Water & Oceans

"Lake Powell is at historic lows, offering kayakers new channels to explore but raising the alarm about water."

"Scientists up and down the West Coast are monitoring what appears to be a large-scale die-off of young Cassin’s auklets, small seabirds whose breeding grounds include a colony in the Farallon Islands west of San Francisco."

"Giant cages float off the shores of Hawaii, housing hundreds of thousands of yellowtail snapper in the deep waters of the Pacific."

"TOLEDO, Ohio — The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to come out with new guidelines that will give cities and water treatment plants a blueprint for dealing with the type of algae-borne toxin that contaminated the drinking water in Ohio’s fourth-largest city, a federal official said Wednesday."

"Levels of a type of pesticide commonly used in backyard gardens and on farms have increased in urban and rural watersheds in California, the state said in a report released Wednesday."

"While some dams in the United States and Europe are being decommissioned, a dam-building boom is underway in developing countries. It is a shift from the 1990s, when amid concerns about environmental impacts and displaced people, multilateral lenders like the World Bank backed away from large hydroelectric power projects."

"As Canadian lakes have become more acidic, they've become increasingly dominated by jelly-like plankton that are throwing things out of whack, new research suggests. And these gummy invaders aren't going anywhere. Soon, they could even disrupt the country's water supply."

"The 'beneficial reuse' of coal ash, often touted as a way to keep the material out of landfills, is potentially causing serious contamination of drinking water in southeast Wisconsin and possibly across the state, according to a report released today by Clean Wisconsin."

"The number of polar bears in eastern Alaska and western Canada has declined by 40%, according to a scientific study that raises more questions about the impact of global warming on the creature that has become the symbol of some of its worst effects."