World's Waters Research Articles

Changing behavior as a policy tool for enhancing food security

Recent developments in international markets point to a dramatic food crisis all over the world. The media today is repeatedly dominated by staggering reports on the global food crisis, soaring crop prices and demands for bio-fuels, raising fears of political instability. Since 2002, media reports have mostly highlighted the dramatic situation of food insecurity. The Arab region is most seriously affected by the global food crisis. It is clear that the root causes of ‘the Arab springs’ and revolutions underway in various Arab countries are not only a desire for transformation to a more democratic political system but also desire for the realization of social justice among citizens, the eradication of poverty and hunger, and a narrowing of the gap between rich and poor. This paper addresses the need for a change in individual and societal behavioral patterns. It addresses the need for communities to assist governments in preventing and managing water-related food crises. It brings together world waters in its complexities, with new dimensions of institutional context and cultural norms. The effectiveness of ongoing traditional approaches may be limited without additional measures and tools to help governments understand how to engage in cooperative behavioral change.

Ships from the depths: deepwater archaeology

Deepwater archaeology uncovers secrets from the ancient maritime past . . . Thousands of shipwrecks and archaeological sites lie undiscovered in deep water, potentially holding important clues to our maritime past. Scientists have explored only a small percentage of the oceans' depths, as 98 percent of the seabed lies well beyond the reach of conventional diving. Ships from the Depthssurveys the dramatic advances in technology over the last few years that have made it possible for scientists to locate, study, and catalogue archaeological sites in waters previously inaccessible to humans. Researcher and explorer Fredrik Soreide presents the development of deepwater archaeology since 1971, when Willard Bascom designed his Alcoa Seaprobe to locate and raise deepwater wrecks in the Mediterranean. Accompanied by descriptions and color photographs of deepwater projects and equipment, this book considers not only techniques that have been developed for location and observation of sites but also removal and excavation methods distinctive to these unique locations, far beyond the reach of scuba gear. Soreide provides an introduction to and survey of the history, development, and potential of this exciting branch of nautical archaeology. Scholars and field archaeologists will appreciate this handy compendium of the current state of the discipline and technology, and general readers will relish this comprehensive look at the challenges and opportunities associated with locating and studying historical and ancient shipwrecks in some of the world's deepest waters.

Water: towards a culture of responsibility

Clean, fresh drinking water is essential to human and animal life. It's equally important to the world economy: it functions as a universal solvent, makes possible industrial cooling and transportation, and is necessary for all kinds of agriculture. Antoine Frerot, CEO of Veolia Water, takes us on a tour of the world's waters, of our water. Lack of clean water kills 2.2 million people every year, and nearly 1 billion people do not have reliable access to clean drinking water. Using examples that transform theory into close-to-home reality, Frerot issues a serious challenge while showing us how to ensure that all the fast-growing cities of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have enough water. He considers how climate change will cause water shortages and explains what we can do now to prevent them. We have the political, economic, and scientific means to ensure the future of water on earth: we need only the will to take action.

Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity

We cannot think of a time that is oceanlessOr of an ocean not littered with wastage—T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”A Poem that Renders the Sea as Pedagogical History, Lorna Goodison's “Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, Pacific, Indian Ocean” depicts Caribbean schoolchildren learning “the world's waters rolled into a chant.” After shivering through the “cold” Arctic and Antarctic, the class “suffered [a] sea change” in the destabilizing Atlantic, abandoning the terrestrial stability of their benches to enter an ocean in which only their voices orient them in time and space as they “call out across / the currents of hot air.” In fathoming what Derek Walcott has called “the sea [as] history,” their “small bodies” are “borrowed / by the long drowned” (Goodison). While colonial narratives of maritime expansion have long depicted the ocean as blank space to be traversed, these students enter Atlantic stasis, a place occupied by the wasted lives of Middle Passage modernity. This Atlantic is not aqua nullius, circumscribed and mapped by the student oceanographer, but rather a place where the haunting of the past overtakes the present subject. Édouard Glissant has described the Atlantic as a “beginning” for modernity, a space “whose time is marked by … balls and chains gone green” (Poetics 6): a sign of submarine history and its material decay. Thus, Atlantic modernity becomes legible through the sign of heavy water, an oceanic stasis that signals the dissolution of wasted lives. After the poem's irruptive consonance of the “bodies borrowed,” the vowels lengthen to mimic a “long drowned” history of the Atlantic, and the narrative is transformed. Reminding us that the Middle Passage “abyss is a tautology” that haunts ocean modernity (Glissant, Poetics 6), the poem traps the students (and readers) in the violent corporeal history of the Atlantic. Instead of moving on to the next ocean of the lesson, the class repeats the word “Atlantic, as if wooden pegs / were forced between our lips; Atlantic, as teacher's / strap whipped the rows on.” Only in the last two lines of the poem do we catch a glimpse of other oceans, trapped as we are in “learn[ing] this lesson: / Arctic, Antarctic, Atlantic, Pacific and then Indian.”

