Water You Talking About?

Hydrology blog. Grad student. Not a jellyfish. Figuring out how to use this. Are ya ready, kids???

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Climate Change

So I really meant to post this sooner, but school got absolutely crazy. It’s my last semester, and I’m wrapping up my research and trying to tie all my loose ends, so sorry about the gap. 

So, climate change in a nutshell. First I have to talk about the greenhouse effect. In an actual greenhouse, light comes in through the glass, and warms the inside of the building. The glass also keeps heat from dissipating out, so the inside stays nice and toasty, and not too cold for the plants inside. The greenhouse effect is pretty similar. Around the earth, there is a protective layer of gas. Sun shines through, and warms up the earth. Then the earth reflects some of this energy back into space. But not all of it goes into space. The protective layer of gas sends some back to earth. This is a good thing! Right now, the average temperature of the earth is 59 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s the average, over all the earth’s surface. Where I am, it’s WAY hotter than that. When it gets that cold, we put on our sweatshirts. But someone living in, like, northern Alaska probably sees that as pool weather. So if you took the average of the every place on earth, you’d get 59 degrees. Without the greenhouse effect, though, the average temperature would be around 0 degrees Fahrenheit! Big difference! Here’s a diagram that I think explains it well:

But there can be too much of a good thing. Whether it’s oils on your skin making pimples, too much time with your best friend and then getting annoyed by them, or this little puppy who ate too much food

you can, in fact, have too much of a good thing. Over the past, eh, hundred years-ish, the amount of greenhouse gases have been increasing. This has been making the greenhouse effect a lot stronger, and way less energy has been released to space, and more been reflected back to earth. This is steadily making the earth warmer and warmer. 

But how have we been increasing greenhouse gases? Well, first let’s go over what the greenhouse gases are. Water vapor is one of them. Methane (natural gas) is another. Ozone is another (I’ll explain ozone in another post, later on). But the one that we’re the most concerned about is carbon dioxide, (CO2). The 2 in CO2 is supposed to be a subscript, a little letter sort of down to the side, but I don’t know how to do that on here. CO2 comes from the burning of fossil fuels, like coal and oil, and when natural gas burns. It can also come from deforestation, when trees are cut down and they release the carbon stored in them. We emit about 10 BILLION tons of carbon each year.  Now, plants use CO2 for their food. But this is way too much, especially because we’re cutting down so many trees at the same time. So it goes into the atmosphere and amplifies the greenhouse gas effect.

Okay, so apparently I’m horrible at guessing the sizes of my blog posts, so I’m going to end it here. I’ll talk more about how we know climate change is occurring, its effects, and other details later. But I don’t know when that will be, since everything is so crazy right now. 

Think critically. 

[water-u-talking-about]

Not cool,man pt 3

I was going to wait a few days before I posted this section, but I was really itching to write. 

First, though, I realized I made a critical error in my last 2 posts. I DIDN’T CITE MY KNOWLEDGE!!! They should just strip me of my degree right now. While all of my descriptions and definitions are my own, I was inspired to write these posts by Susan Joy Hassol’s TEDx talk, linked here. She does a good job explaining all the language barriers between the layperson and the scientists, and although, like I just said, my descriptions were my own, I talked about the words that she gave as troublesome in her talk. She talked about theory and uncertainty which is what I talked about in my first post. Part 2 was a more my own, as she didn’t really talk about the peer review process or “further research is needed”. But this post will deal with the those who try and discredit climate change, which she talks about a lot. Again, I’m not copying what she’s saying, I’m just using her talking points and then inserting my own descriptions and analysis. As an aside, I really love TED talks.

Like this. I have no idea what’s going on here, but it seems really neat.

Okay, so the disinformation campaign. I realize that I really haven’t gone too in-depth on what climate change actually is, and its effects, but I just want to go over misconceptions first, and the disinformation campaign rests on these misconceptions. The disinformation campaign is a group of...uh...people? People and corporations (though the US has decided that corporations ARE people) who are trying to invalidate climate change. Why? Because they depend economically on it not happening. Upton Sinclair, the famous author, once said “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Often, the disinformation campaign is headed by bigwigs from fossil fuel companies, or people who are paid by fossil fuel companies (looking at you, certain members of congress). They REALLY want everyone to keep on doing the same things we’ve been doing, because if we switch to alternative energy sources, consume less, and make other lifestyle changes, they will lose money. Forget the fact that alternative energy as a whole is more economically friendly for everyone. 

They use the words that I talked about in my last posts. They say things like climate change is only a theory, that scientists are “uncertain”, and that there needs to be more research. Then they move onto things like scientists are creating the concept climate change to make us less competitive, or because we want to make a profit. Well, first of all, investing in green energy will actually make us more competitive, and create so many more jobs, but really, NOBODY benefits from climate change. The effects will be disastrous, and we’ve already seen some of these disastrous effects, in the form of stronger storms and freak heat waves. Desertification and drought will starve millions. The point is, why would we ever come up with something like climate change? We only bring it up because we’re so, so worried.

Next post, I’ll start going more into what climate change actually is, and then we can talk more about the factors of it that the disinformation campaign tries to exploit. But for now I just wanted to go over the language issues. It might be a little while until I can post again, though, because I basically shoved aside things that I actually HAD to do in order to write these posts, and now they are hanging over my head. But until then, think critically about what you see and hear. Actually, do that always. Not just until the next post.

[water-u-talking-about]

Not cool man, pt 2

Okay, so I ended up going a little lot longer than I mean to on my last post, and I still have some more to cover before I actually fully delve into climate change. I still want to talk about scientific jargon. 

