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5 Natural Disasters That Demand Quick Environmental Change

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5 Natural Disasters That Demand Quick Environmental Change

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The article talks about the causes and impacts of natural disasters and it gives specific examples of such disasters.

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Natural disasters are extreme - they are basically sudden events that are caused due to changing environmental patterns. As the name explains - they are a disaster that not only damages the properties but also affect the people, flora and fauna around.

The worst part is that these disasters like earthquakes, floods, storms, landslides, tsunami, volcanoes, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, forest fires or heat waves strike anytime anywhere on the Earth without any warning.
RELATED: 7 GEOENGINEERING SOLUTIONS THAT MIGHT CAUSE MORE DAMAGE THAN GOOD
So, what causes them? Let's find out!

Environmental disasters will occur whenever there is a disruption in the balance of the environment. But, it should be noted that human activities play a vital role in the severity as well as the frequency of disasters.

Technology indeed has done miracles and has proved to be a boon in many ways. But, with the world getting more advanced, the activities of people across the globe have led to environmental imbalance.

Below-mentioned are some of the reasons behind the occurrence of such natural calamities and their impact on the world as a whole.

Major Causes and Impact of Natural Disasters

Changes in the global climate and lifestyle are the major causes of such unfortunate events. They worsen the natural hazards while amplifying the risk of extreme weather issues like increase in air and water temperature.

This further leads to supercharged storms, rising sea levels, increased wind speeds, heavier precipitation, intense and prolonged droughts as well as floods.

As per the report from the United Nations taken on November 2015, the rate of natural disasters typically, weather-related, is growing. This can be clearly seen by the statistics mentioned below.

The yearly average of the weather-related disaster was 335 between 2005 and 2014. This means, there's almost 14% increase from 1995 to 2004 and nearly twice an average recorded between 1985 and 1995.

The developing countries are said to be more vulnerable to such environmental disasters due to the following reasons:

Poor construction

Poor hygiene

A high density of population

Lack of economic safety nets

Limited resources for disaster response and rebuilding

There's a huge impact on human lives whenever such disasters strike on any country. The first and immediate impact observed during such times is displaced population.

During events like earthquakes and floods, people have to abandon their homes and seek shelter in other regions. The increase in the number of refugees, in turn, can affect the accessibility of health care, food and water supplies and much more.

During flood-like situations, stagnant water promotes multiplying of water-borne bacteria as well as malaria-causing mosquitoes. In short, health risks shoot up instantly in such flood-affected areas and it can further shoot up the death toll, if it fails to receive emergency relief measures from international aid organizations and others.

Third, there's acute food scarcity observed in such areas. The loss of agricultural supplies and destroyed crops makes thousands of people go hungry.

That's not it. Due to this, everything including food supply becomes expensive, reducing the family's purchasing power and ultimately increasing the risk of severe malnutrition.

Thus, when a disaster strikes a community, an area, a state or a country, it really takes a lot of time in rebuilding and getting back to the normal life.

Though natural, these disasters also occur due to our negligence towards protecting the environment and the world as a whole.

As there's a famous saying - better late than never; why not act from today itself?

Let's not wait for any other natural disaster to occur simply due to our negligence towards the environment. People from all across the world should come together in the interest of protecting our nature with conscious efforts.

If we are successful in keeping our environment safe and secure, the rate of such environmental disasters is bound to reduce. It definitely is not in our hands to prevent all of them.

But still, we should try our best to avoid the climate-based disasters simply by making a positive difference to the environment.

For now, let's take a small tour to some of these climate-based natural disasters that have struck at different areas of the world and that can be under our control and if not, we can at least make it easier for the disaster-struck people to fight against it bravely.

1. The Disastrous South Asia Floods

Massive floods devastated many regions of South Asia in August 2017. The heavy monsoon rains and intense flooding affected an estimated 40 million people across Bangladesh, Nepal, and India.

This environmental disaster was so intense that it has been described as the region's worst flood in 40 years. Few of the states which had the most destructive impact are Bihar, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, a Nepalese southern region of Terai and the districts of Kurigram and Chimari located in Northern Bangladesh.

In this tragic incident, millions of people lost their homes, livelihoods, and property.

According to UNICEF, approximately 31 million people were affected in India alone, more than 8 million, including about 3 million children in Bangladesh and about 1.7 million people in Nepal.

This level of rains and floods is by far unusual and unheard in the areas that have encountered such flood-like situation before.

2. The Strongest Hurricane Irma

Source: NOAA/NASA/Wikimedia Commons

Hurricane Irma is considered to be the most powerful Atlantic hurricane in the recorded history till now. In September 2017, it made landfall on Barbuda in 37 hours at 185 miles per hour.

These winds extended to other areas of Puerto Rico, the northern part of Haiti and the Dominican Republic with 15 inches of rainfall.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the death toll reached 129. It shockingly damaged 90% of the buildings in Barbuda while destroying almost all forms of communication.

Sadly, it left 60% of the people homeless causing widespread and catastrophic damage.

3. The Devastating Tropical Cyclone Idai

Source: ESA/Wikimedia Commons

A tropical depression was formed on the eastern coast of Mozambique that further intensified to 120 miles per hour on March 14, 2019. Due to the tornado and floods that followed, it has resulted in extensive damage in the affected areas including Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Madagascar, and South Africa.

Thousands were injured while around 1000 died due to this natural disaster. Looking at the destruction and damage, Zimbabwe was declared as a state of disaster.

Still, there's a concern that if the rains continued like this in future, there are chances of more flood damage from the already over-flowing rivers.

4. The Alabama Tornado Outbreak

Source: TheAustinMan/Wikimedia Commons

The National Weather Service in Birmingham tagged this Tornado as severe as it smashed homes and damaged the power lines including a massive steel cell tower in March 2019. It affected both the areas - Lee County and Alabama killing 23 people and injuring many more.

The casualties were not confirmed, but the East Alabama Center received more than 40 patients that were hit by Tornado.

National Weather Service meteorologist Chris Darden characterized this tornado as a monster by saying that it stretched over at least 24 miles. It was, indeed, one of the deadliest tornadoes of the recent years.

5. Heat Wave in India and Pakistan

As the global average temperature climbs up, extreme heat events are occurring more often for a longer time period. One such deadliest heat wave was recorded in summer 2015.

It killed nearly 2,500 people in India and 2,000 people in Pakistan. That's not the end. Yet again in 2017, both these countries were gripped again by scorching heat where Pakistan observed the temperature of 53.5 Celsius.

The heat wave has not spared other countries in the Middle East and Southern Europe too. With every passing year, summers are getting extreme, making it difficult for the people to fight against the heat.

It's Time to Act Now and Reduce the Rate of Natural Disasters

Regardless of the countries being rich or poor, no one is spared from different and extreme environmental disasters. Those who are underdeveloped are least responsible for such crisis, yet come under the grip of such undesirable events.
RELATED: 10 WAYS YOU CAN HELP REDUCE THE CLIMATE CHANGE
Thus, it's high time for the world to join hands together and cope up with the climatic impact, especially the ones that are under human control. This will, in turn, save us from the consequences of the natural disasters occurring in different parts of the world.

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5 Natural Disasters That Demand Quick Environmental Change

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Natural disasters are extreme - they are basically sudden events that are caused due to changing environmental patterns. As the name explains - they are a disaster that not only damages the properties but also affect the people, flora and fauna around.

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NATURAL DISASTERS ARE GETTING WORSE. PEOPLE WITH THE LEAST POWER ARE MOST AT RISK.

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NATURAL DISASTERS ARE GETTING WORSE. PEOPLE WITH THE LEAST POWER ARE MOST AT RISK.

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Natural disasters strike people equally, but how a community can respond is not equal.

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"Oh my God," Kristy Terry repeated from the passenger seat of her husband's white pickup truck as he swerved around Hurricane Michael's remnants in October. Roofs had crumpled like tissue paper. Insulation from ruined buildings covered the ground like snow. And then there were the trees.

As much as anything, the downed and broken trees signal how long recovery will take for Calhoun County, Florida, a rural area where Terry lives about an hour from the state's Gulf of Mexico coastline. Before the storm, the timber industry was a top employer. People also planted their own properties with pine trees - which must grow for 20 years or more before they can be sold - to save for retirement or college. In a county where the typical household income is nearly 40 percent below the U.S. median, those losses represent a devastating blow.

"We don't know what we will be after this," said Terry, executive director of the Calhoun County Chamber of Commerce. "We do anticipate people will leave. They won't have a choice."

Natural disasters are often seen as equal-opportunity events. They strike the rich and poor, black and white, old and young. But people who start out with fewer resources and power, federal researchers say, are less likely to recover financially afterward - and more likely to die. Some people with low incomes live in more hazardous areas, places made affordable by repeated flooding or other weather events, academics from Princeton University and three other institutions studying 90 years of disasters found. And after disasters, a 2018 analysis concluded, federal relief appears to be widening disparities rather than helping communities return to the status quo.

As climate change worsens, it's fueling more frequent and extreme natural disasters that will only add to the problem. That includes storms like Hurricane Michael, one of the costliest in the world in 2018, which caught places like Calhoun off guard because they rarely have been hit this severely before. Now, academics, advocates and attorneys worry that as the consequences of these disasters grow, vulnerable Americans who are already suffering will get pushed even further behind.

"I don't really think we've learned our lesson," said Debra Wray Furrh, advocacy director for Lone Star Legal Aid in Texas. "We keep seeing the same results over and over and over."

Who's vulnerable?

A ragged American flag hangs from a damaged tree in Calhoun County, Florida, after Hurricane Michael hit in October. (Photo courtesy of Kristy Terry)

Natural disasters hit large swaths of America every year. Only four U.S. counties escaped significant damage from these hazards between 1999 and 2013, according to a recent study. In 2017 alone, hurricanes, wildfires and other extreme weather affected nearly 8 percent of the U.S. population - 25 million people. And they don't all have an equal ability to respond.

People who are poor, racial or ethnic minorities, young or old, or who live in certain types of housing, like mobile homes, are generally less resilient when disasters strike, according to a report by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. But that can vary a lot.

"What makes one person vulnerable might not make another person vulnerable," said Christopher Emrich, an associate professor at the University of Central Florida.

So academics and federal officials, hoping to improve disaster response, have been developing tools known as vulnerability models that use 15 or more factors to get a fuller picture. Take income and housing. People with less money are more likely to live in badly constructed, older or mobile homes, increasing their risk of damage from natural disasters, studies show.

What makes people vulnerable before disasters may also leave them less able to get assistance after. Some don't know about available support. Others lack the time or ability to navigate the challenging process of seeking aid, experts said.

Do you have a story for us about natural disasters? We want to hear from you. Email us at rleven@publicintegrity.org.

Gregory Friendshuh, 77, ran into problems getting reimbursed after the Camp Fire in California, among last year's most costly disasters worldwide. His mobile home in Paradise burned up - and so did the papers proving he owned it, which he and his wife had to leave behind in their frantic escape. That meant he couldn't prove that where he lived existed. He said that he received federal aid, but not for the trailer.

"Who cares about a damn pink slip," he told the Center for Public Integrity in February, referring to the incinerated title. "I lost my home."

The fire came at an especially difficult time for him. Just a day and a half before, he had been discharged from the hospital after open-heart surgery. Smoke from the fire sent him right back. Weeks after recounting his experience, Friendshuh died.

U.S. Army Sgt. Rodrigo Estrada of the California Army National Guard searches and clears debris in Paradise, Calif., following the Camp Fire. The wildfire was one of the world's costliest natural disasters in 2018. (Crystal Housman / U.S. Air National Guard)

Even when vulnerable people get disaster aid, it isn't always equitable. After a 2008 Iowa flood, academics from the University of Iowa investigating purchases of damaged housing by local governments found areas with high elderly and Hispanic populations were less likely than applicants in other communities to receive pre-disaster market value for their homes. They also weren't as likely to receive timely payments for those properties.

Individual injustices can have a major impact over time. A 2018 study looking at 15 years of U.S. disasters, written by sociologists from the University of Pittsburgh and Rice University in Texas, worked to understand those effects by examining property damage and wealth accumulation for roughly 3,400 American households. They found that whites tend to see an increase in wealth "the more natural hazard damages accrue in a county." Blacks, by contrast, lose ground.

