To: Wharf Rat who wrote (259280 ) 8/28/2014 6:18:14 PM From: Alex MG Respond to Groundwater Depletion is Destabilizing the San Andreas Fault and Increasing Earthquake Risk . If fracking, injecting chemically-laden water deep underground, may be a factor in sparking small earthquakes maybe it's not much of a stretch that depleting underground aquifers is impacting stress on earthquake faults. Here's an excerpt of a story at San Francisco Public Press that caught my eye: "Depletion of groundwater in the San Joaquin Valley is having wide-ranging effects not just on the agricultural industry and the environment, but also on the very earth beneath our feet. Massive changes in groundwater levels in the southern Central Valley are changing the stresses on the San Andreas Fault, according to research published today ..."Photo credit above: "In a newly published scientific paper, researchers attributed modest uplift in areas of the Sierra Nevada and Coast Ranges across central California to human-caused groundwater depletion in the adjacent San Joaquin Valley. GPS stations such as this one, P311 in the eastern Sierra Nevada, are administered by the EarthScope Plate Boundary Observatory ." Photo courtesy of UNAVCO.sfpublicpress.org Visualize It: Old Weather Data Feeds New Climate Models . How do you get old, relatively crude, hand-drawn weather maps into the climate models? Crowd-sourcing. Here's an excerpt of a fascinating story at Climate Central : "In the 1930s, there were no computers to run climate models or record weather observations. Instead, weather reports were written or typed on typewriters and forecast maps were drawn by hand . Those observations from the past contain valuable data that can help scientists better understand what the climate may look like in the future. But gathering that data and making it usable is a tall task involving scanning millions of sheets of paper and transcribing them into formats that scientists can use ..."Choking The Oceans With Plastic . Here's an excerpt of a Charles Moore Op-Ed at The New York Times : "...Plastics are now one of the most common pollutants of ocean waters worldwide. Pushed by winds, tides and currents, plastic particles form with other debris into large swirling glutinous accumulation zones, known to oceanographers as gyres, which comprise as much as 40 percent of the planet’s ocean surface — roughly 25 percent of the entire earth. No scientist, environmentalist, entrepreneur, national or international government agency has yet been able to establish a comprehensive way of recycling the plastic trash that covers our land and inevitably blows and washes down to the sea ..."File photo credit : Marine debris washing up onto the coast of Hawaii courtesy of Wikipedia .Brazil Coffee Output Set For Longest Decline Since 1965 . The world may go down the tubes, but please don't take away my coffee. Here's an excerpt from Bloomberg : "...Production in Brazil, the world’s top grower, may drop as much as 18 percent to 40.1 million bags when the harvest ends next month, the National Coffee Council estimates, after a 3.1 percent slide last year. With damage worsening before the start of spring in the Southern Hemisphere, the council said farmers may collect less than 40 million bags in 2015, creating the longest slump in five decades ..."