Like I said, I think that a lot of misconceptions about climate change come from language barriers. And I feel like that is definitely the scientist’s fault. I think (and this is a theory, but not a scientific theory, just a hunch theory) that a lot of scientists are really jazzed about their subjects so that 

a) they tend to not have a life outside of it. And I think this is partially due to the cutthroat academic environment we have here

b) they want to prove how much they know so they talk in a very high level

c) they feel like simplifying their words makes what the are saying lose meaning and accuracy

but what I want to tell my peers sometimes is 

a) everyone needs a life outside of their job, and if you can’t talk about anything else besides science, you really need to take a step back

b) you’re being a jerk

c) the minuscule details are actually rarely necessary to talk to people about outside your field

and really, if we can’t translate our results, our knowledge, what’s the point of all this????? So I really want to make sure we all understand what each other is saying. Time to dissect some more words/phrases. Cue Bill Nye!

Wow, this is already a long post! I’m bad at planning my post sizes, guys. 

Okay, “further research is needed”. Like uncertainty, this tends to make people think that we’re not sure of what we’re saying. And there are definitely some scientists that would smack me on the head for saying that we’re ever sure of anything, but really, we’re as sure as can be. When we say further research is needed, it’s because further research is ALWAYS needed. When doing an experiment, you should know what you would do if you had more time, more funding, more manpower. A couple of summers ago, I was collecting ticks in the Czech Republic (it’s called Czechia now, apparently) to test for lyme disease distribution and even though I got a pretty good sample size, I definitely could have gone further. I would have been more comfortable if I had doubled that. And more so if I tripled it. Looked in more places. Compared summer distributions to winter. Point is, that doesn’t mean my analysis wasn’t good, but just that further research is our way of saying that we could always do more.

Finally, peer reviewed. Scholarly articles are peer reviewed. A lot of times in middle and high school, we’d review each others rough drafts in English class and call that peer review. We’d check their grammar, see if the other person was missing something they should have, and then hand it back to them. Scientific peer review is not like that. Scientists get dirty, y’all. You have to play devil’s advocate ALL THE TIME. Pick apart every single bit of their paper. Ask them why they made every little decision they did. If you are writing the paper, you have to be able to defend every choice you made. The peer review is meant to blow holes in the paper, make sure that everything in there is accounted for. It’s a really rigorous process. It’s not just “hmm...hmm...add a comma there...okay looks good”. We have to make sure each paper is vetted thoroughly and that the scientific process is held to, so you know what comes out is generally pretty thoroughly reviewed, not just passed along to be printed out. WE. GET. NASTY.

Okay, now this is REALLY REALLY REALLY long! Eesh. Judging post length is not my strong point, y’all. So I’ll sign off now. Next post, I’ll be talking about the disinformation campaign/merchants of doubt. I’m pretty excited to write that.

[water-u-talking-about]

Not cool, man

Okay, so climate change. Not something that I’ve talked about too much on here. But it’s something that’s so important. Like, world-endingly important.

Huh, apparently endingly is a word? I just used it to get my point across but spell check isn’t identifying it as wrong or anything.

Anyways, I’m not trying to be doom and gloom. Although I guess I am incorrect, the world won’t end. The world will keep on spinning. Will we be there, though? How about it’s the-end-of-life-as-we-know-it-ingly important? Does that work?

And just because a certain someone has ordered the EPA to delete all its pages on climate change doesn’t mean it’s going away. Just because tweets from the twitter accounts of National Parks are getting deleted doesn’t mean it’s not real.

I think sometimes people reject climate change as real because of the language that scientists use. It’s almost like a different language at times. Let’s dissect that.

First off, theory. Used by non-scientists (and scientists when they are not talking about science), a theory means a hunch. Like, “I have a theory that my socks go to a different dimension when I wash them because I have a bunch of random single socks”. It’s not something that can really be proven, or is much more formed than a vague idea. When scientists use the word theory, it means an explanation based in fact. Anything before that is called a hypothesis. Gravity is an example of a theory. Galileo Galilei, Sir Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein all did a lot of experiments and work to establish it as fact. Heliocentrism, the model in which the Earth revolves around the Sun, is a theory. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo basically proved this as well, and it is also established as fact. So when people say that climate change is just a theory, well, that’s true. But that doesn’t discredit it, that’s just stating exactly what it is. Climate change is a theory, like gravity or heliocentrism.

^That’s Copernicus, by the way. Not Vanessa Williams, the other one. 

Uncertainty. This word doesn’t sound good. It sounds like scientists have no idea what they are talking about. If you say that you are uncertain if something is going to happen, you don’t know if it will happen or not. When scientists talk about uncertainty, it’s basically a range of variability. Almost absolutely nothing in science is certain. If I’m measuring the temperature of a pot of water for an experiment, I have to check the temperature a ton of times, in many different areas, to make sure I’m getting the true temperature. It can be influenced by bubbled in the water, imperfections in the pot, the heating element, whatever. And if I told you that I took sixty measurements of the water and it turned out to have a temperature of 100 degrees, you’d probably believe me. But there is a level of uncertainty. It may be 99.8, or 100.1 degrees. But I feel comfortable saying it’s 100 degrees, and you are comfortable with my answer. Scientists are have high certainty about all the effects of climate change that we will see, but because there is some level of “uncertainty”, people seem to take that as “well, scientists aren’t even sure of it!”