"How federal assistance is currently administered seems to be exacerbating rather than ameliorating wealth inequalities that unfold after costly natural hazards," the researchers concluded.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which coordinates national disaster response and recovery, didn't directly respond to the study's findings. But spokeswoman Jessica Nalepa said in a statement that the agency doesn't base its assistance decisions on demographic factors such as race or economic status.

"FEMA case workers do their absolute best to work with families after a disaster when many decisions are being made about recovery," Nalepa said. "To imply that FEMA does not or would not grant assistance to any survivor in need is grossly inaccurate, misleading and disturbing."

Terry, who is also a board member for a nonprofit disaster relief organization, the North Florida Inland Long-Term Recovery Group, praised the federal government's response to Hurricane Michael. But she too has seen some residents struggle to get aid. They've had to "appeal, appeal, appeal,"she said. Often that means trying to find even more records proving ownership. Records that might have been lost in the storm. Records they may not have kept to begin with.

"Some people get tired of appealing, honestly," Terry said.

Pieces of a damaged house in Calhoun County, Florida, lie across a yard shortly after Hurricane Michael hit the area in October. (Photo courtesy of Kristy Terry)

'Like nothing we had seen'

In an effort to do better, some government agencies are harnessing social vulnerability tools, like the University of South Carolina's Social Vulnerability Index, as they plan and respond to disasters. South Carolina, for example, paired the index with federal damage data after Hurricane Matthew in 2016 to help distribute funds to those who needed it most.

Worsening disasters, meanwhile, are forcing groups who work with vulnerable individuals to think bigger. Julie Aguilar Rogado, deputy director for Legal Services of Northern California, said her office's caseload rose roughly 200 percent following the Camp Fire, and they didn't have enough people to address the need. Now they're considering how to quickly mobilize all California legal aid offices for future disasters.

"The scale of the Camp Fire was like nothing we had seen in our service area before," Rogado said.

Still, advocates and academics worry not enough is being done. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, for example, have called for the government to fund studies and develop interventions to address disparate impacts on poor people caused by flooding hazards. And in April, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Bennie G. Thompson urged a federal agency to investigate whether disaster relief is making inequality worse.

Some say the best solution is prevention. Change where people can live so they reside in less vulnerable areas. Reduce poverty levels so people have the resources to prepare. Limit greenhouse gas emissions to slow climate change.

That approach, said Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of Columbia University's National Center for Disaster Preparedness, ensures "we've done everything possible to prevent these conditions in the first place."
For More Information:
Do you believe you have been treated unfairly by the Federal Emergency Management Agency? FEMA asks you to call 800-621-3362 or 800-462-7585 (TTY/TDD).

Read more in Environment

Firms mining metals dug up and dumped nearly 2 billion pounds of toxic waste in 2017. Experts say there's not nearly enough money available to clean up the mess.

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Natural disasters are getting worse. People with the least power are most at risk. - Center for Public Integrity

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"Oh my God," Kristy Terry repeated from the passenger seat of her husband's white pickup truck as he swerved around Hurricane Michael's remnants in October. Roofs had crumpled like tissue paper. Insulation from ruined buildings covered the ground like snow. And then there were the trees.

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‘Billion Dollar’ Natural Disasters on the Rise

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‘Billion Dollar’ Natural Disasters on the Rise

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In recent years, the number of natural disasters requiring more than $1 billion in relief funding has been on the rise.

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'Billion Dollar' Natural Disasters on the Rise

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Natural disasters could be far less damaging with better building codes

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Natural disasters could be far less damaging with better building codes

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A study by the National Institute of Building Science (NIBS) found that using the latest model building codes is extremely beneficial.

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From the mudslides in Montecito, Calif., to the flash floods in Ellicott City, Md., Hurricane Florence in the Carolinas and the wildfires that swept through Northern California, 2018 saw natural disasters of every type affect communities across the country. In total, the president declared 59 major disasters last year. And these disasters came at a high cost, with more than 200 people killed and countless more injured - and more than $91 billion in property damage.

In fiscal year 2018, FEMA, through its Disaster Relief Fund, invested more than $20 billion to support recovery efforts, providing aid to repair damage and construct new homes, small businesses, schools, hospitals, police stations and community centers. The truth, however, is that many of these newly rebuilt and repaired structures will face new hazards and natural disasters - whether it's in the next five years or 50 years from now - and they will need to be prepared. Fortunately, there is a highly cost-effective strategy for ensuring that these structures can handle it: building codes.

A recent study by the congressionally-established National Institute of Building Science (NIBS) found that using the latest model building codes provides a benefit of $11 for every $1 invested through earthquake, flood and wind mitigation benefits, with a $4 to $1 wildfire mitigation benefit. These ratios represent avoided casualties, property damage, business interruptions and insurance premiums. They quantify the importance of modern codes that we see every year when natural disasters strike.

Just this past year, modern codes ensured that the state of Alaska sustained minimal damage and a quick recovery following the Port MacKenzie earthquake. In Florida, following Hurricane Michael, buildings built to modern code requirements fared far better than buildings built to older standards.

Despite the demonstrated benefits of up to date codes, their adoption is not consistent across the country. Many states set code baselines statewide, while in 20 states local governments determine what, if any, building codes apply in their jurisdictions. In some states where local governments control code adoption, upwards of 25 percent of residents are subject to codes that are nine or more years old. Several states with statewide code adoption are using codes that are just as dated. This variation leads to real-world ramifications. The International Building Code, which is adopted in every state, requires storm shelters for schools in tornado-prone regions. Yet, of the 21 states that regularly face tornado risk, only a third require tornado shelters to be built in schools.

With the need for modern code requirements so clear, and the President and leaders from both parties calling for increased investment in our nation's infrastructure, it makes sense for any infrastructure modernization legislation to require new and renovated buildings be built to the latest building codes. Schools, public housing, hospitals, shelters and other public amenities are all pillars of our communities and especially important in meeting the needs of vulnerable populations. Ensuring they are constructed to modern codes protects the people who use and occupy these structures as well as the federal government's own investment.

These standards also track with FEMA's requirements for post-disaster public assistance, HUD requirements for post-disaster community development and the federal government's requirements for its own buildings. To do otherwise, locks in avoidable risk over investments with 75-year lifetimes or more.

An infrastructure bill with minimum code requirements is the simplest and most cost-effective way to avoid long-term risk and increase natural disaster mitigation in communities across the country.
William R. Bryant, MCP, CBO, is the board president of the International Code Council and a Code Official for Anne Arundel County, Md. R. David Paulison served as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) under President George W. Bush from September 2005-January 2009 and is senior advisor to the BuildStrong Coalition. James Lee Witt served as director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) under President Bill Clinton William (Bill) Jefferson Clinton De Blasio pitches himself as tough New Yorker who can take on 'Don the con' WANTED: A Republican with courage Democratic leaders' impeachment tightrope MORE from April 1993-January 2001.

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Natural disasters could be far less damaging with better building codes

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From the mudslides in Montecito, Calif., to the flash floods in Ellicott City, Md., Hurricane Florence in the Carolinas and the wildfires that swept through Northern California, 2018 saw natural disasters of every type affect communities across the country. In total, the president declared 59 major disasters last year.

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The article talks about Hurricane Sandy as a specific example and how to prepare for such a disaster.

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Get ready

In the long term, moisture can cause "water treeing," where insulation degradation propagates in the form of micro-cracks, and can eventually lead to cable failure. Water treeing starts at stress points on the cables, caused during manufacturing, transportation, pulling or service.

The risk can be reduced with cables that are optimized for these environments (e.g. TR-XLPE or LC), but not all cable failures are due to a breakdown in cable insulation. Splices, terminations and joints are also a potential weak link where poor workmanship can lead to water ingress.

As well as power cables, many of the same considerations apply to underground fiber optic cables. Water molecules embedded in micro-cracks can cause signal attenuation, connectors can corrode, and freezing can cause mechanical damage.

Outdoor cables use gel-filled tubes or water-swellable materials to minimize water penetration and survive harsh environments but, as with power cables, the connections can be the weakest link. Preventing water ingress and minimizing moisture are the best ways to protect critical fiber optic infrastructure.

What about the future? Climate change could potentially be the biggest threat to infrastructure. In the UK, increased flooding is expected to damage key assets including masts, pylons, data centers, telephone exchanges, base stations and switching centers, according to a report by AEA for DEFRA, the UK's Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

In the US, the Third National Climate Assessment, from the US Global Change Research Program reports similar risks.

Over the past century, global average sea level has risen by eight inches, and it is expected to rise by one to four feet in the rest of this century, raising the risk of erosion, storm surge damage, and flooding for coastal communities. In the US, nearly 490 communities will face chronic inundation by the end of the century, including large cities such as Boston, New York, Miami, San Mateo and Newark. Data centers in these cities will be at risk of flooding.

A nearer-term paper, Lights Out: Climate Change Risk to Internet Infrastructure, predicts that by 2030, with a 1ft rise in sea level, 235 data centers will be affected, as well as 771 POPs, 53 landing stations, and 42 Internet Exchange Points (IXPs).

Under a modest projection, 4,067 miles of fiber conduit will be under water by the end of the century. This is infrastructure which is designed to be weather and water resistant, but it is not designed to be submerged,and some of this infrastructure is already 20 years old, and already at risk of seals and cladding deteriorating.

For the data center, other danger areas include cable and pipe penetrations in the rooftop, power systems located outside the exterior wall, or connections to an exterior network room. All penetrations through the building envelope should be treated as a potential leak path and sealed appropriately (see box).

New data centers can be built outside of coastal areas but, even here, large storms have increased in certain areas by as much as 71 percent. For every one degree Celsius increase in climate, there is seven percent more moisture in the air. Based on the predicted global temperature rise of three to five degrees, heavy downpours could become even more frequent in the future, causing localized flooding and changing flood boundaries.

Despite the warnings, in a recent survey of 867 data center operators and IT practitioners, only 14 percent reported they were taking climate change into consideration and "re-valuating site selection based on higher temperatures, increased flooding, or water scarcity." Only 11 percent are taking steps to mitigate increased flood risk.

These are low numbers, but they do show that the threat of climate change and flooding is starting to be recognized. Future data centers must protect against the threat of water, and it seems that some operators are already doing it proactively.
Jason Hood is global segment manager infrastructure at Roxtec International

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In the long term, moisture can cause "water treeing," where insulation degradation propagates in the form of micro-cracks, and can eventually lead to cable failure. Water treeing starts at stress points on the cables, caused during manufacturing, transportation, pulling or service. The risk can be reduced with cables that are optimized for these environments (e.g.

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How a Tiny Endangered Species Put a Man in Prison

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How a Tiny Endangered Species Put a Man in Prison

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3 intoxicated men were caught breaking into and swimming in the environment of the endangered pupfish.

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This story was originally published by High Country News and is shared here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

They passed around a bottle of Malibu rum as gunshots bellowed into the desert night. A trio of young men had set up camp near the unincorporated town of Crystal, 80 miles outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. As recently as 2005, the tiny town hosted two brothels, but by April 2016, it was pretty much empty, ideal for carefree camping on a moon-like stretch of desert, the perfect place to pass around a bottle and a shotgun for some bunny blasting.

As often happens on a night like that, things went downhill. Drunk on rum and the roar of the gun, the three men fired up an off-road vehicle and drove away from camp. Riding in back was Trent, a chestnut-haired, bearded 27-year-old, who carried the shotgun and blasted away at road signs as they tore across the Amargosa Valley and Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. They headed toward a remote unit of Death Valley National Park: Devils Hole, a deep pool inside a sunken limestone cavern. The area's surrounded by 10-foot-tall fencing, a fortress erected to protect an endangered species of pupfish found there.

Trent shot at the gate to the pedestrian walkway area and then shot the surveillance camera and yanked it from its mount. Then he and one of his companions, Steven, stumbled into the enclosure. Steven was so intoxicated that it took him multiple tries to clear the fence. Inside the enclosure, he paused to empty his bladder.

Filled with mischief, Trent lunged toward his partner and punched him in the crotch with a left hook. Then, as Steven stumbled over to a large boulder to vomit, Trent dropped the shotgun, stripped off his clothes, and slipped into the deep warm water of Devils Hole. He didn't know it yet, but that would prove to be his worst mistake of the night.