Thresholds of hypoxia for marine biodiversity

Hypoxia is a mounting problem affecting the world's coastal waters, with severe consequences for marine life, including death and catastrophic changes. Hypoxia is forecast to increase owing to the combined effects of the continued spread of coastal eutrophication and global warming. A broad comparative analysis across a range of contrasting marine benthic organisms showed that hypoxia thresholds vary greatly across marine benthic organisms and that the conventional definition of 2 mg O(2)/liter to designate waters as hypoxic is below the empirical sublethal and lethal O(2) thresholds for half of the species tested. These results imply that the number and area of coastal ecosystems affected by hypoxia and the future extent of hypoxia impacts on marine life have been generally underestimated.

Rise of oceanographic barriers in continuous populations of a cetacean: the genetic structure of harbour porpoises in Old World waters

BackgroundUnderstanding the role of seascape in shaping genetic and demographic population structure is highly challenging for marine pelagic species such as cetaceans for which there is generally little evidence of what could effectively restrict their dispersal. In the present work, we applied a combination of recent individual-based landscape genetic approaches to investigate the population genetic structure of a highly mobile extensive range cetacean, the harbour porpoise in the eastern North Atlantic, with regards to oceanographic characteristics that could constrain its dispersal.ResultsAnalyses of 10 microsatellite loci for 752 individuals revealed that most of the sampled range in the eastern North Atlantic behaves as a 'continuous' population that widely extends over thousands of kilometres with significant isolation by distance (IBD). However, strong barriers to gene flow were detected in the south-eastern part of the range. These barriers coincided with profound changes in environmental characteristics and isolated, on a relatively small scale, porpoises from Iberian waters and on a larger scale porpoises from the Black Sea.ConclusionThe presence of these barriers to gene flow that coincide with profound changes in oceanographic features, together with the spatial variation in IBD strength, provide for the first time strong evidence that physical processes have a major impact on the demographic and genetic structure of a cetacean. This genetic pattern further suggests habitat-related fragmentation of the porpoise range that is likely to intensify with predicted surface ocean warming.

Gambling in the deep sea

For decades, the depths of the oceans have fascinated researchers. The discovery of strange creatures perfectly adapted to eternal darkness, high pressure, and other unusual conditions has raised enormous interest in how life emerged on Earth and how it flourishes in such extreme environments (Fig 1). This abundance of life has also lured researchers and biotech companies to the oceans in the hope of finding unknown genes, proteins, and other compounds that could be exploited commercially. Despite the enormous costs that still pose a considerable barrier to deep‐sea research and exploitation, some now worry about the negative side effects of deep‐sea bioprospecting. Scientists, entrepreneurs, politicians and legal experts have begun to debate problematic issues, such as the preservation of deep‐sea biodiversity, habitat protection and sharing of benefits. Their aim is to draft international regulations to prevent environmental and scientific tragedies without hampering discovery. Figure 1. Tubeworms ( Riftia pachyptila Jones ) found at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean at the East Pacific Rise off the coast of Mexico. These red‐blooded animals live of chemosynthetic bacteria near thermal vents on the ocean floor and can grow up to 3 m long. © Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Woods Hole, MA, USA. Scientists have made—and continue to make—exciting discoveries in the depths of the oceans. In the early 1980s, Karl Stetter, a microbiologist from the University of Regensburg, Germany, discovered a hyperthermophilic archaebacterium that flourishes near submarine vents (Fig 2) at temperatures of about 100 °C (Stetter, 1982). Stetter and his colleagues described another archaebacterium in 2002, termed Nanoarchaeum equitans . This organism is parasitic with an unusually small ribosomal RNA and now represents a new phylum in the bacterial world (Waters et al , 2003; Huber et al , 2002). Figure 2. A ‘black smoker’ on the ocean floor at the East Pacific Rise off the coast …