Okay, WOW, I am so sorry, this post was WAY longer than I meant it to be. I was going to add more, but that will just have to come later. Hopefully this clears up some things. Again, I still feel like I’m shouting into the abyss, but I hope somebody still reads this.

[water-u-talking-about]

Ecohydrology

I’m not sure why I’m continuing with the blog at this point. But I don’t like to abandon things. Just last month, I logged onto my old Neopets account. I had no idea what was going on anymore, but PERSEVERANCE, PEOPLE! I also thought about logging back into my old Runescape account, but I don’t remember the name or the password. I made it in 7th grade, so it’s probably something like Sparklz123. I love(d) glitter.

Right now, I’m in an Ecohydrology class, so I wanted to talk about it on the blog. I feel like maybe writing about ecohydrology will help me understand it better. I fully believe that you don’t understand something unless you can explain it. 

So. What is ecohydrology? According to Newman et al. 2006 Water Resources Research, ecohydrology is defined as “how hydrological processes influence distribution, structure, function, and dynamics of biological communities”.

What.

Basically, it is merging ecology and hydrology. Ecology, how organisms are related to each other and their physical surroundings (definition c/o Wikipedia) and Hydrology, the study of water. Hydrology depends a lot on the behavior of organisms, and the behavior of organisms depends a lot on hydrology. Rodriguez-Iturbe et al. 2000 Water Resources Research basically pioneered this field, and they say that the link between the two is soil moisture. It makes sense. Soil moisture can influence what plants are present. Plants can influence how much soil moisture there is. They take up water, but can also prevent evaporation from the soil by increasing ground cover.

In fact, it is evapotranspiration that is a key element of ecohydrology. Just to go over the definitions really quick, evaporation is water loss through vaporization, as water goes from liquid to gas. Transpiration is water loss through plant tissue. It’s hard to separate the two. If you have a patch of land, and can measure how much water is lost, its hard to tell whether the loss is from evaporation or transpiration, the soil or the plant. So they’re combined a lot, into evapotranspiration. 

Things don’t exist in a vacuum. Processes aren’t just in one field. Things interact with each other all the time. Ecohydrology takes that into account. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches are used instead of reductionist science, where things are in neat little boxes. I’ll talk about ecohydrology more, I promise. This was just meant to be an introduction to the concept. I’ll give more examples of it, and examples of how it is used to address problems and questions. But now I have to go study for my test. But this has been a giant block of words, so here’s a gif of a cute panda bear rolling down a hill. Until next time!

[americasgreatoutdoors]

Here’s your daily dose of cute: Four baby foxes 🐺  snuggling on the beach at Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts. The seashore protects 40 miles of pristine sandy beach, marshes, ponds and uplands support diverse species, including these cute little red foxes. Photo by National Park Service.

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omg

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Sorry...

It’s been a while. Like, an entire semester. An entire crazy semester. But now it’s summer, and even though I’m still working, it’s a little less crazy. But I never gave up on the blog! Even though right now I have a whopping 8 followers.  But as the late Remus Lupin once said, it is the quality of ones convictions that determine success, not the number of followers. 

I sort of want to change this blog from just water to all things environmental, but then I feel like I would have to change the name to match, and I don’t want to do that. I like the name too much. I had a travel blog last summer when I did research in the Czech Republic, and it was called Shananigans Abroad, because my name is Shana. 

Anyways, the story of the day. I really wish I had gotten around to posting when there was all the flooding going on in Texas, because that’s where I was raised, but now any article that I post from then is pretty dated, and I’m trying to stick with current stuff. But there is flooding going on elsewhere, fortunately for me and unfortunately for West Virginia. The governor’s communication director said it’s looking like the worst flood in 100 years, and I don’t know about the validity of that statement because I don’t know past flooding regimes in West Virginia, but it got me thinking about a graph, and I wanted to talk about it. It’s called an IDF curve. That stands for Intensity, Frequency, Duration. It is used to determine how often a precipitation event will occur for any given amount of rainfall and time of rainfall. I found a couple for West Virginia, but they weren’t crisp and clear, so I picked one for Birmingham, Alabama, from the University of Alabama, because it is simpler to read and will be easier to understand what I’m saying.

Alright, so. The x, or horizontal, axis is duration. How long does the rainfall last? Then there’s the y, or vertical, axis. it is how much rainfall you get out of it. So let’s read the chart together. Lets say we want to know how often a storm that lasts 20 minutes and dumps 2 inches of rain will come. Well, 2 inches of rain over 20 minutes is the same as 6 inches of rain over one hour, because 20 minutes is 1/3 hour and 2 is 1/3 of 6. So in other words, we’re looking for the frequency of a 20 minute storm that dumps 6 inches per hour. So we’re going to go to the duration axis and find 20. Right above the “r” in “Duration”. Now follow the vertical line above it up to 6 inches. Alright, we see a line intersecting that, and it’s a “return period” line. What line is that? It’s the 50 years line. So a storm in Birmingham, Alabama, that is 20 minutes long with 6 in/hr we would expect to come every 50 years. Obviously that’s not always the case, and with climate change making everything a little wonky, that’s not anything definite, but that’s what, hypothetically, we should be seeing. 