Sixty thousand years ago, a narrow fissure opened up in the Amargosa Valley, releasing water pooled deep in the earth and creating Devils Hole, the opening to an underwater cavern. Scientists disagree over just how it happened-whether by way of underground tunnels, ancient floods or receding waters-but several desert fish were separated from the larger population and trapped in Devils Hole. There, a tiny sub-population-the Devils Hole pupfish ( Cyprinodon diabolis)-evolved in extreme isolation for tens of thousands of years, eventually, according to scientific consensus, becoming an entirely new species.

Today, visitors to Devils Hole get a rare window into one of the Mojave Desert's vast aquifers. Steep limestone walls surround a tiny opening into turquoise water. Divers have descended over 400 feet into the cave without reaching the bottom. The water is so deep that earthquakes on the other side of the world cause it to slosh, shocking the fish into spawning.

The environment in Devils Hole is so remote and extreme that scientists have long puzzled over how the pupfish can live there at all. Still, a modest population has managed to survive on a shallow, sloping rock shelf that gets just enough sunlight-only four hours per day at its peak-to allow algae to grow for the fish to eat.

The Devils Hole pupfish are truly unique. The males are a bright blue, the females a subdued teal, and they're only about an inch long. They are more docile and produce fewer offspring than their cousins, which are found in pockets ranging from the Southwest toward the Gulf of Mexico. The Devils Hole pupfish lacks the pelvic fin that enables its kin to be vigorous swimmers. But it is able to thrive in temperatures far warmer than similar species can tolerate. Trapped by geology in a consistent 93-degree womb, Devils Hole pupfish have nowhere to go. In fact, they have the smallest geographic range of any known vertebrate species on earth.

The pupfish were among the first species to be protected under the Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1967-along with the American alligator, the California condor and the blunt-nosed leopard lizard-and that protection was carried over to the Endangered Species Act of 1973. At the time, around 220 survived in Devils Hole, but since the 1990s, the species has been in significant decline, sinking to just 35 fish in 2013. Today, there are modest signs that the population is growing; the last population count was 136.

The tiny fish has become an icon for those looking to protect endangered species and their habitat, but it's a target of deep resentment in Nevada, and particularly in Nye County, where, according to critics, the interests of an obscure fish are pitted against the livelihood of local agricultural families. The issue has tested water rights in this arid part of the American West and raised questions about how far officials should go to save a handful of imperiled fish. The drunken invasion of its habitat in 2016 was not unprecedented: Dozens of trespasses have been documented throughout the decades. But such crimes are difficult to investigate and rarely prosecuted.

This time, however, would be different.

On Monday, May 2, 2016, Kevin Wilson, an aquatic ecologist and manager of the Devils Hole research program, arrived at the National Park Service outpost in Pahrump, Nevada, a beige, low-key building in the middle of anti-fed country.

"We have some news you won't like," one of his research associates told him, gesturing toward a surveillance video playing on her computer screen. Wilson peered at the images just as one of the three trespassers tried-and failed-to clear the fencing before barging his way in on the other side of the enclosure.

"As I watched the surveillance footage, I could tell they had definitely been drinking," Wilson told me when I visited in February. "But it was really just the one guy that had actually gotten in the pool that concerned me the most."

Wilson, who is 51 with dark gray hair and bright blue eyes, wears his green uniform comfortably, a slight potbelly protruding above his belt. He jokes often, but the deep wrinkles in his face, tanned from years in the unforgiving Nevada sun, give him a stern appearance.

Normally, the nocturnal visitors would have been caught by a motion sensor that triggered a loud alarm. But a barn owl roosting in the area had caused too many false alarms, and rather than spook the bird, officials had disabled the device. So once the men broke in, they felt no real urgency to leave. Little did they know that multiple cameras captured their every move.

A small earth tremor that occurred over the weekend had prompted Wilson's staff to review the footage. "Obviously, we saw much more than we had been expecting," Wilson said, raising an eyebrow.

The video continued to play in Wilson's office. As one man swam, another remained at the edge of the water, while the drunkest one leaned against a rock. The swimmer climbed out of the water, dragged himself over the algae-covered shelf and got dressed. Then the party fled on their off-road vehicle.

Wilson paused the video and backed it up. The man who fired the shotgun and plunged into the pool had left a few things behind-his wallet and cellphone. The next morning, in the fog of a hangover, he broke in to Devils Hole to retrieve them, ignoring the empty beer cans and his underwear, which was still floating in the water.

Wilson reviewed one particular piece of footage, a view from an underwater camera, over and over: A foot plunged through the placid, algae-filled water onto a shallow shelf-the only breeding area in the world for the Devils Hole pupfish. The man had waded in at the most inopportune time possible, in late April, the peak breeding period for the pupfish. "I couldn't immediately tell if any fish were harmed," Wilson told me. "But I decided to do a site visit to find out for sure."

That morning, Wilson, his research team and a bevy of law enforcement officials assessed the damage. The area reeked of vomit; beer cans were scattered around and Trent's underwear still floated in the water. The group huddled around for a closer look. In the pool, a single bright blue pupfish was also floating on the surface - dead.

In February, Wilson took me to the scene of the crime. Wilson has dedicated a good portion of his life to pupfish. He first visited Devils Hole in the 1970s, when he was just 8 years old, tagging along with his geologist mother. Those early visits to national parks and camping trips with his family helped inspire his post-graduate work: the first-ever holistic study of the Devils Hole pupfish. And then the perfect job opened up at the perfect time. "As soon as I defended, this permanent position to study the Devils Hole environment and the pupfish opened up. I've been here ever since," Wilson told me as we stood near the edge of the pond, as cold raindrops began to fall. Just paces away, pupfish flitted through the water.

The 2016 trespass swiftly activated an intricate legal enforcement network designed to protect the fish. After reviewing the footage and finding that a pupfish had indeed died as a result of the incident, Wilson notified the National Park Service at Death Valley and in Washington, DC, as well as the US Fish and Wildlife Service, Nevada Department of Wildlife and the Nye County Sheriff's Office.

A team called the Scorpion Task Force was assembled. Its leader was the Park Service Investigative Services' Paul Crawford, a seasoned Brooklyn-born detective with a constellation of freckles across his face. In 2012, he was the lead detective investigating the murder of ranger Margaret Anderson in Washington's Mount Rainier National Park.

Based in Boulder City, Nevada, and nearing retirement in 2016, Crawford decided to make the trip to Devils Hole. He would supervise two other men: Morgan Dillon and Josh Vann. Dillon, a detective for the Nye County Sheriff's Office, jumped at the chance to work on the case. "I was excited that I might have an opportunity to go all the way down to the pupfish pool and see the fish," Dillon told me. "I originally went to college to be a wildlife biologist. I've always been passionate about that and still like to read scientific articles on the pupfish. Me, personally, though-I wasn't smart enough to be a scientist, so I became a detective instead."

Vann, a ranger at Death Valley National Park, worked alongside Dillon. At Devils Hole, they gathered three empty beer cans as well as two empty boxes that had held shotgun ammunition, two live rounds and multiple spent shotgun shells. Dillon attempted to fingerprint the beer cans and swabbed them for DNA evidence. He even collected the underwear and entered it into the case file.

Abundant surveillance footage gave the detectives clear images of the three suspects' faces. "We see you, and now we're going to find out who you guys are," Crawford remembers thinking. The four-wheeler stood out most: a blue Yamaha Rhino, with flamboyant stripes along its doors. "It was altered with a second seat, extended roof, skid plates up front. It wasn't something these guys bought and just drove off the lot," Crawford said. "Those are a dime a dozen. We would have never found them."

On May 6, Crawford put out a crime-stoppers tip form. Meanwhile, back at the Nye County Sheriff's Office, Dillon showed his colleague, Sgt. Thomas Klenczar, an off-road aficionado, video stills of the customized vehicle. "We were really just BS-ing about it," Dillon said. "But he's into OHVs and is always on Craigslist, so he decided to take a look." Minutes later, Klenczar and Dillon found the vehicle on Craigslist. It had been listed for sale just one day prior to the drunken break-in. "The fact that the vehicle was so unique and that we were able to quickly find it on Craigslist was the one and only piece of this that allowed the case to move forward," Dillon said.

Dillon used the phone number from the Craigslist ad and a house number in one of the photos of the Yamaha to come up with the owner's name. A photo of the man-Steven Schwinkendorf of Pahrump-matched one of those on the Devils Hole footage.

The early 20th century was an anxious era for the National Park Service. The fledgling agency hemmed and hawed over its identity and whether or not it included a responsibility to protect wildlife and wild spaces.

From the 1920s through the 1940s, the Park Service managed land mostly for tourists to enjoy. In one of the agency's founding documents, Interior Secretary Franklin Lane described developing the parks as a "national playground system." The prevailing attitude at the time was that protecting a rarely viewed species like the Devils Hole pupfish was a project "better left to another agency," according to Kevin Brown, an environmental historian who authored a 2017 Park Service book on the history of Devils Hole.

With no entity charged to oversee Devils Hole and the pupfish, the deep cavernous pool gained fame among locals. The area, with the pupfish swimming serenely within it, was subject to constant trespass. To this day, locals often refer to Devils Hole as the "Miner's Bathtub."

In 1950, an ichthyologist named Carl Hubbs excoriated the Park Service for its refusal to protect Devils Hole. Early the following year, Lowell Sumner, a Park Service biologist, visited Devils Hole and did a pictorial study of it. He argued that it was in the national interest to include this geological wonder in Death Valley National Monument. In 1952, President Harry Truman added the Devils Hole unit to Death Valley National Monument under the Antiquities Act, specifically mentioning the "peculiar race of desert fish," and declaring that all of the species and ecosystems of Death Valley would be protected. "It was incredibly forward-looking at that time," said Patrick Donnelly, the Nevada state director for the Center for Biological Diversity. "That was really what began this saga of the role that pupfishes ended up playing in battles down the road."

On May 9, 2016, the Scorpion Task Force-Dillon, Klenczar and Vann-drove through Pahrump, Nevada, to meet their first suspect in person. The harsh beauty of the desert around Pahrump clashes with the severity of the city's neon glow. Under the surrounding Black Mountains, the desert's sage seems greener, the needles of its barrel cactus redder and the flash of the nearby casinos, motels and fast-food chains even brighter. One street is named "Unicorn," another "Tough Girl." "Don't Tread on Me" flags wave above many front doors. The locals elected brothel owner Dennis Hof to the State Assembly, a month after the self-proclaimed pimp and so-called "Trump of Pahrump" died of a heart attack on his 72nd birthday, at a bash attended by notorious Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the porn star Ron Jeremy.

The detectives located the suspect's home and walked to the door. Steven Schwinkendorf, dark-haired, 6 feet tall and topping 200 pounds, answered it, facing Dillon, his arms crossed. A small boy, Schwinkendorf's son, peeked around his legs. Dillon showed the photos from the surveillance video and asked him if the vehicle was his. Schwinkendorf admitted that it was and explained that he had already traded it in as part of a deal for a new four-wheeler.

"Is this you?" Dillon asked, pointing to one of the men on the video, according to investigation transcripts. Schwinkendorf said it was. The other two suspects had come to his house for a barbecue before they went camping, he said. "We had been drinking quite a bit," Schwinkendorf admitted. He told the detectives that the trio then went to Ash Meadows to shoot rabbits. Schwinkendorf said he had only vague recollections of being at Devils Hole, though he remembered vomiting; his friends had teased him about it.

Schwinkendorf identified his companions-Edgar Reyes, a Las Vegas local, and Trenton Sargent, the skinny-dipper-and gave Dillon their phone numbers.

The next day, Dillon called the other suspects. He first dialed Reyes, who didn't answer, though he quickly phoned back. Dillon remembers Reyes saying he was scared. "I woke up, and my face is plastered all over everywhere on the internet," Reyes said. He admitted to the trespass and confirmed that the shotgun belonged to him, but he said that all three of them had been shooting it. "Not long after speaking to him, I got a call from his attorney," Dillon told me.

But Dillon had yet to reach Sargent. "I was afraid that Schwinkendorf and Reyes would get to Sargent and spook him. I felt like I was running out of time."

That afternoon, Dillon called Sargent. "He told me that he heard I was looking for him," Dillon said. "He was very cooperative and forthcoming." The crime-stoppers tip had gone viral, and in the days since it went public, Sargent told Dillon he had received "hundreds of messages" and even a few death threats. He admitted that he had taken off his clothes and gone swimming in the pool. "I was showing off for my friends," Sargent said, "and I wanted to see how deep it was." His demeanor was extremely polite, Dillon remembers, and they spoke on the phone for several minutes.