Ecohydrology as a new tool for sustainable management of estuaries and coastal waters

Throughout the world, estuaries and coastal waters have experienced degradation. Present proposed remedial measures based on engineering and technological fix are not likely to restore the ecological processes of a healthy, robust estuary and, as such, will not reinstate the full beneficial functions of the estuary ecosystem. The successful management of estuaries and coastal waters requires an ecohydrologybased, basin-wide approach. This necessitates changing present practices by official institutions based on municipalities or counties as an administrative unit, or the narrowly focused approaches of managers of specific activities (e.g., farming and fisheries, water resources, urban and economic developments, wetlands management and nature conservationists). Without this change in thinking and management concept, estuaries and coastal waters will continue to degrade, whatever integrated coastal management plans are implemented. To help in this process of change there is a need to (1) develop a profound understanding of the effects of biota and biotic processes on mediating estuary response to changing hydrology, sediment and nutrient flux and of the biota on hydrology at the river basin scale, and (2) to develop science-based remediation measures at the river basin scale, with elements of ecohydrology and phytotechnology at their core, to strengthen the ability of the biota to sustain and adapt to human-induced stresses.

What role for law in achieving transboundary drainage basin security? - the development and testing of the Legal Assessment Model (LAM) for transboundary watercourse states

The beneficial use of the world's transboundary waters raises difficult issues for drainage basin security on most parts of the globe. International law provides that each transboundary watercourse State is entitled to, and obliged to ensure, an "equitable and reasonable use" of these shared waters. The IWLRI developed and tested a Legal Assessment Model (LAM) through the work of interdisciplinary teams working in three different transboundary situations--China (upstream), Mozambique (downstream) and Palestine (shared groundwater). The LAM provides a tool for transboundary watercourse States to use in the preparation of their national water strategy for use at the national and international levels. The model should now be tested at the basin level, with a view to assisting to accomplish the peaceful and rational use of transboundary waters in line with the governing rule of international law and thereby to facilitate the overall policy objective of drainage basin security.

Oral histories in meteoritics and planetary science: VIII. Friedrich Begemann

Abstract— In this interview, taped in 2001 during The Meteoritical Society meeting in Rome, Friedrich Begemann recalls that after he earned his doctorate in physics under the direction of Professor Friedrich G. Houtermans, first in Göttingen and then in Bern, Switzerland, he began his career as what he calls a low‐level gas counting man, specializing in tritium (3H). In 1954 he accepted an invitation from Professor Willard F. Libby to run his gas‐counting laboratory at the University of Chicago. Begemann spent 3 years there during which he traced the distribution in the world's atmosphere and waters of tritium from two sources, natural cosmic radiation and the detonation of the first thermonuclear device. During his time at Chicago he was drawn into Harold C. Urey's group of scientists studying meteorites. Begemann found that he could measure tritium in meteorites, and by coupling his values with those of 3He, he and his collaborators initiated a new branch of meteoritics by determining the first cosmic‐ray exposure age of a meteorite—Norton County, which fell in 1947. In 1957, Begemann joined the group led by Friedrich A. Paneth at the Max‐Planck‐Institut für Chemie at Mainz, Germany, where he continued his studies of gas isotopes for the remainder of his career. His research led to the discovery of primitive noble gases in the diamond—graphite aggregates in ureilites, where their presence in presumably deep‐seated igneous rocks still remains to be explained. With the advent of the Apollo missions, Begemann extended his studies to the lunar rocks and soils in an effort to learn as much as possible about the interaction of solids with the space environment. He also became heavily involved in measuring the s‐process isotope abundance patterns of medium‐heavy chemical elements as they occur in interstellar grains. In 1995 at the meeting in Washington, D.C., The Meteoritical Society presented Friedrich Begemann with the Leonard Medal for his contributions to our understanding of the radiation encountered by bodies as they orbit through space.