Let’s do it again, with a less clean answer. Now we’re looking for a 30 minute storm with an intensity of 3 inches/hour. Go across the bottom to 30 minutes, then up to 3 inches. It’s between 2 lines, the 2 year and the 5 year line. So we should see a storm like that between every 2 and 5 years. Not super hard, but the graphs can get a little busy and sometimes it’s hard to keep track of all those lines. A 100 year storm in Birmingham could mean a lot of things. It could be a 10 minute storm that dumps 8.5 in/hour, or a 20 minute storm that dumps 6.5 in/hour, a 30 minute storm that dumps 5.5 in/hour, a 40 minute storm that dumps a little less than 5 in/hour, a 50 minute storm that’s a little over 4 in/hour, or a 60 minute storm with an intensity of a little less than 4 in/hour. So we see that both how long a storm lasts and how much precipitation occurs factors in to determining the frequency of a storm. 

I’m not sure how the governor’s communication’s director meant his statement, but if a weatherperson or scientist said “100 year flood” or “100 year storm”, that’s what they meant. And obviously IDF curves differ from location to location. Birmingham, Alabama, and West Virginia have different IDF curves, as does Tucson, Seattle, Los Angeles, New York City, Anchorage, and Honolulu. What is a 100 year storm in one isn’t necessarily a 100 year storm in another. 

And if you are in West Virginia, please stay safe! 

Source: https://weather.com/storms/tornado/news/west-virginia-flooding-severe-weather-outbreak-news

[water-u-talking-about]

It’s been a while

Hi everyone! It’s been a long time since I made a post. Sorry about that. Things got busy. I hope all of you (although it’s not like I have a ton of followers) are doing well. 

I’ll continue with the posting of a news article and talking about it. One of the most relevant topics about water right now is the Flint, MI crisis. I’ll start with the topic of environmental justice.

Environmental justice is, as defined by the Environmental Protection Agency, “ the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies”. 

Wait what does that mean? It means that nobody, regardless of class, race, religion, etc, should have to deal with poor environmental protection. It means that socially privileged groups shouldn’t be the only ones who enjoy things like clean water or clean air. And it sounds great and wonderful, and it is, but it’s not happening. Rich people, white people, and rich white people are more likely to live in less polluted areas, and poor people, people of color, and poor people of color are more likely to live in polluted areas. Think about it. Are you more likely to find a dump in the poorest area of your town, or in the richest? People that are better off, have more access to resources, tend to live in nicer, less polluted areas. And if pollution occurs in their area, they often have the resources to tackle it, or to move. In poorer areas, people have less resources and stability, so often they just end up dealing with the pollution, because they have no other option. They can’t afford to up and move, or to get lawyers to take a case to court. 

Flint is a prime example, although by far not the only one. The city isn’t very well off, with a per capita income lower than the US average. To save money, the source of Flint’s water was switched from Lake Huron to the Flint River.  In addition, the pipes are lead. The lead pipes weren’t so much of an issue before, since the Lake Huron water was treated with an anticorrosive, so the lead from the pipes wouldn’t infiltrate into the water (although lead pipes shouldn’t be used anyways), but the Flint River water isn’t being treated. This is a situation that would be much easier to prevent than to fix. And unfortunately, lead is very persistent in water

And here we see a glaring lack of environmental justice. People who are well off are buying a lot of bottled water, or filters, working mothers who can’t breastfeed and have to buy formula which requires extremely clean water, those are the ones who shoulder the load the most. Authorities, who had access to clean water, assured everyone the water was fine, just discolored. Even if everything gets fixed, right this second, the biggest issue is why did this happen in the first place? Why did politicians think this was okay? And how can we stop this from happening in other places?

I mean, seriously, would you drink this water? Just looking at it makes me nauseous.

http://www.wired.com/2016/01/heres-how-hard-it-will-be-to-unpoison-flints-water/

[water-u-talking-about]

‘Git off mah lawn

You know that one Clint Eastwood movie, Gran Torino? I’ve never seen it, so I don’t know what it’s about, but I remember in seeing the trailer that there was one point where Clint Eastwood said that to somebody who, presumably, was on his lawn. Well, some people are kind of doing that in California in regards to their lawns, though without the guns (probably).

Before I get into that, though, I kind of want to talk about changing this blog a little bit. Before, I talked a lot about concepts in hydrology, but now I want to kind of change this into a blog where I post news stories and discuss them, and the science behind them. So now it’s more like “Water they talking about?” The news story I’m going to talk about now is from the New York Times, written by Matt Richtel, about homeowners in Northern California.

As I’ve been talking about it a lot on this blog, we all know that California is in a monster drought, and in times of drought, there are a lot of water restrictions. One big one is watering lawns. Grass takes up a lot of water, so one of the first restrictions during a drought is limiting the times you can water your lawn. I don’t know how they do it in California, and it’s not like we really have lawns in Arizona, but where I grew up in Texas, we were only allowed to water our lawn on certain days of the week, depending on the last number of your address (0-1 on Sunday, 2-3 on Monday, etc, though I don’t think I got the days right). Then you were only allowed to water between 8-10 AM and 6-8 PM (I think. Point is, there were time and day restrictions). It’s not great for your lawn, and your grass will dry out, but lawns don’t exactly provide much besides just looks. 

However, you can water at any time if you have your own well or if you harvest rainwater. Then you’re not using city water, exactly, but water you got yourself. There’s really no issue with using rainwater, as much of it is washed away anyways and you might as well catch it and put it to use, but it’s a little bit stickier with wells drawing groundwater. Wells aren’t just standalone, and may in fact be tied to the city water supply after all. It isn’t a big deal if a few people do it, but if a lot do, then it’s just like using the city water anyways. Then there’s also issues that come from groundwater pumping. The area around a well can subside, potentially causing sinkholes, but also it lowers the water table around the well. It forms what’s called a cone of depression, and looks like this:

The purpose of this image from the USGS is actually to show drainage, but you can see how around the well, the water table lowers. And if there is a lot of wells in an area, it’s just a general lowering of the water table, so it’s hard to get to the water.