"Sargent asked me, unprompted, if I had run his criminal history," Dillon told me.

"I have so much to tell you," Sargent said to Dillon. "I'm a convicted felon. I know that I can't have a gun, that I can't be around guns. I wasn't intending to shoot that night and was just going to hold the spotlight while the others shot." There was a pause-a long-enough silence that Dillon thought the phone might have been disconnected. "But because of the drinking, I shot as well," Sargent told him.

Sargent had been convicted of grand theft of money and property three years earlier in San Bernardino, California. He had struggled with addiction for most of his teenage and early adult years, but since then, he had cleaned up his life and returned to his hometown, Indian Springs, Nevada. He lived in a trailer and often saw his son Logan, who was then only 1 month old and lived with his in-laws in town.

Sargent later admitted to knowing about the pupfish and their endangered status, but insisted he didn't mean to harm them. His drunken break-in was a slip, he said, a momentary lapse of judgment.

Trent Sargent's swim was just the most recent threat to the existence of the Devils Hole pupfish. Back in the late 1960s, after the National Park Service began its first studies and population counts, the Cappaerts, a ranching family in Pahrump, decided to dig a number of wells on their 12,000-acre ranch just a few miles from Devils Hole.

When the Cappaerts began pumping, the water level in Devils Hole dropped, exposing large parts of the algae shelf. That exposure, the Park Service argued, decreased algae production and limited the pupfish's spawning area, which in turn reduced its chance to survive. The aquifer level lowered so drastically that it alarmed not only Park Service staff, but also the US Fish and Wildlife Service and Nevada Department of Wildlife. The park's staff ordered the Cappaerts to stop pumping.

The Cappaerts said they had spent a lot of money drilling the wells and changing their farming operation, and that they intended to go right on pumping without limitation under "Absolute Dominion," also known as the "English Rule," a 19th century common-law doctrine adopted by some US states that allowed landowners to use as much groundwater as they pleased. (Nevada had actually abandoned Absolute Dominion in favor of prior appropriation for both surface and groundwater decades earlier.) The Park Service argued that the special status of Devils Hole pupfish under the Endangered Species Act and its habitat's status as a national monument trumped the Cappaerts' rights to the water.

The Cappaert case went all the way to the US Supreme Court, testing the power of the Antiquities Act and the weight of the new Endangered Species Act. In 1976, the High Court affirmed the federal government's right to maintain water levels sufficient to support the pupfish, even at the expense of water rights held by nearby ranchers.

The decision enraged the residents of Nye County. The attorney representing the Cappaerts argued, "There are two endangered species here: the pupfish and the American rancher," and said the federal government had chosen a fish over the people. A Pahrump newspaper editor even threatened to throw the pesticide Rotenone into the sunken cave to "make the pupfish a moot point." The community split into factions, and anger pervaded the air. Warring bumper stickers-"KILL THE PUPFISH" and "SAVE THE PUPFISH"-were plastered on cars, street signs and office buildings across the Southwest.

But the decision has stood the test of time. In the late 1970s, the Cappaert family sold their ranch. The land has since changed hands a number of times, eventually becoming the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. Had that case gone any differently, had the Park Service not decided that part of its mandate was to protect the species and stop the Cappaerts from pumping-had Truman not designated Devils Hole a national monument in the first place-the Devils Hole pupfish might now be extinct, though Pahrump would probably be a little greener. "If it weren't for that decision, the Amargosa Valley would have been pumped dry a long time ago," Wilson, the biologist, told me recently. "There would be no Death Valley, no Devils Hole, no Devils Hole pupfish - but there would be a whole lot more golf courses, I bet."

The Devils Hole pupfish, a tiny species that has survived such obstacles, represents a paradox for Wilson, who would not live in Pahrump were it not for Devils Hole. He told me that adjusting to a life in the gravel-covered, billboard-lined city was difficult for him and his wife, a Canadian, who, after a few years in Nevada, finally found her niche in, of all things, golf. "I do wish I could just pick up and move Devils Hole and put it somewhere with a higher standard of living," Wilson told me. "But it's worth protecting - and worth punishing people who threaten this little species.

"The most important advances in science have come from the edges of what's possible-from the most extreme environments," Wilson said. "We have a lot to learn about how the Devils Hole pupfish has even been able to survive."

Trent Sargent turned himself in just after Memorial Day and pleaded guilty to violating the Endangered Species Act, destruction of federal property, and possessing a firearm while a felon. A few days before his October sentencing, he submitted a letter to US District Judge Andrew Gordon, who would decide his fate.

"I'm not one to make excuses for what I have done wrong and I'm not going to start now," he wrote, in all capitalized, slanted script. "I made a stupid mistake. ... I'm not a bad person, your honor, and I take full responsibility for my actions and the crimes I committed. ... I would like to ask you to accept this letter to you as my verbal 'handshake' that upon my release I will complete all stipulations given to me by the courts and you will not see me again in your courtroom."

On the afternoon of Oct. 25, 2018, Sargent stood quietly beside his lawyer in a Las Vegas courtroom as Judge Gordon handed down his sentence: A total of 12 months and one day-nine months specifically for his violation of the Endangered Species Act-in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Once he is released from the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center, Sargent must pay nearly $14,000 in restitution to the National Park Service, along with a $1,000 fine. He's also forbidden to enter federal public lands for the rest of his life.

Four months later, I journeyed to Indian Springs, Nevada, an unincorporated community of fewer than 1,000, where Sargent has lived for most of his life. It's home to Creech Air Force Base and the Desert Warfare Training Center. I met Sargent's family at their spacious and warmly lit doublewide manufactured home. There was a chill in the air and a blustery wind, but his mother, Norine, sat outside, watching her grandchildren jump on a trampoline in the yard. Trent's father, Josh, joined us a few minutes later, home from work at the Nevada National Nuclear Security Site, where he's been employed as an ironworker for 30 years.

I had assumed that the Sargent family would consider what happened to their son unfair. But I was wrong. In fact, they defended the Endangered Species Act with a conviction that surprised me, and they knew a lot about Devils Hole and the pupfish that swam there. Norine recalled the family taking trips to Devils Hole when Trent was a boy, teaching him about the pupfish. "Trent would just as soon give first aid and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to that little pupfish than have this thing go on and on," Josh Sargent said. He acknowledged that his son was paying the necessary price for his actions. "He knows about endangered species, and he takes responsibility for what he did."

The Sargents' home was filled with pictures of family, including several of Trent throughout the years. In one, the beaming 12-year-old holds up the first fish he ever caught, a minuscule rainbow trout. But now Trent can't visit public lands or use a firearm. "Trent grew up hunting and fishing," Norine said. "And now he'll never get to go hunting with his dad ever again."

Had that fateful evening unfolded just slightly differently-had that single pupfish not died-Trent would very likely be sitting in the living room with his family. Sometimes it is a bitter pill for the Sargents to swallow. "I understand the way people feel about the fish," Josh Sargent said. "But what if someone runs over a cat? Are they going to stop and make sure the cat is alive? No, I don't think so. They're just going to keep on truckin'. But Trent kills a fish-and certainly not intentionally, and he's in prison. ... We're not trying to defend him; the Sargent family is deeply sorry for what happened."

Because there are so many endangered species, society is forced to make difficult choices about which ones to protect, and to what lengths we should go to save them. Climate change has quickened the pace of extinction, and already the number of critically endangered species exceeds our ability to save them all.

The Devils Hole pupfish, serene, obscure and tiny, has survived a very long time in an unkind place, just one drunken night or one jug of poison away from oblivion. It is a wonder, to be sure. But how far do you go to save a species like this? For Wilson and the others at Death Valley National Park, it means surrounding this biological wonder with an impenetrable cage. Biologists occasionally feed the fish and clean out Devils Hole as if it were a giant aquarium. They even have a backup population held in a huge climate-controlled tank nearby, insurance against outright extinction. Protecting the species means harsh punishment for anyone who kills even just one fish, according to Patrick Donnelly of the Center for Biological Diversity, which offered a $10,000 reward for help in identifying the drunken skinny-dipper and his friends. "We desperately wanted justice for this. If they didn't get the book thrown at them, what's stopping others from doing whatever they want and eliminating an entire species?"

Since the incident, Devils Hole has become an even more formidable fortress. The Park Service capped its towering fences with additional barbed wire. The public can only view the sunken cave from a distance now, more than 20 feet above it. And inside the fenced viewing area are even more cameras, motion sensors and "No Trespassing" signs.

"I hate it," Wilson told me this winter. "I hear from the public all of the time - 'Why does this place look like a prison?' People get really upset that they can't get a closer look. But it's just what we have to do - to stop people from doing stupid things."

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How a tiny endangered species put a man in prison

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This story was originally published by High Country News and is shared here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. They passed around a bottle of Malibu rum as gunshots bellowed into the desert night. A trio of young men had set up camp near the unincorporated town of Crystal, 80 miles outside of Las Vegas, Nevada.

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Endangered Species Rebounds in South Sound Prairies

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Endangered Species Rebounds in South Sound Prairies

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The checkerspot butterfly was successfully reintroduced into the south sound prairies by scientists.

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The scientists at Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) have successfully reintroduced the endangered Taylor's checkerspot butterfly into south sound prairies, specifically at the Scatter Creek Wildlife Area in Thurston County and Joint Base Lewis McChord.

Biologists were out on one of the Scatter Creek sites Wednesday, counting the number of the butterflies along survey lines, and were pleased to see that "there were almost too many to count," said Mary Linders, endangered species recovery biologist for WDFW.

In the last decade, WDFW has tripled the amount of Taylor's checkerspot butterflies in the south sound prairies.

"No one has been able to do this successfully with this group of butterflies, so this is really exciting on a national scale," Linders said, endangered species recovery biologist for WDFW.

In fact, Taylor's checkerspot butterfly is one of about 20 subspecies of Edith's checkerspot butterfly, and is the only one that has successfully been reintroduced to the wild.

The butterfly became endangered due to loss of habitat from the advance of invasive plant species like scotch broom. So the first method of restoring the subspecies was to restore the prairies themselves.

Josh Cook, wildlife biologist for WDFW, specializes in prairie restoration and said WDFW has a suite of treatments it does every year to help restore the habitat for Taylor's checkerspot butterflies.

"The easiest way to do it is to start with prescribed fire," he said. "We'll select areas that could use a burn and that will open up a canvas, essentially, of landscape. Then the invasive weeds will emerge first, once we get some precipitation. So we'll herbicide those out, and that will give us the opportunity to select against them. A lot of the native plants will emerge after that."

Those native plants are what the Taylor's checkerspot butterfly needs to survive. These plants include the blue camas and Indian paintbrushes found in the prairies.

"Over the course of the last 20 years, we've been working hard on restoring the habitat on this prairie," Linders said. "It used to be covered with scotch broom, five, six, seven feet tall. We have gotten rid of that and are restoring a lot of the native prairie plants. These efforts preserve a lot of the native nectar and host plants for the Taylor's checkerspot butterfly, and also for a whole suite of other species that are also very rare on these prairies."

In 2007, WDFW officially started the program, testing the waters of this type of restoration work. The larva were reared in captivity throughout their hibernation stage, before the caterpillars could be released onto the prairies.

Linders said it is important to note that researchers in the Bay Area of California have studied this butterfly - a different subspecies of the same butterfly - for 40 years, but have not been able to get the larva through the hibernation stage of the growth process. WDFW biologists have done so in just over a decade of work.

"We started playing with smaller numbers," Linders said. "We were captive rearing at the Oregon Zoo, trying to figure out how to captive rear, just putting out a few hundred caterpillars into the prairies at a time."

The program also captive rears the larva at Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women in Belfair, Washington.

Over the years, as they pinpointed the exact life stage to release the caterpillars, biologists at WDFW felt comfortable releasing them in progressively larger numbers.

During the five years that led up to 2013, WDFW released anywhere from 1,500 to 2,500 per year on prairie sites around the south sound area.

"We did our last release, for the most part, in 2013," Linders said. "We did sort of one bump up in 2016 because we were concerned about a big El Nino year that might take that population back down. The numbers are quite precarious until they get into the thousands."

The results have been better than anyone could have expected as she and others at WDFW monitor the population growth with regular surveys, Linders said.

