASA

PASADENA, Calif. -- Observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed possible flowing water during the warmest months on Mars. 

"NASA's Mars Exploration Program keeps bringing us closer to determining whether the Red Planet could harbor life in some form,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said, “and it reaffirms Mars as an important future destination for human exploration." 

Dark, finger-like features appear and extend down some Martian slopes during late spring through summer, fade in winter, and return during the next spring. Repeated observations have tracked the seasonal changes in these recurring features on several steep slopes in the middle latitudes of Mars' southern hemisphere. 

"The best explanation for these observations so far is the flow of briny water," said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson. McEwen is the principal investigator for the orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) and lead author of a report about the recurring flows published in Thursday's edition of the journal Science. 

Some aspects of the observations still puzzle researchers, but flows of liquid brine fit the features' characteristics better than alternate hypotheses. Saltiness lowers the freezing temperature of water. Sites with active flows get warm enough, even in the shallow subsurface, to sustain liquid water that is about as salty as Earth's oceans, while pure water would freeze at the observed temperatures. 

"These dark lineations are different from other types of features on Martian slopes," said Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project Scientist Richard Zurek of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Repeated observations show they extend ever farther downhill with time during the warm season."[...]