So in California people who water their lawns this way have nice, lush green lawns, while everyone else’s is dry. In order to avoid people getting mad, they put up signs saying “watered by well” and stuff like that so people don’t get mad that they’re using more than their fair share.

It’s a little blurry, though, as these topics kind of are, but in the west, any groundwater you can get is yours legally, so you can do what you want. I thought it was interesting, and I put the link below so you can read the article for yourself. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/09/science/california-drought-lawn-grass-water-wells.html?_r=0

[water-u-talking-about]

Raise Up Lights

Did you know if you say “Raise up lights” you’re actually saying “Razorblades” in an Australian accent?

I just read a pretty interesting article by the Smithsonian on how California, in their drought, is looking at Australia for drought management techniques. Desalination didn’t really work out for Melbourne, Australia, as the building of a desalination plant took longer than the actual drought (yikes) so by the time it was ready, the drought had ended. In Perth, though, desalination provides almost half of the city’s drinking water. They also implemented a recycling program, where wastewater form houses is used to irrigate golf courses, or flush toilets, so more use is gotten out of the water. This is in combination with changing behaviors, like the citizens reducing their water use, and builders building more green houses.

The thing is, though, this isn’t anything new. We’ve known about the technology to do things like this for a while. So why haven’t we done it?

Well, it makes the water more expensive. And we don’t like that here. We’re used to cheap, plentiful water delivered fast. Installing desalination plants to take the salt out of seawater and making it potable (drinking water quality) is expensive, and takes a long time, and taxes would need to be raised in order to get good wastewater treatment pipes and facilities to irrigate crops and grass. And Americans hate raising taxes. In my suburb of Tucson, the mayor raised taxes by half a penny per person per year to fund a community center, and there was a massive freakout. In Tucson proper, the roads are so terrible. Like, potholes everywhere. You have to drive swervy. Everyone complains about them. But when a bond was put forth last election, raising taxes 12 dollars per person per year to fix all the roads? Hahahahahahaha no, that got a big fat “nope”. It’s pretty much the same in a lot of areas around the US. 

What can be done about this? Well, better education programs for one. We need better knowledge of the drought. Not better knowledge, exactly, but more widespread knowledge of  how pressing and urgent it is. We need to have people understand that paying a little extra for water now means we won’t run out of water later. I’m not sure exactly what the best method is for this, but actually that’s what my masters thesis will be on, partially. I’m trying to get the best public-scientist communication, and understand public motives for science participation. So don’t worry folks, I got this.

So California, come on. Pay up a little and it will be worth it, I promise. And if you don’t I’ll set Australian animals on you.

Sweet dreams!

[water-u-talking-about]

Drought and Soil

Hey everyone!

So today I’ll be talking about how drought affects soil. I touched on this earlier, but here I’ll go into more detail.

Everyone has seen, or at least seen pictures, of soil like this, right?

Well, that soil is super, super dry.Sometimes that’s natural, as some soils are referred to as shrink-swell, and crack when they dry. This may be the case in these soils above, though I doubt it. Those look a little too extreme to me. I think, in the case of these soils, that there was just so little water, and so much heat, that it was like that one scene in Rango. 

In fact, sometimes in cases like that, the soil’s dryness actually keeps it from getting more water. You see in the above pictures that the soil is sort of plated over? It actually dries so much that the top can make a kind of shield over the soil, making it hard for any water to penetrate the surface. So it’s like a positive feedback loop. Soil dries, so it plates, which makes it harder for water to infiltrate, so it gets drier, so it plates more. 

In addition to the physical changes in the soil, the chemistry changes too. A characteristic of soil is its salinity or sodicity. Salinity, for the purpose of soils, is the presence of calcium and magnesium salts. Sodicity is the presence of sodium salts. All soils have some level of salinity and sodicity, and water often has some level of salinty and sodicity. So when soils are watered, or irrigated, salts are added. The water eventually evaporates, and salts are left behind. More water is added, and it’s often okay, because the concentrations of salts in the water are okay. But in dry, hot areas, more water is lost, and the concentrations of salts in the soil increases. 

Also, the way to remedy salt affected soils involves a lot of water. For saline soils, the soil is flushed with water, and with sodic soils, gypsum is added and then it is flushed with water. Large amounts of water. So in drought, too, it’s even harder to remedy salt affected soils. 

Saline and sodic soils also change the shape of the soil. Healthy soils is flocculated, which means clumpy. Clumpy soils is good, because water flows through it better. It flows around clumps. Dispersed soil is less clumpy, which is harder for water to infiltrate. It plates, like the first pictures. Saline soils are flocculated well, but sodic soils disperse soils. It’s a terrible flocculator. So in cases where the soils becomes sodic, it plates. 

What does this mean? Soil dries. It becomes sodic. It makes it harder for water to infiltrate. So it gets drier. And more sodic. And so on. 

So with this post, and last week’s post, you can really see that the causes and consequences of droughts are linked and often lead to one another. So the best thing to do is avoid a drought in the first place. Obviously you can’t make it rain, but you can have good conservation practices to avoid overuse. 

That’s all for now! I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving! This is what I’m going to be doing:

[water-u-talking-about]

Bears Shouldn’t Talk for a Reason

So I’m gonna talk about how a drought affects other things in the environment, using the example of California again.