"Now for the last three years the numbers of adults have been building really quickly," she said. "And so we are kind of seeing exponential growth in the population right now. We are probably hitting maximum density, so we are kicking butterflies out into the surrounding habitat, which is really exciting for us... They are shooting out all over the place."

Taylor's checkerspot butterfly is an integral part of the prairie system. Just as the prairies support its life, it supports the life of the prairies.

It is all a delicate balance, Linders said, with plenty of problems to work through.

"We often look at a single species and say, 'Why do we need that one?'" she said. "In the case of these prairies, it's not just one species that we are concerned about. In fact, one of the things we are seeing with the restoration of the Taylor's checkerspot is... it's actually creating and maintaining habitat for a whole host of other birds, butterflies, rare plants."

Linders said that this line of work is her calling. She said she loves how these prairies are why European settlers built here in the first place, and how they have historically been integral to the way of life for many Native Americans.

Restoring the prairies, then, has become a priority in her life.

"I don't know what else I would do," Linders said. "I absolutely love what I do. It's work that takes passion and takes commitment. It's something that really requires me to put all my physical and mental capacities to try to solve these problems. This particular butterfly seems to be too complex to research our way through these problems."

Linders and company at WDFW have had to act and invest in the prairies to obtain the results they have accomplished.

So be on the lookout for an orange and black butterfly in prairie land, because it's a sight that was seldom seen 10 years ago.

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Endangered Species Rebounds in South Sound Prairies

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The scientists at Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) have successfully reintroduced the endangered Taylor's checkerspot butterfly into south sound prairies, specifically at the Scatter Creek Wildlife Area in Thurston County and Joint Base Lewis McChord.

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Reintroduction of first endangered species to Missouri shows encouraging signs

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Reintroduction of first endangered species to Missouri shows encouraging signs

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An endangered of species was finally let go by scientists to flourish on their own.

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After seven years of hand-holding, scientists, acting like anxious parents, have decided to let go of the first federally endangered species ever restored to Missouri.

Since 2012, more than 2,800 American burying beetles have been released in the soil at Wah'Kon-Tah Prairie near El Dorado Springs in Southwest Missouri. They've also been given food and closely monitored to see how the population was doing.

"We are seeing some positive trends that indicate it is time to see how the beetles are doing on their own," Bob Merz said this week.

Merz is the zoological manager for invertebrates at the St. Louis Zoo and director of the Center for Conservation of the American Burying Beetle at the zoo's Wildcare Institute. The zoo, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Missouri Department of Conservation and the Nature Conservancy have all worked together to restore the orange-and-black beetle, which is an inch or so long, to Missouri.

They will continue to monitor the beetles, but no new stocking is planned this summer, and the beetles - carrion eaters - will have to find their own dinner. Merz likened the moment to parents sending children off to college.

Scott Hamilton, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and species lead for the American burying beetle recovery effort in Missouri, has compared it to taking training wheels off a child's bicycle.

"We put in about 400 beetles every year," Hamilton said of the recovery effort. "Now we need to see what the Wah'Kon-Tah population is going to show us on its own."

'Disastrous decline'
Historically, the American burying beetle was found in much of the eastern and central United States, including Missouri. Before the reintroduction at Wah'Kon-Tah, the last one on record in the state was collected in 1972 in Newton County.

By 1989, there were only two known populations of the beetle surviving in the wild, one in Rhode Island and the other in Oklahoma. At the time, it was thought that the beetle had experienced "one of the most disastrous declines of an insect's range ever to be recorded," according to federal records.

That year, the American burying beetle became one of the smallest creatures on the federal government's list of endangered species, joining the bald eagle, grizzly bear and California condor.

Since that listing, subsequent surveys for the American burying beetle have turned up populations in other states, including Kansas and Arkansas, but scientists say it is still missing across 90 percent of its former range, which once extended from Florida to Canada and from the Dakotas to Texas. Merz has said many of those remaining populations in the Midwest remain isolated from each other and small, making them vulnerable.

And with the exception of that lone population found on Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island, no wild populations of the beetles have been seen east of the Kansas-Missouri line.

According to Merz, there are a lot of theories about the beetle's decline, including the widespread use of DDT and other pesticides, habitat loss and fragmentation, and possibly impacts to the beetle's primary food source, which is carrion.

Following designation as an endangered species, limited reintroductions were attempted elsewhere, including on islands off the coast of Massachusetts as well as in Ohio, but the largest reintroduction to date started in 2012 in Missouri, when 296 beetles were brought to Wah'Kon-Tah, a 3,000-acre remnant of original tallgrass prairie.

The beetles were bred in captivity at the St. Louis Zoo, and for each of the more than 2,800 beetles stocked from 2012 to 2018, scientists and volunteers dug a tiny hole at selected sites and placed in it the carcass of a quail and a pair of beetles before replacing the soil. To track the beetles that were stocked, scientists notched the elytra, which is the hard, modified forewings that encase the thin hind wings used by beetles in flight. The notch distinguishes captive-bred from wild beetles.

Political fighting
While the reintroduction progressed in Missouri, elsewhere in the country sometimes contentious debates began playing out among local, state and federal elected leaders who were concerned not only for the beetle, but also the impact that federal designation was having.

As new populations were found elsewhere in the Midwest, some argued that it was time for the beetle to be downlisted, from endangered to threatened, or even delisted. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, "endangered species are at the brink of extinction now, threatened species are likely to be at the brink in the near future."

Chad Warmington, president of the OIPA-OKOGA, an oil and gas industry trade group, said downlisting the endangered beetle would provide "significant regulatory relief" to oil and gas producers, which have to get additional permits, take steps to mitigate their industry's impact, and sometimes work around remnant populations of the insect. It can be expensive and time consuming. He also noted that the industry also has implemented conservation and recovery efforts and that is a "key reason the beetle has and will continue to flourish" in Oklahoma.

"Even with listing it as threatened, there are still protections, just not as onerous," added Cody Bannister, vice president of communications for the association. "There are still protections in place for the beetle."

In 2015, Ottawa County, Oklahoma, commissioners also passed a resolution calling for removal of the American burying beetle from the list of federally protected endangered species. It was part of an initiative promoted by the Association of County Commissioners of Oklahoma. The action also followed legislation introduced a year before by U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., to remove federal protection for the beetle. He noted that following listing as an endangered species, it had subsequently been found in 45 of the state's 77 counties, mostly in eastern Oklahoma.

"The Endangered Species Act is designed to protect species that may go extinct, and the American burying beetle is showing increasing resiliency," Inhofe said in a statement issued at the time. His bill not only had support from the oil and gas industry, but also the Oklahoma State Home Builders Association.

"We want them to acknowledge that we have concerns here," John Clarke, Ottawa County commissioner, told the Globe at the time. "We aren't against conservation efforts. We don't want to hasten the demise of this species. We just want the environmental groups to look again at this region to understand that they aren't endangered here, or if they have at least recovered to a point that we don't have to continue these studies at a cost to taxpayers."

Clarke was referring to evaluations the county had to complete before it could begin any construction project. Those studies cost $5,000 to $7,500 each.

"The studies have to take place in the summer for this beetle since that is when they are active, and that study is only good for one year. If construction doesn't occur within that time frame, then we have to start the whole process over. It's so binding to anything we want to do. Every study we do costs money - money that is tight that we can use (for) new projects like bridges and roads, which is our primary focus as a commission."

Some conservation groups, however, including The Center for Biological Diversity, have argued that lawmakers are kowtowing to industries that contribute money and exert influence via lobbyists, and that decisions about endangered species were being driven by economic concerns, not science.

Noah Greenwald, endangered species program director for the Center, told the Globe: "The Species Status Assessment found the beetle is likely to go extinct in Oklahoma, which is where the most beetles and most solid wild populations remain. This means the beetle is more - not less - endangered than previously thought. This was all done to appease the oil and gas industry, which perceives the beetle to threaten their bottom line. This is Trump administration swamp politics at its worst."

He was referring to an announcement recently by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is proposing downlisting the beetle from endangered to threatened, a process that will include public hearings and that could take several months.

Amy Leuders, southwest regional director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, noted in making the announcement that the American burying beetle is now found in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, Texas and on Nantucket Island off the coast of Massachusetts.

"We have made some positive steps forward and are now proposing to downlist the beetle," Leuders said.

Merz said changing the status of the beetle won't affect the recovery effort in Southwest Missouri, and he hopes any decisions are based on science, not political concerns.

He also noted that the Wah'Kon-Tah population is still the only known population in Missouri, and that it is premature to consider the recovery effort there a success yet. They'll know more after watching the Southwest Missouri population for a few years, to see what happens now that scientists are no longer providing food and supplemental stockings.

"We are not at the point where anyone can say it is a self-sustaining population," Merz added.

Signs of success
But if they can't count it as a success yet, they say they have reasons to be hopeful.

After that first stocking in 2012, scientists went back and checked on one-third of the beetle release sites later that year and found 395 grubs, or beetle larvae, which was the first of several positive indicators they would find in coming years.

Following the stockings each year, scientists also have returned to Wah'Kon-Tah to look for evidence of reproduction, and in the summer and fall of 2016, after the stocking that year, more than 850 beetles were trapped on the prairie, and 473 of those were unnotched, meaning they were offspring.

They also look each spring before stocking for what they call "overwintering beetles." That first year, they found just one. The second year it was two, the third year it was nine. The high was 110 overwintering beetles found in 2017. The numbers have been lower since then, but Merz and Hamilton said fluctuations are to be expected.

Hamilton added: "This is an animal that is surviving and reproducing."

The two men also acknowledged that measuring the population of a nocturnal insect that lives below ground and can fly several miles when above ground presents challenges, and weather, including heavy rains and flooding, can affect the population from year to year. Still, they think the numbers mean it is time for the population at Wah'Kon-Tah to fly solo.

"We felt we reached the level we are probably going to reach out there," Merz said.

And in another hopeful signal, American burying beetles have been collected at nearby public sites. The first was found at the nearby Monegaw Prairie Conservation Area, which is about a mile away from Wah'Kon-Tah, and last year single beetles were trapped at the Linscomb Wildlife Area and at Schell Osage Conservation Area, two other public tracts that are a few miles farther yet. The beetles also have been found on nearby private land up to several miles away.

Merz notes that all of those public lands are within a four-county area (Cedar, Vernon, Bates and St. Clair) that have been designated as the beetle's recovery area. As the population expands, both Hamilton and Merz said a special designation as a "nonessential experimental population" follows the beetle. According to Hamilton, that designation means that if a nearby landowner, in the course of otherwise legal business on his property, accidentally kills a beetle, there will be no legal fallout. That designation also allows landowners to continue haying and burning their prairies, for example, as well as clearing brush, putting in fences and other work without having to worry about hurting the beetle. It also allows road building and other development to continue in the four-county recovery area.

"We're setting up the beetle the best way we possibly can," Merz said. "I don't think there is a better way to set them up to succeed. There is nothing we could have done to set them up better than we have done."

While they wait to see what happens at Wah'Kon-Tah, they also plan to begin another stocking this summer at the nearby Taberville Prairie Conservation Area in St. Clair County, another remnant of native prairie.

Steven Buback, natural history biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation, said in an email to the Globe last week: "We are hopeful that this population can survive and thrive on its own, and we can begin to focus on efforts on expanding inhabited range and providing additional population-level resiliency. Even if the species gets downlisted to threatened, we will continue to work to make the reintroduction ... a success. Hopefully, it will prove successfully integrated in the native fauna of Missouri and can continue to be a part of our fauna for future generations."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Reintroduction of first endangered species to Missouri shows encouraging signs

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After seven years of hand-holding, scientists, acting like anxious parents, have decided to let go of the first federally endangered species ever restored to Missouri. Since 2012, more than 2,800 American burying beetles have been released in the soil at Wah'Kon-Tah Prairie near El Dorado Springs in Southwest Missouri.

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Biodiversity: many species could be even more likely to go extinct than we realise

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Biodiversity: many species could be even more likely to go extinct than we realise

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According to a new report, more than a million species are at risk of extinction.

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Biodiversity: many species could be even more likely to go extinct than we realise

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(MENAFN - The Conversation) More than a million species are at risk of extinction according to a new report on biodiversity. But even some species tha

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Pallid Sturgeon Released Into Missouri River In Effort To Save The Endangered Species

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Pallid Sturgeon Released Into Missouri River In Effort To Save The Endangered Species

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Pallid sturgeons were used to help another fish species recover in Missouri.