Structure and function of anthropogenically altered microbial communities in coastal waters

Human-based (anthropogenic) nutrient and other pollutant enrichment of the world's coastal waters is causing unprecedented changes in microbial community structure and function. Symptoms of these changes include accelerating eutrophication, the proliferation of harmful microalgal blooms, excessive oxygen consumption (hypoxia, anoxia) increasing toxicity, altered routes and fluxes of organic and inorganic matter cycling, and disruption of food webs. Biogeochemical and trophic consequences are expanding on local, regional and global scales.

A Dim Future for Boreal Waters and Landscapes

I n the past 30 years, a combination of human activity and natural events has resulted in both dramatic and subtle changes to forests, wetlands, lakes, and streams in the boreal regions of North America. Consequently, future generations will not see natural boreal assemblage of plants, animals, and landscapes. In this article, I document some of the changes that have occurred and discuss how these changes may cause severe malfunctioning of boreal communities and ecosystems in the future. Despite increasing public concern for the world's forests and waters, the boreal zone is seldom mentioned. At 1.3 x 109 ha, the boreal forest is second in size only to the moist tropical forests (Olson et al. 1983). Furthermore, boreal lakes are the most numerous on Earth. Although the exact number has never been compiled, there are over 700,000 lakes in temperate areas of eastern Canada alone (Minns et al. 1990). I estimate that Canada may contain from 1.5 to 2 million lakes. The vast areas of water in boreal Eurasia may double this number. Molot and Dillon (1996) estimate that, globally, lakes cover 1.25 x 106 km2, or 100/0 of the total boreal area. The boreal region

Papers from the Western Pacific International Meeting and Workshop on TOGA/COARE

This special issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research is remarkable in bringing together papers relating to the coupled ocean‐atmosphere system, with emphasis on the western tropical Pacific region, and in doing so, temporarily reuniting the “Oceans” and the “Atmospheres” sections of the journal. In the western Pacific, the so‐called “warm pool,” containing the world's warmest open ocean surface waters is found. Here vigorous and complex air‐sea interactions are occurring on time scales ranging from intradiurnal to interannual, and on spatial scales ranging from a few kilometers (individual convective clouds), to the westerly wind burst which interacts with the ocean over thousands of kilometers, and to the 30‐ to 60‐day oscillation, which is global in scale but which is most energetic in the warm‐pool region. Understanding these interactions is extremely important for modeling and prediction of both short‐ and long‐term climate variability [TOGA COARE Panel, 1990], since the deep convection over the warm pool provides the strongest heating source of the global upper troposphere.

Farming the World's Waters

Farming the World's Waters

Marine Scientific and Technological Assistance to Developing Countries: Science for Development or Technology for Malintegrated Growth?

The U.S. marine-science community' is currently preparing to launch new programs of marine scientific and technological assistance for developing countries. With Third World governments likely to soon control access to much of the ocean space within which marine scientists work, U.S. oceanographers are making ready for the day when assistance in the building of indigenous Third World technoscientific capabilities will become the standard quid pro quo for clearance to conduct scientific research in Third World waters.

Implications of the minor element content of some major streams of the world

Of 15 or more minor elements in the world's principal river waters only aluminum, iron, manganese, barium and strontium range much over 100 μg l . (parts per billion). Most minor elements range at or below 100 μg 1 . and have median (or middle) values of 10 micrograms per liter or less. Significant areal differences in minor element content are found in the river waters. For example, Atlantic Coastal river waters in the aggregate are slightly more enriched in concentrations of silver, chromium, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, strontium and titanium, and slightly deficient in barium and lithium when compared with median values for North America. Median values of ratios Ba Sr , Ni Cr and Ni Cu are reasonably consistent (within a factor of two) in principal drainage from North America. Noteworthy are consistent median ratios of Ni Cu for large rivers of United States, but the ratio tends to be slightly greater in global northern latitudes than in southern latitudes. Median values for aluminum, barium, copper, lead, molybdenum and silver in North American runoff are of the same order as published world averages for ocean water. Hydrologic and geochemical aspects of continental runoff are strongly implied in observations of minor element content of large rivers. Evidence to date is that median values of Ba Sr ratios are relatively uniform in global river waters. There is real danger in oversimplifying chemical systems in broad assessments of lower reaches of large drainage basins because individual hydrologic and chemical events upstream are largely obscured.