Drought doesn’t just mean less water, and people can’t water their lawns. It can affect a lot more than just people. Forests can be really sensitive to drought, and so can soils. Today, though, I’ll just talk about forests, and I’ll talk about soils next time.

First up, forests.Let me just introduce you to someone, in case you don’t know him.

His name is Smokey.

Don’t listen to him. He’s a liar.

He’s a mascot created to prevent forest fires. But forest fires need to happen. Now, his campaign of putting out fires from human causes was good enough, don’t leave your campfire burning. Don’t flick your cigarettes to the ground (I would say don’t flick your cigs on the ground without making sure they’re put out, but just don’t flick them to the ground at all). But it became so obsessed with putting out every singe flicker of flame in forests, and was actually extremely effective. It worked and it worked well. But like I said, forest fires need to happen and are important. And big crown fires, where tall trees are engulfed by flame and it completely decimates miles and miles of land aren’t natural. Forest fires in nature are small floor fires, which burn a lot of the scrub off but don’t travel up the trees. These small fires keep a lot of brush and litter off the ground, and a normal, untouched forest floor actually looks a lot like a park, and you won’t see too many young trees, since the older trees outcompete them and fire burns them off. But since Smokey, we put out every fire we saw. We were quite vigilant, quickly dousing the smallest fires. But that meant that the brush and scrub built up on the floor, and smaller trees were growing, so now fire could “climb” up the trees better. So then if we didn’t catch a fire, we had crown fires. We eventually realized that and are now doing things like controlled burns, where an area of forest is burned under supervision to make sure it doesn’t get too high, but there’s still the danger of crown fires.

Wait, what does this have to do with drought?

With drought, the brush and scrub on the floor gets dry. And dry plant matter is great kindling for fire. So we have the potential for more fires, and since California doesn’t have a lot of water, there’s not a lot of water to fight the fires. In addition, rivers and streams are natural barriers to fire, creating a “road” the fire can’t cross”, so as those run dry, fires can spread more. Also, there are insects like pine beetles, that burrow and kill trees. They tend to target trees that are stressed, so a drought-stressed tree is perfect. So it can create an epidemic of tree deaths, and THEN, ON TOP OF THAT, dead trees are great kindling for fires. So, more fires. 

Wait, so should we have forest fires? Shouldn’t we? The moral of this story is: We done messed up. Forest fires were good, then we intervened, and now forest fires are bad, but we also sort of want small ones. We need to continue with small, controlled burns, because they keep big ones from happening. But if we didn’t go all crazy stopping fires, this wouldn’t have been a problem in the first place. And now if a fire starts in somewhere we can’t control it, it can be big and terrible. We overreacted, and are now paying for it. 

So listen to Smokey 2.0:

“Only you can prevent forest fires...that I caused. Lol my bad.”

[americasgreatoutdoors]

It’s National Bison Day! Here’s a great photo of bison and its calf sharing a tender moment at Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge in Colorado. Photo by Rich Keen, DPRA.

[water-u-talking-about]

When the baby goes off to college, the parents will say "Bison"

[water-u-talking-about]

Water Policy

Hey y’all! So I’m gonna veer from my usual topic a bit and instead of talking about water itself, I’m going to talk about the management, distribution, and ownership of water in the Southwest. This blog, like I’ve said, is for my watershed hydrology class, but I’m also in a Water, Environment, and Society classs that is pretty interesting, so I thought I’d talk about that for a little bit.

As I’ve mentioned, California is going through a major drought, though hopefully El Nino will lighten that up a bit this year. While obviously the lack of rain is nobody’s fault, there have been policies that are not the most environmentally conscious and have been using water faster than it can be replenished. When the west was first settled, people thought it was just like the east. In other words, people thought the west was like

but it was really like

So the American East has this water rule called Riparianism, which basically means that you can use water as long as it doesn’t prevent someone else for using water. It’s all fine and dandy, because there was a lot of water there and it was quite rainy so there wasn’t a lot of issues. But in the West there is fewer water and the climate is drier, so there wasn’t as much water to go around. So this doctrine called Prior Appropriation was started, which basically meant first come first serve. You could use the water as long as you were putting it to “good use” which basically meant anything that wasn’t a deliberate waste. You were actually better off taking and hoarding the water (which was considered good use) than leaving it, because then somebody else could hoard the water. 

Plus, in the west there was just so much room and land available. Railroad and mining companies were practically begging people to move out West, offering land and jobs to those who came. Problem was, the land was too large for farming and too small for ranching (raising livestock). The land was given in 160 acre patches which was much too big to irrigate for farming, and for any large scale farming, irrigation was needed. So people had to draw groundwater. Which leads to groundwater depletion, as groundwater is much harder to replenish than surface water.

In addition, there are places like Los Angeles. Los Angeles is a city that shouldn’t exist. It had no resources, performed no essential functions. But it grew anyways without any large source of water. Water was needed, and the mayor of LA at the time, Fred Eaton, and a civil engineer named William Mulholland, created an aqueduct from the Owens Valley in California, which allowed Los Angeles to grow more, which meant it needed more water,so it found another source, so it grew more, and so on. Now it’s hard to say that it was a bad decision. Before the aqueduct was built, the water shortage was so bad that families of five were taking one (combined) bath per week, bathing in each others old bath water. But there are two kinds of fixes for scarcity: increasing supply or limiting demand. I’ll give the example of cake. Say there is a store is out of chocolate, but you want to make lots of chocolate cake. You found another store of chocolate, and promptly bought them out of chocolate, so you found another store, bought them out, and found another. In that case, you increased supply. You could also decrease demand, by learning how to make chocolate cake with less chocolate. Los Angles chose to increase supply rather than decrease demand. Short term, increasing supply is better, but in the long term decreasing demand is better. But you should always try to decrease demand, even if you are increasing supply. I mean, seriously, in Bel Air there is a user who consumed 11.8 million gallons of water a year!! Source: https://www.revealnews.org/article/the-wet-prince-of-bel-air-who-is-californias-biggest-water-guzzler/

Shame!