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Tim Schroeder is a little bleary-eyed.

He left South Dakota before sunrise and drove 10 hours straight to Missouri - with a few hundred endangered fish in the back of his pickup truck.

Schroeder, who works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was tasked with delivering a load of pallid sturgeon to biologists in St. Charles. It's part of a long-running partnership between federal scientists and the Missouri Department of Conservation to jumpstart recovery of the endangered fish species, which was once common in the Missouri and lower Mississippi rivers.

"They're an ancient dinosaur-lookin' creature with a triangle nose," Schroeder said, gently cupping the fish in his hand.

He flips it over to reveal a silvery, translucent underbelly and points out a recent meal winding through its digestive tract.

The pallid sturgeon are about a year old and still relatively small - about 10 inches long - but they can grow up to six feet long and weigh about 100 pounds.

It's one of eight sturgeon species in North America, seven of which are listed as threatened or endangered.

One of the big threats, said MDC fisheries management biologist Sarah Peper, is ongoing habitat loss.

Pallid sturgeon do best in slow-moving, shallow stretches of water, which are becoming increasingly rare on the Missouri River.

"These are fish that are as old as the dinosaurs," Peper said. "None of their evolution took place in a river that looks like this, that's swift and narrow and deep. Their Missouri River was wide and shallow with shifting sandbars and floodplains accessible in the spring floods."

Damming and dredging in recent decades have dramatically altered the riverscape and blocked spawning routes, further contributing to declining sturgeon populations.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service added the pallid sturgeon to the endangered species list in 1990. Four years later, MDC began releasing hatchery-raised pallid sturgeon into the Missouri River, with the goal of keeping the species from going extinct.

Under threatening skies, Peper and MDC fisheries technician John Winter carefully transfer more than 200 pallid sturgeon into a temperature-controlled tank on a boat.

They shove off from shore at Blanchette Landing in St. Charles and carefully pilot around fallen branches in the flood-swollen Missouri River.

"[The fish] have never been in a river before," Peper said. "Especially with the river at this flood stage, you don't want to throw them out into the main channel with the really swift current."

Peper kills the motor, as Winter transfers several wriggling sturgeon into the river. With a little luck, some will survive to reproduce.

For Peper, it's a small step toward conserving a species that was here long before us.

"They're such an ancient fish," she said. "You think about all the changes that this fish has gone through in millions and millions of years, and now it's going to die out if we don't do something."
Follow Shahla on Twitter: Send questions and comments about this story to feedback@stlpublicradio.org @shahlafarzan

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Pallid Sturgeon Released Into Missouri River In Effort To Save The Endangered Species

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Tim Schroeder is a little bleary-eyed. He left South Dakota before sunrise and drove 10 hours straight to Missouri - with a few hundred endangered fish in the back of his pickup truck. Schroeder, who works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was tasked with delivering a load of pallid sturgeon to biologists in St.

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Breakthrough in new material to harness solar power

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Breakthrough in new material to harness solar power

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Scientists at the University of Toledo made a significant breakthrough in the chemical formula and process to make solar cells.

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The most affordable, efficient way to harness the cleanest, most abundant renewable energy source in the world is one step closer to reality.

The University of Toledo physicist pushing the performance of solar cells to levels never before reached made a significant breakthrough in the chemical formula and process to make the new material.

Working in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Lab and the University of Colorado, Dr. Yanfa Yan, UToledo professor of physics, envisions the ultra-high efficiency material called a tandem perovskite solar cell will be ready to debut in full-sized solar panels in the consumer market in the near future.

Perovskites, compound materials with a special crystal structure formed through chemistry, would replace silicon, which -- for now -- remains the solar-cell material of choice for converting the sun's light into electrical energy.

"We are producing higher-efficiency, lower-cost solar cells that show great promise to help solve the world energy crisis," Yan said. "The meaningful work will help protect our planet for our children and future generations. We have a problem consuming most of the fossil energies right now, and our collaborative team is focused on refining our innovative way to clean up the mess."

The new research paper, which is published in the journal Science, outlines how the photovoltaics team is fine-tuning a mix of lead and tin to advance the technology closer to its maximum efficiency. Efforts have currently brought the efficiency of the new solar cell to about 23 percent. In comparison, silicon solar panels on the market today have around an 18 percent efficiency rating.

Scientists used a chemical compound called guanidinium thiocyanate to dramatically improve the structural and optoelectronic properties of the lead-tin mixed perovskite films.

" Science is the top academic journal in the world, alongside Nature, which published other research by Dr. Yan only five months ago after he discovered a single material that produces white light, which could boost the efficiency and appeal of LED bulbs," Dr. Sanjay Khare, professor and chair of the UToledo Department of Physics and Astronomy, said. "His significant sustainability work at The University of Toledo can help power the world using clean energy."

About five years ago Yan's team at UToledo identified the ideal properties of perovskites and he has since focused his 20 years of experience on producing an all-perovskite tandem solar cell that brings together two different solar cells to increase the total electrical power generated by using two different parts of the sun's spectrum.

Last month the U.S. Department of Energy awarded Yan a $1.1 million grant to continue his research in collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Lab.

"This is the material we've been waiting for for a long time," Yan said. "The solar industry is watching and waiting. Some have already started investing in this technology."

Yan is an expert in theory of defect physics and electronic properties in semiconductors, materials synthesis and thin-film solar-cell fabrication.

"Our UToledo research is ongoing to make cheaper and more efficient solar cells that could rival and even outperform the prevailing silicon photovoltaic technology," said Dr. Zhaoning Song, research assistant professor in the UToledo Department of Physics and Astronomy and co-author on the study. "Our tandem solar cells with two layers of perovskites deliver high power conversion efficiency and have the potential to bring down production costs of solar panels, which is an important advance in photovoltaics."

While Yan's team has improved the quality of the materials and the process to manufacture them at a low cost, more progress needs to be made.

"The material cost is low and the fabrication cost is low, but the lifetime of the material is still an unknown," Song said. "We need to continue to increase efficiency and stability."

"Also, lead is considered a toxic substance," Yan said. "I am determined to work with the solar industry to ensure solar panels made of this material can be recycled so they don't cause harm to the environment."

Journal Reference:

Jinhui Tong, Zhaoning Song, Dong Hoe Kim, Xihan Chen, Cong Chen, Axel F. Palmstrom, Paul F. Ndione, Matthew O. Reese, Sean P. Dunfield, Obadiah G. Reid, Jun Liu, Fei Zhang, Steven P. Harvey, Zhen Li, Steven T. Christensen, Glenn Teeter, Dewei Zhao, Mowafak M. Al-Jassim, Maikel F. A. M. van Hest, Matthew C. Beard, Sean E. Shaheen, Joseph J. Berry, Yanfa Yan, Kai Zhu. Carrier lifetimes of >1 μs in Sn-Pb perovskites enable efficient all-perovskite tandem solar cells. Science, 2019; 364 (6439): 475 DOI: 10.1126/science.aav7911

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solar energy; energy and resources; energy policy; materials science; energy and the environment; renewable energy; environmental science; geomagnetic storms

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Breakthrough in new material to harness solar power

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Physicists are pushing the performance of solar cells to levels never before reached. They have made a significant breakthrough in the chemical formula and process to make a new material. The ultra-high efficiency material called a tandem perovskite solar cell is being developed to help solve the world energy crisis.

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Blockchain Is The Next Big Thing For Renewable Energy

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Blockchain Is The Next Big Thing For Renewable Energy

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Blockchain is considered to be the next big technological advance in renewable energy.

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Blockchain has been touted as the next big technological advance - impacting everything from online transactions to e-government. But what does it mean for renewable energy?

Essentially an online register that securely stores information, blockchain serves as a repertoire of knowledge accessible to everyone. Rather than being controlled by one entity, blockchain is spread across multiple computers and uses a form of data logging to ensure that the information cannot be changed or corrupted by anyone else. By decentralizing data and protecting the way it is manipulated, blockchain promotes transparency and the sharing of information. As such, the record has immense potential in helping shape a wave of new technology and our ability to interact with it.
↪Read Also: Cruise Ship Pollution Is Causing Serious Health And Environmental Problems Consumer Driven Smart Grids
Blockchain has served as the platform for the online currencies that have created a lot of hype as an alternative form of legal tender. Whilst they are often mentioned in the same breath, blockchain is far more than just a platform for cryptocurrency. While energy-intensive cryptocurrency mining has caused a spike in carbon emissions, blockchain is a blank canvas capable of driving innovation in the field of green technology . Startups and major companies alike are looking to unlock the potential that blockchain holds to catalyze the transition to green energy.

Many startups are already using blockchain as a tool to make energy grids more accessible and sustainable by promoting data-sharing in real time. The idea behind creating energy grids linked to blockchain is fairly simple: by giving consumers total control over where they source their energy as well as the information behind the production itself it drives competition and promotes sustainable energy.

Consumers using a smart-grid that relies on blockchain will be able to compare their energy providers and buy directly from them. In Estonia, a blockchain-powered smart grid called WePower has been testing just how well a choice-driven energy market could work by teaming up with an independent energy provider who shares their energy data in real time. Consumers helping pilot the program have bought into the grid and been given credits to spend on specific energy sources, giving them the freedom to alter their choices based off of real-time power generation and their prices.
↪Read Also: The European Union Is Helping These Islands To Go Renewable An Opportunity for Clean Energy
Estonia's fully digital grid made it easy for a WePower to test its blockchain project as well as using it to help promote clean energy . WePower's CEO Nick Martyniuk told that "blockchain provides the necessary trust for data sharing and creates liquidity as well as accountability between energy buyers and producers."

Should the blockchain-based grid take off and become more mainstream, it could open up a whole new market for clean energy as Martyniuk points out, "Even though the cost of renewables has dropped significantly, small to medium size companies don't have a good way to start buying green energy."

A smarter electricity grid giving consumers transparent energy choices could push for more integration of clean energy. As points out, cheaper forms of energy, such as renewables, are set to be the market's favorite choice and could help propel clean energy as a mainstream option.

Based off projects in India, Hunink illustrates what a blockchain-driven grid could look like : "A biomass plant owned by a farmer in rural India could start delivering the backup power to the grid as soon as the central grid fails, for a price that may vary dynamically according to the rest of available energy in the system. If the blackout is during the day, many solar panels would also be able to cover the load, however, at night, the biomass plant operator has better leverage to sell his energy for a higher price. The market dynamics of supply and demand could all be automatically contracted within a smart contract blockchain environment.
If you are interested in this story then read also Meet The Companies Spearheading Blockchain For Clean Energy.
The decentralization of energy systems democratizes information and allows individuals to make their better-informed decisions. As a tool, blockchain smart grids could help to reduce inequality and provide cheaper, cleaner energy to both areas with developed electricity grids and those lacking any energy access. Blockchain could be one of the many solutions to long term reduction of carbon emissions and help promote sustainable development across the world.

However, in order to be successful, smart grids will require everyone to share their information, a move that many companies and private citizens alike have refused to do. Blockchain will need everyone on common ground in order to truly reach its potential as a global tool, but until then, startups will continue to pioneer the technology and help small communities and developing nations take charge of the clean energy revolution.

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Blockchain Is The Next Big Thing For Renewable Energy

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Blockchain has been touted as the next big technological advance - impacting everything from online transactions to e-government. But what does it mean for renewable energy? Essentially an online register that securely stores information, blockchain serves as a repertoire of knowledge accessible to everyone.

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Salt could be the future of renewable energy

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Salt could be the future of renewable energy

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Salt could be used to store heat and help fix the problems caused by renewable energy sources.

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BERLIN - Amid the hum and heat of Berlin's Reuter thermal power station stands a shining contraption that looks out of place in the decades-old machine hall.

Its silver pipes and vats contain a substance that Vattenfall, the plant's operator, says could become a key ingredient for a fossil fuel-free future.

The energy company, together with a Swedish start-up, is testing the use of salt - though not quite the common table variety - to store heat, which accounts for more than half the power consumed in Germany.

If it works well, the system could help solve a problem posed by renewable energy sources like wind and solar the world over: they are unreliable, meaning they sometimes generate too much, and sometimes too little power.

"Germany currently has enough installed renewable energy capacity to produce twice as much as it needs, it's just not constant," says Hendrik Roeglin, who oversees the salt storage project for Vattenfall.

