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The Thirsty Dragon: Semiconductors and Water Scarcity in China
August 15th, 2021
Via The Diplomat, a look the nexus between semiconductors and water scarcity in China: Everyone knows it’s a bad idea to spill water on a cell phone, but did you know that it takes more than 3,000 gallons of water to produce one? Water is needed for mining the metal, making the glue and plastic for assembly […]
Read more »The Colorado River Basin’s Daunting New Math
August 15th, 2021
Via Circle of Blue, an article examining how the Colorado River basin’s big reservoirs have fallen to uncharted territory, with a dire forecast in the future: Lakes Mead and Powell, icons of 20th century water engineering in the American West, are in bad shape. The story of their decline is written into the edges of the […]
Read more »Household Wells Are Failing In Northern California
August 13th, 2021
Courtesy of Circle of Blue, a look at the impact of drought in Northern California where many household wells are failing: Though it was a sudden death, happening overnight during a record-smashing June heat wave, the demise of Maralee and Noal Childs’s household water well was not entirely unexpected. The Childses live in Glenn County, […]
Read more »Argentina’s Paraná River Drops to 77-Year Low
August 13th, 2021
Courtesy of Circle of Blue, a report on Argentina’s Paraná River: The Paraná River stretches through the heart of central South America, arising in Brazil and extending over 3,000 miles through Paraguay and Argentina. The continent’s second-longest river behind the Amazon, the Paraná is a workhorse, supporting rainforest diversity, Indigenous ancestral homes, and Argentina’s economy: over […]
Read more »The Thirsty Dragon: Managing China’s Thousands Of Dams In An Era of Climate Change
August 13th, 2021
Via Quartz, an article on China’s challenge of managing thousands of dams in an era of climate change: The Yangtze river’s periodic flooding was one of the reasons China built the Three Gorges dam, the largest addition to the country’s network of tens of thousands of dams. The idea was that by storing and then […]
Read more »The Water – Taliban Connection
August 13th, 2021
Via The Conversation, a report on the Taliban’s seizure of Herat and a nearby dam that provides water and power to hundreds of thousands of Afghans: The Taliban have taken over the Afghan city of Herat, capping three weeks of furious fighting in which both men and women took up arms to defend their city while many residents […]
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