[water-u-talking-about]

More About Soil!

Sorry guys, I had a crazy busy week and didn’t get to post last week. 

I’m gonna continue talking about soils this week. It’s my favorite thing to talk about. You could say that I live...a sedimentary life.

Yeah, yeah, I heard the crickets.

Also, have any of you seen the movie Atlantis? The Disney one? It was one of my favorite movies when I was little (and still is) and I have to say, I always imagined myself growing up to be as tough as Audrey, or as smart as Milo, or as fierce as Kida, but I just ended up being Mole. 

Although I would never call it dirt. I know in this case it’s “displaced” but those are his samples, so they’d still be soil. Once he took them off Milo’s bed, whatever remained on the sheets would be dirt.

So last time I said I would talk about the movement of water in soil. Do you remember how much of soil I said is not actually soil? Remember, 1/2 of soil is actually soil particles, 1/4 is air, and 1/4 is water (ideally). So 1/2 of it is not actually soil. Water and air fill up the spaces between the soil, called pores. When the soil pores are completely filled with water and the soil can’t hold any more, the soil is saturated. In the same way, when the soil is really dry, most of the water is gone. I would say all the water is gone, but you can’t really have that. Water is very attracted to the soil particles, and it would take a lot of force to get all the water out. It won’t evaporate, and plants can’t get it, but it’s there. 

It is possible to measure the amount of water in soil. The easiest way is to get some soil and weigh it as soon as possible. Then you bake the soil in an oven, which makes almost all the water evaporate out. I know I just said that some water stays on the soil, but it is such a tiny amount that it doesn’t really matter, and a scale won’t catch it. You weigh the dried soil, and the difference between the two is how much water there was. 

Now let’s get to the movement of water through soil. When water goes into the soil at the soil surface, that is infiltration. The water infiltrates into the soil. Now, something I haven’t talked about is groundwater. Groundwater is what it sounds like, water deep in the ground. Water is moving through rock formation in the ground, and that’s where a lot of our drinking water comes from. That’s where wells get their water from. So water can move through soil to groundwater, and that’s called percolation. Finally, there is interflow, which is when percolating water hits some kind of barrier, like a sheet of rock, and can’t move down any more and moves to the side. 

There are two concepts that in soil water movement that I always mix up. Infiltration rates and conductivity. The infiltration rate is how quickly water can infiltrate into soil. The conductivity is how quickly water moves through a soil once it is in it. So for conductivity, soils with larger pores are favored, because it is easier for water to move through it.

Okay, I think that will be all for today. Take care, y’all!

[water-u-talking-about]

Soil (not Dirt)

Hi everyone!

I’m really excited about this week’s post, because it’s something that is really near and dear to my heart.

Soil!

I’ve done a lot of research in soil and I think it’s absolutely fascinating. 98 percent of our food is soil based in some way (including meats, as they eat things dependent on soil, like alfalfa). It is quite literally the foundation of our lives! 

Something you will never ever hear anyone who has a background in soil science say is “dirt” on the land. Dirt and soil are two different things. Soil is a mixture of rock, organic materials like leaves and plants, and microorganisms. Dirt is soil somewhere it shouldn’t be. It is soil in the ground, and if you get it on your shirt it’s dirt. If you track it in the house with your shoes, you have dirt on the floor. But trees don’t grow in dirt, and you can’t get “potting dirt” at Home Depot. 

Once, I was in an environmental science assembly, where the college wanted to know our opinions on some programs. This one kid was talking about soil, and he called it dirt. There were about one hundred of us in the room, and as soon as he said it, there was a lot of tittering, and I heard more than one person mumble “soil”, as did I. He said dirt again, and the mumbling got louder. Finally he used it again and one person shouted “soil, not dirt!” and the whole room burst out laughing and sighed in relief. We actually got uncomfortable at the use of the word dirt. I’m getting off topic, though.

Soil can be made up of a lot of different things. When I worked with soil, my the “parent rock” for my samples were basalt, granite, and rhyolite. You can have soils that have a lot of organic matter, like leaves, worm casts, twigs, bacteria, old food. You can have soils made from volcanic rock. You can have soil that is mostly frozen. Your soils can have a lot of peat in it.

hahahahahahahahahaha get it...Pete?

I bet Pete would think that was funny.

So what does this have to do with water? Well, soil has water in it, too! In fact, if you could have a perfect soil, it would only be 1/2 soil. It would be 1/2 soil, 1/4 water, 1/4 air. It is important to hydrology because a big part of water movement is through soil. How quickly water can move through soil depends a lot on the soil texture. There are three sizes of soil: sand, silt, and clay. Sand is made up of soil particles from .05 millimeters to 2 millimeters. Silt is .002 millimeters to .05 millimeters, and everything smaller than .002 millimeters is clay. So if you’re reading this on a normal computer, the periods at the end of each sentence are sand-sized. Clay is very small and sticky, as it holds water the best (think of clay for pottery, and how it is wet until it is fired. Silt is smooth and dusty. I guess a good texture comparison would be like baby powder. I don’t think anyone will have trouble imagining sand, though, and what it feels like or looks like. In case you really don’t know, though, here is sand:

There. In case you didn’t know.