Rival utility E.ON recently calculated that solar and wind power generated up to 52 gigawatt hours of electricity during peak daylight hours on Easter Monday. Germany's energy consumption at the time was just 49.5 gigawatt hours.

"With many facilities like this one, in theory you wouldn't need gas or other fossil fuel backups," said Roeglin.

Phasing out nuclear, coal and gas is an ambitious undertaking for a heavily industrialized country such as Germany. The government has set a deadline to shutter all the country's nuclear plants by 2022 and stop burning coal for electricity by 2038; gas will be a stop-gap technology until a way is found to rely wholly on renewable technology sometime around the middle of the century.

The plan, known as the Energiewende, or energy transition, is being closely watched by other countries trying to figure out how to curb greenhouse gas emissions and meet the Paris climate accord that aims to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit).

Experts agree that a range of technological solutions will be necessary to replace fossil fuels, some already existing and some still at the experimental phase. California-based automaker Tesla has already shown in Australia that it can provide large lithium-ion battery systems to stabilize electricity grids.

At the Reuter power plant in Berlin, which supplies 600,000 households in the capital with heat, the solution now includes calcium oxide, also known as quicklime.

Vattenfall and Swedish start-up SaltX have been taking advantage of a simple chemical reaction that occurs when quicklime becomes wet: the salt-like grains soak up the water, becoming calcium hydroxide and releasing large amounts of heat in the process. By removing the water again - a process not dissimilar to baking - the substance turns back into calcium oxide.

The process essentially mirrors how batteries work, except that instead of electricity, the system stores heat. SaltX says it has also patented a way of covering the quicklime with tiny particles - known as a nano-coating - to prevent it from lumping together after several heating and cooling cycles.

Roeglin says the process can absorb ten times more energy than water, which is currently used for power-to-heat facilities. And unlike tanks of hot water, which slowly cool down over time, the system can retain the chemically-trapped energy for far longer. Need heat? Just add water.

The pilot project in Berlin can currently store enough energy to heat about 100 large houses. But SaltX says the facility could easily be scaled up and provide heat to any of the homes or offices already connected to the capital's district heating system.

Such networks - consisting of pipes pumping hot water or steam from power plants to consumers - exist in many European countries, Canada, the United States, Japan and China.

"It makes total sense to try this because storing energy is a hugely important step in future," said Kai Hufendiek, an energy economist at the University of Stuttgart.

Hufendiek, who isn't involved with the project, said that if the system can produce temperatures above 500 degrees Celsius - as SaltX claims - this also makes it interesting for industrial applications such as food processing.

SaltX also notes that the calcium oxide currently mined in Finland could be safely recycled, giving it an edge over some battery technologies that use rare or toxic materials.

"If your ambition is to be fossil-free within a generation, you have to consider various alternatives to reach that," a representative of SaltX, Simon Ahlin, said during a visit to the facility. "This is a solution that's available in a short time frame."

Roeglin, the engineer, is waiting till the end of the year to see how the test pans out. "It may be one part of the puzzle," he said.

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Salt could be the future of renewable energy

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BERLIN - Amid the hum and heat of Berlin's Reuter thermal power station stands a shining contraption that looks out of place in the decades-old machine hall. Its silver pipes and vats contain a substance that Vattenfall, the plant's operator, says could become a key ingredient for a fossil fuel-free future.

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Extreme water pollution threatens U.S.-Mexico border beaches

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Extreme water pollution threatens U.S.-Mexico border beaches

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The "Clean Border Water Now" program is raising awareness for the elimination of waste on the beaches of San Diego.

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Around 20 million gallons of sewage per day are discharged into the Pacific Ocean, just five miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border.

The "Clean Border Water Now" program is raising awareness for the need to eliminate the sewage, trash, sediment and chemical waste that plagues the beaches and waves in the border region and southern San Diego County.

The contamination problems are so severe and frequent that beaches around Imperial Beach were closed for roughly half of every year from 2015-2017.

Surfrider Foundation urges American and Mexican authorities to address the threat posed by the flow of untreated sewage, industrial pollution, and trash into the Tijuana River Watershed and the Pacific Ocean.

The environmental organization is advocating to fix and upgrade wastewater infrastructure, improve emergency response and increase water quality monitoring.

Surfrider volunteers have been collecting water samples weekly at ten beaches and surf spots from Imperial Beach to Tourmaline Surf Park in Pacific Beach.

The truth is that water quality conditions are not getting better in this border region - unfortunately, they continue to worsen.

A Serious Public Health Situation

Surfrider filed a citizen suit against the International Boundary and Water Commission. The environmentalists require the agency to address their numerous violations and the harm that has impacted the local community.

"Here in the Laurel Canyon, you can see that many homes are not connected to city sewage infrastructure, and what's happening is the sewage is ending up in the canyon," explains Anna Lucia Avedoy, a Tijuana clean water activist.

"This is a serious public health situation because children are living in these areas. It smells very foul here, and they are constantly breathing in all of this fecal matter that is running through here. And all this water drains into the United States into Goat Canyon."

At Tijuana Beach, the ocean hides high water pollution levels.

"I've been sick from conjunctivitis, stomach infections, and ear infections. I've also heard that surfers and lifeguards have gotten sick for entering the water when it's been contaminated," adds Avedoy.

A few miles north, at Imperial Beach, the pollution issues are also problematic. And when it rains, surfers must stay out of the water.

"If I get in the water right now, I could get hepatitis, flesh-eating disease, staph infections and any sort of unknown viruses," notes actress and activist Mia Maestro.

"It's not about the border and building a wall between these two communities. It's about working together and finding a solution."

Take a look at 25 shocking facts about water pollution.

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Extreme water pollution threatens U.S.-Mexico border beaches

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The "Clean Border Water Now" program is raising awareness for the need to eliminate the sewage, trash, sediment and chemical waste that plagues the beaches and waves in the border region and southern San Diego County. The contamination problems are so severe and frequent that beaches around Imperial Beach were closed for roughly half of every year from 2015-2017.

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Chemical storage facility faces water pollution charges in Houston

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Chemical storage facility faces water pollution charges in Houston

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The Intercontinental Terminals Company is facing several misdemeanor counts after a plant fire earlier in the year.

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Intercontinental Terminals Company faces five misdemeanor counts of water pollution in the aftermath of a plant fire in March that resulted in toxic chemicals leaking into Houston-area waterways and caused local schools to close and residents to be told to stay indoors.

The move by the office of Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg is part of a more aggressive approach toward chemical companies following environmental disasters that have drawn national attention,

"The discharge from the ITC fire into Tucker Bayou is a clear water pollution case," Alex Forrest, the environmental crimes division chief for the DA's office, said in a written statement to the Chronicle. "We are looking forward to reviewing the reports of other local and federal agencies, as they complete their investigations, so that we can determine if other charges will follow."

ITC stores petrochemicals for such companies as Chevron, Exxon and Phillips 66. One of those storage tanks caught fire on March 17, resulting in the breach of a containment wall and allowing cancer-causing chemicals like xylene and benzene to pour into Tucker Bayou.

The DA's office determined that water pollution reached illegal levels from March 17 to March 21, resulting in ITC facing one count of water pollution for each of those five days. The company faces up to $500,000 in fines on those charges.

Michael Goldberg, an attorney for ITC, said in a written statement to the that "there was a large fire and an enormous effort to extinguish it, which resulted in a discharge into Tucker Bayou."

ITC previously paid a $500 fine in a 1975 case and another $650 in 1990 for water pollution, the noted. The company has received more than $65,000 in fines for violating federal and local environmental rules since 2009.

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Chemical storage facility faces water pollution charges in Houston | The Texas Monitor

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Intercontinental Terminals Company faces five misdemeanor counts of water pollution in the aftermath of a plant fire in March that resulted in toxic chemicals leaking into Houston-area waterways and caused local schools to close and residents to be told to stay indoors. The move by the office of Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg is ...

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Pollution Threatens China's Food Security

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Pollution Threatens China's Food Security

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About 8 million acres of land were deemed to be too polluted to grow crops and this is because the polluted water is threatening food security.

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A report this week noted that nearly 3.33 million hectares (eight million acres) of Chinese farmland are too polluted to grow crops. The article, which was re-posted by the state-run China Daily news site, quoted Wang Shiyuan, China's vice minister of land and resources. Wang says that the government is determined to address the issue of polluted farmland, and will commit "tens of billions of yuan" each year to help return the land to a usable state.

Food security is a major concern for Chinese leaders, and worries over this issue already had the potential to severely slow down other planned reforms such as urbanization. The announcement on China's pollution levels further complicates the balance of preserving farmland and speeding up urbanization. Wang Shiyuan noted that the amount of polluted land represents nearly 2 percent of the country's arable land, which is not something the Chinese government can ignore. China's per capita arable land area is already less than half of the world average - the country simply can't afford to lose any more land to pollution.

China's government wants to ensure enough arable land is left reserved for farming, and the large swath of polluted fields cuts into that amount. Xinhua reports that China's arable land survey counted about 135.4 million hectares (334.6 million acres) of farmland - but after removing from that count land reserved for "forest and pasture restoration" as well as land too polluted for crop-growing, the "actual available arable land was just slightly above the government's red-line" of preserving 120 million hectares (296 million acres) of usable farm land. In other words, pollution is presenting a dangerous threat to one of the government's highest priorities.

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This presents a tough choice for Chinese leaders: let the land lie fallow and risk disrupting food supplies, or allow crops to be grown on tainted soil. Wang's remarks show the government is leaning towards the former. Tainted crops have already caused scares among China's citizens. A report by Guangzhou in May found that nearly half the rice in the cities' restaurants had excessive levels of the heavy metal cadmium. The city's residents were outraged when the report was published. The rice in Guangzhou was linked to polluted plots in Hunan province, which produces 11 percent of China's total rice each year. Caixin published an article arguing that cover-ups by both local and provincial governments allowed the problem to spread before it exploded into the public consciousness in late spring 2013.

In a way, Wang's public report could actually be good news for environmental advocates. For one, it shows that the central government is taking the problem seriously, and might be taking steps to increase transparency in the tracking and reporting of soil and water pollution. Even more importantly, food security is a non-negotiable for China's government and pollution becoming a serious impediment to ensuring a steady supply of crops. Now China's leaders will be more willing to make the hard choices necessary to clean up the land and water pollution in China's rural areas. This might mean setting strict new pollution limits for businesses, or even closing down factories that operate close to farmland.

Unfortunately, however, the food security crisis could also negatively impact the environment. Chinadialogue reported back in November that the government was letting reforestation subsidies (money paid to farmers who plant trees on their land) expire over food security concerns. Wang's remarks seem to promise that some land is being kept in reserve for reforestation and the creation of pasture land. If China's arable land continues to creep down towards the "red line," it will be very tempting for the government to reclaim this land for agriculture - which Chinadialogue argues will speed up desertification, putting China at risk in other ways.

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Pollution Threatens China's Food Security

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A report this week noted that nearly 3.33 million hectares (eight million acres) of Chinese farmland are too polluted to grow crops. The article, which was re-posted by the state-run China Daily news site, quoted Wang Shiyuan, China's vice minister of land and resources.

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Hanoi begins project to clean highly polluted river with Japanese technology

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Hanoi begins project to clean highly polluted river with Japanese technology

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New technology is being used to help clean the infamous Lich River.

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Hanoi begins project to clean highly polluted river with Japanese technology - VnExpress International

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Hanoi authorities on Thursday began a project to clean a section of the capital’s infamous To Lich River.

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Biofuel offers a solution to the world’s renewable energy crisis

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Biofuel offers a solution to the world’s renewable energy crisis

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The article talks about bioenergy, which includes biomass and biofuel, and how it could play a big role in an environmentally-friendly future.

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Solar cells and wind farms are commonly referenced in the fight against climate change, but there is another, often overlooked, form of energy production that is already playing a sizable role. Bioenergy, which includes both biomass and biofuel, has been adopted by governments around the world as a viable method for generating carbon-neutral power, at least until the reliability and cost of other renewables improves.

A green delusion
Of late, bioenergy has come under attack, both for pulling investment away from other green technologies and for not being low-carbon. In October last year, more than 100 organisations from across the world signed a joint declaration arguing against the expansion of bioenergy projects, referred to as the ' Biomass Delusion '.

Bioenergy has come under attack for pulling investment away from other green technologies

Recent developments in the field of bioenergy, however, have provided renewed hope that it can play a role in a green future. Last year, the US Department of Energy committed $80m of investment to bioenergy research and development, with the aim of producing more affordable and sustainable non-food dedicated energy crops.