But soil is rarely, if ever, just sand, silt, or clay. It is usually a mix, and the amount of sand, silt, or clay in each mix determines how water flows through it. Loam the word for a pretty even mix of the three. Here’s a picture of loam:

It’s so beautiful I want to cry.

In general, soil with small spaces between particles fills up with water faster than soil with big spaces between particles. This is because of something called capillary action. Water is sticky, and I don’t mean goopy. It likes to be attached to things. The best example of capillary action I can think of is dipping the corner of a paper towel into water. Even if you only dip a little bit, water creeps up the paper towel, way higher than what was in the water. Water is really attracted to the paper. In soil, water is really attracted to the particles, and with clay, water acts like it does with the paper towel and gets sucked into the soil. If you dip the corner of a rag into water, the water will go up the rag, but slower than it does with the paper towel. The rag is like sand.

This has been another of Shana’s Bad Analogies™.

I think that’s also gonna be the end of this post. I wanted to end it a little smoother, but I don’t want to throw a ton of information at you in one post. I’ve been trying to break things up some. And I think that’s a good background on soils, and we can talk more about the movement of water through them next time. Until then, you can do what I do and glare at anyone who calls it dirt.

[water-u-talking-about]

Water Events

Hi y’all!

I promised you I’d come back and talk about big events in hydrology and their effects, so here it is. If you are from Arizona, you definitely know about monsoons, even if you don’t know the mechanisms behind them, but I bet more people have heard of El Nino. I’ll be talking about both today, because they’re pretty influential especially in the American West. 

El Nino (I don’t know how to do the tilde on here) is also called ENSO, El Nino Southern Oscillation, which is what I’ll be calling it from here on out. But first I want to talk about gradients and concentration and how they move things. A gradient is a change in amount of something, and things always want to move from a high amount of things to a low amount of things.

I realize that is really confusing. Enter “Shana’s crappy analogies”. You have three rooms that are all connected. Room one is connected to room two, room two is connected to room three. And you have a lot of dogs in room one. Like, fifty dogs. One of my favorite shows is Pit Bulls and Parolees, and I just watched it, so I have dogs on my mind. Anyways, you have 50 dogs in room one, and ten dogs in room two, and no dogs in room three. So room 1 has a high concentration of dogs, room two has a medium (but if you know anything about dogs, ten in one room is crazy still) and room three has a really low concentration, since it is zero, and you can’t have a lower concentration than zero. You can’t have negative dogs. You either have one dog or more or no dogs. There is a gradient between the rooms then, as you go from high to low. But the dogs in room one are so packed and they really just want their own space. So we open the doors between the rooms and let the dogs roam between them how they like. And eventually they’ll spread out about evenly in each room, assuming each room is the exact same and doesn’t have a lot of treats in one and none in the other. So with sixty dogs in three rooms, eventually each room should have about twenty dogs. But twenty rooms with three dogs in each room is a lot nicer, and if you open the doors to seventeen more rooms, that’s how they’d spread themselves.

Okay, now how in the world is that relevant? Well, normally there is a very strong gradient in ocean surface temperature in the Pacific. Over by Australia the water is really warm, and the warm water goes pretty deep, and then gets less and less deep as you approach South America. Where the water is warmest there is a lot of rain. So areas like the Philippines and Indonesia get hammered. But every few years around wintertime he gradient evens out a bit and warm water can be found near South America, and they and the Southwest US get more rain than usual (plus South America gets good fishing). 

Wow, that’s a lot of text with no picture. But I don’t really have a relevant picture to put in there, so here’s my dog in the middle of a dream where she’s eating something.

Okay, hope you enjoyed that. Next is the Monsoon. It’s pretty complex so I’ll try to make it as simple as I can. There is an Asian Monsoon, and then a North American Monsoon, and since I live in North America and not Asia, and I assume my five followers here do as well, I’ll just talk about the North American (also called Arizona) Monsoon. So during the summer, and the hotter summer months like July and August, North America gets a lot of direct sunlight and gets really hot. Now here is where it gets complicated, so I’m just gonna skip over this and you’re just gonna have to trust me. I want to tell you what the monsoon is, not how it works and every aspect of it. But a gradient forms over the Sierra Madre (Mexico-Texas-New Mexico-Arizona-ish) and sends warm moist air westward. And when it gets to Arizona, it will rain in small pockets, But it rains with the strength of Gaston. And like Gaston, it spits hard, and can flood areas really easily. Another similarity between a monsoon and Gaston is that Gaston is roughly the size of a barge (from eating five dozen eggs in the morning) and so is the pockets of rain in the monsoon. So quite large for a Frenchman, but small for rain. It will rain hard over a small area. So that’s what Arizona gets in the summer. 

So both really affect watersheds. And it looks like this year will be an ENSO year, which is good for California because they’ll probably get some water out of it. But sometimes too much water too fast can be a problem. Soil can’t suck up water super quickly, and areas that are paved over really can’t suck up water. So there ends up being a lot of flooding. which is really dangerous. So there is always the possibility of California getting a lot of rain but not being able to actually catch it and keep it because it might go away too fast. Hopefully, then they’ll get some nice slow rain over a long time. California, though, is missing about 2 years worth of rain, so they need a lot. 

Alright, that’s the post! I know it was really complex and dense, but hopefully the next few will be a little more light and easier reading. Go outside and dance in the rain. Unless you live in California, of course. Wait until ENSO comes for that.