Evidently, the jury is still out as to whether bioenergy is a useful tool in the fight against climate change. There have been open letters pledging their support, while others have been heavy with criticism. In order to bring everyone onside, bioenergy proponents will have to convincingly argue that burning biomass, or converting it into ethanol, is not a net contributor to carbon emissions and that crops for energy can be grown on a mass scale without negatively impacting food security.

Cream of the crop
Global population levels are set to hit 9.8 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100, according to a 2017 United Nations report. Obviously, this growth will facilitate the need for heightened levels of energy production - but it will also mean many more hungry mouths to feed. If citizens are forced to choose between food and fuel, few will plump for the latter.

Consequently, there are concerns that any increase in the use of bioenergy will come at the expense of agricultural land that could be used for food crops. According to Global Food Security, a UK cross-government programme on food security research, the planet will need to produce more food in the next 35 years than it has produced in the entirety of human history. The likelihood of achieving such a goal will be made more difficult by changing dietary habits, increasing urbanisation and rising sea levels.

Dr Naomi Vaughan, Senior Lecturer in Climate Change at the University of East Anglia, told The New Economy that the growing demand for bioenergy crops could potentially exacerbate food security issues if "it was poorly regulated". However, recent developments suggest that bioenergy and food crops can be grown in parallel rather than in competition.

Scientists at the University of Illinois are looking at ways of creating bioenergy-suitable crops that can be grown on the type of marginal land that is unsuitable for agricultural cultivation. In particular, they are investigating whether hybrid strains of elephant grass can be bred that will produce enough biomass to make them a viable fuel source even in low-temperature environments.

The resilience of elephant grass has long been recognised, but the plant has only recently been considered a potential bioenergy crop. Elephant grass, or miscanthus giganteus, is a naturally occurring hybrid produced by crossing two other Asian grasses, miscanthus sacchariflorus and miscanthus sinensis. In Eastern Siberia, a strain of miscanthus sacchariflorus was recently discovered growing in temperatures as low as minus three degrees Celsius. By studying these grass crops further, there is hope that even hardier hybrids can be created that can provide fuel in climates where food production is not an option.

" Miscanthus giganteus is exciting for a number of different reasons, the most obvious being that it is very productive in temperate regions compared to other highly productive crops - the obvious comparison here would be corn," explained Charles Pignon, a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "It is able to be very productive, while also being very resource-efficient. It doesn't need too much fertilisation, it can grow well on marginal soil and even though it originates from Eastern Asia, the hybrid we use is sterile, which reduces its risk as an invasive species. These are the reasons for miscanthus ' broad appeal."

Grasses are not the only viable bioenergy crop that scientists are looking at. Last year, a Texas A&M AgriLife Research study found that high biomass sorghum can be grown in water-stressed conditions and still produce significant yields - as much as 10 tons per acre. Other researchers are looking at growing the tamanu plant, another bioenergy crop, on peatland that is unsuitable for any other purpose. These developments show how bioenergy can make better use of the planet's resources rather than being just another drain on them.

Seeds of doubt
A criticism often levelled at proponents of bioenergy is that it is not actually carbon neutral. When trees are cut down and burned to create energy, it is certainly true that bioenergy is a net contributor to atmospheric CO2 levels because carbon is released immediately, which will then take years to be sequestered by new plant growth. However, Pignon argues that it would be wrong to paint the bioenergy field with too broad a brush.

"There are lots of different crops and systems that can provide feedstock for bioenergy," Pignon said. "With woody feedstock, it does take a while for carbon to be sequestered, but that isn't the case with a perennial feedstock or a plant like miscanthus. Because the plant is harvested every year, the harvested biomass only contains the carbon that was sequestered over the past year, not over the past several years. In addition, we only harvest the above-ground part of the plant. So with a system like miscanthus, you have a real opportunity to achieve negative CO2 emissions."

Distinguishing between the different forms of bioenergy is important if businesses and governments are to approve projects that truly grant environmental benefits. It is essential that the issues raised by bioenergy opponents are considered, but they shouldn't dominate the dialogue. If bioenergy projects avoid using productive forests for combustion, they can ensure that forest carbon stocks at least remain stable. Effective forest management can ensure that bioenergy does not have a detrimental impact on the atmosphere or woodland ecology.

According to Vaughan: "The key challenge for sustainable biomass energy is strong governance and regulation to minimise negative impacts such as deforestation, biodiversity loss, food security issues or negative impacts on local communities."

If this challenge can be overcome, bioenergy - whether it comes from burning trees or converting organic matter from perennial plants into ethanol - can play a part in a green future. What's more, there are other benefits of bioenergy crops that aren't always considered. The roots left in the soil by perennial grasses, for instance, help improve soil dynamics in a way that food crops do not.

Moreover, if scientists can grow bioenergy plants on land that was previously considered useless, then the economic benefits for communities in these areas could be huge, opening up new agricultural revenue streams. Farmers in locations susceptible to drought may find that bioenergy crops provide more reliable harvests than those dedicated to food.

Currently, bioenergy accounts for approximately nine percent of the world's energy supply, but much of this still concerns the burning of biomass in less-developed countries. If bioenergy is to play a greater role in the energy make-up of the future, it needs to greatly increase its scale and sophistication. Scientists and agribusinesses will play their part, but so too must politicians, who should put the right regulatory frameworks in place to ensure that bioenergy has a positive effect on communities both locally and globally.

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Biofuel offers a solution to the world's renewable energy crisis

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Solar cells and wind farms are commonly referenced in the fight against climate change, but there is another, often overlooked, form of energy production that is already playing a sizable role. Bioenergy, which includes both biomass and biofuel, has been adopted by governments around the world as a viable method for generating carbon-neutral power, at least until the reliability and cost of other renewables improves.

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Water Purification Products Market Demand Would Increase Rapidly by 2026: BWT AG, Aqua America, Pentair, Panasonic, Calgon Carbon Corporation

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Water Purification Products Market Demand Would Increase Rapidly by 2026: BWT AG, Aqua America, Pentair, Panasonic, Calgon Carbon Corporation

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The water purification market is predicted to expand rapidly by 2026.

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Water purification products help remove undesirable chemicals, biological contaminants, suspended solids, and gases contents from contaminated water. The products are available in different forms, price ranges, and features. Water purification methods are based on different processes such as physical, biological, and chemical.

The global water purification products market is expected to expand at a rapid pace during the forecast period. Factors such as increase in awareness about water safety and quality, scarcity of potable water resources, increase in health concerns are expected to boost the water purification products market. Moreover, regulatory authorities are adopting participative approaches to make unhygienic water safe for drinking purposes. An increase in population lead to water pollution and water scarcity, which has a negative impact on the water utility business but a positive impact on the growth of the water purification products market.

This is because it boost demand water purification products, which provide clean and safe water supply. Some of the developments in water purification technology are water filtration with nanotechnology, potable products, photocatalytic water purification technology, acoustics nanotube technology, sunspring system, euglena biofiltration system, sun light, and high tech materials. These developments are expected to augment the water purification products market. However, the presence of local and regional suppliers and strong presence of substitutes for water purification products are acting likely to restrain the water purification products market.

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The global water purification products market can be segmented based on type, application, distribution channel, and geography. Based on type, the market can be classified into devices and solutions. The devices segment can be further divided into water purifier, water softener, water filter, and others. Water purification solutions are available in different forms such as liquid, powder, tablet, gel, and others. In terms of application, the market can be categorized into residential, commercial, and industrial.

The commercial segment can be further divided into medical, pharmacological, office & farms, municipal, and others. The industries segment can be further classified into water utilities, manufacturing, and others. Based on distribution channel, the market can be segmented into online stores and offline stores. The offline distribution channel segment is projected to dominate the market during the forecast period, owing to an increase in the number of international or local brand retail stores across the world.

In terms of geography, the global water purification products market can be classified into Europe, North America, Middle East & Africa, Asia Pacific, and South America. North America is expected to hold a major market share, followed by Europe. Adoption of water purification products is expected to rise in North America, due to stringent government regulations concerning water quality. In North America, countries such as the U.S. and Canada are significantly affected by hard water.

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As a result, demand for water purification products in the region is estimated to rise in the next few years. The market in Asia Pacific is expected to expand at a robust growth rate during the forecast period. Rapid pace of industrialization and heightened focus on agricultural development have led to the generation of large quantities of waste and pollution in this region. This is driving the market in the region. The market in South America and Middle East & Africa is anticipated to expand at a sluggish pace in the coming years.

Major players operating in the global water purification products market include 3M Purification Inc., Brita, Aquasana, BRITA LP, BWT AG, Aqua America, Pentair, Panasonic, Calgon Carbon Corporation, Groupe Novasep, Culligan International, Asahi Kasei Corporation Dow Water & Process Solutions, H2O Innovation Inc, and GE Water & Process Technologies. Market players are focused on developing new products that will help reduce the usage of water and save energy.

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Water Purification Products Market Demand Would Increase Rapidly by 2026: BWT AG, Aqua America, Pentair, Panasonic, Calgon Carbon Corporation - Market Reporter

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Water purification products help remove undesirable chemicals, biological contaminants, suspended solids, and gases contents from contaminated water. The products are available in different forms, price ranges, and features. Water purification methods are based on different processes such as physical, biological, and chemical.

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Google Plans to Be 100 Percent Renewable Next Year

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Google Plans to Be 100 Percent Renewable Next Year

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Google is planning to use only renewable resources to power all of the services it provides.

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For six years, Google has aggressively purchased renewable energy to power the email accounts, searches, app downloads, video streams and other services that have become an integral part of daily online life.

In the process, it became the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy on the planet. Next year it plans to go one step further, ensuring that it purchases 100 percent of the energy it uses to power its entire sprawling digital empire from renewable sources.

A wind farm in Story County, Iowa, where Google has a data center and made its first wind power purchase in 2010.
Credit: Carl Wycoff/flickr

While Google has said it's committed to be part of the climate solution, altruism isn't the main reason for its renewable energy splurge. Buying renewable also gives Google a competitive advantage. In 2015, it consumed 5.7 terrawatts of energy, roughly the equivalent of all of San Francisco. The fluctuating cost of coal and gas can create unwelcome surprises for a company that is dependent on energy for its core business.

"Energy costs are the largest operating cost for our data centers," Neha Palmer, the head of Google's energy strategy, said. "There's a perception that renewables can be more expensive and that's just not the case."

Since Google's first renewable energy purchase in 2010 - a 10 megawatt deal with a wind farm in the heart of Iowa - wind power costs have dropped an average of 80 percent while solar has dropped 60 percent.

Markets in Northern Europe - where one of Google's 15 massive data center operates - are designed to make it easy and cost-effective to purchase renewable energy because you can directly choose the supplier, Palmer said.

Outside of purchasing clean energy, Google has also focused on the part of the energy equation it has more control over: efficiency. Since 2010, the digital world has blown up. There are more people online watching more videos, streaming more songs and checking more emails. Data centers have to have all those things available as quickly as possible, which requires a lot of energy.

To help improve efficiency, Google tasked DeepMind - its in-house artificial intelligence group - with studying patterns in data center operations. By "learning" the patterns of data use, cooling needs and other aspects of data center operations, Google said it was able to cut energy use by up to 40 percent in test data centers.

There's a slight caveat, which is that Google won't run entirely on renewables yet. It plans to purchase the equivalent of 100 percent of the energy it uses in the form of renewables through agreements with electric utilities, but the energy flowing to its data centers and offices isn't solely from renewable sources. That's due to a few factors, including the lack of 24/7 access to renewables and the reality that energy on the grid comes from a variety sources including coal and natural gas.

Google is just one of a number of companies pursuing more climate-friendly energy policies. Eighty-three large companies including Apple, Ikea and Facebook have committed to getting 100 percent of their energy from renewables (how they reach that goal remains to be seen).

Global investments have also been rising. Renewable energy investments topped $286 billion last year, a record. That has helped drive costs down, making renewables cheaper and more appealing.

"We're technology agnostic but we're not price agnostic," Palmer said.

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Google Plans to Be 100 Percent Renewable Next Year

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For six years, Google has aggressively purchased renewable energy to power the email accounts, searches, app downloads, video streams and other services that have become an integral part of daily online life. In the process, it became the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy on the planet.

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