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April 4, 2018: US carbon emissions are at a record low as of this year.

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from research organizations

Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems (MHPS) and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) today announced the release of the 2018 Carnegie Mellon Power Sector Carbon Index, at CMU Energy Week, hosted by the Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation. The Index tracks the environmental performance of U.S. power producers and compares current emissions to more than two decades of historical data collected nationwide. This release marks the one-year anniversary of the Index, developed as a new metric to track power sector carbon emissions performance trends.

"The Carnegie Mellon Power Sector Carbon Index provides a snapshot of critical data regarding energy production and environmental performance," said Costa Samaras, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering CMU. "We've found this index to provide significant insight into trends in power generation and emissions. In particular, the data have shown that emissions intensity has fallen to the lowest level on record, as a combination of natural gas and renewable power have displaced more carbon intensive coal-fired power generation."

The latest data revealed the following findings: U.S. power plant emissions averaged 967 lb. CO2 per megawatt-hour (MWh) in 2017, which was down 3.1 percent from the prior year and down 26.8 percent from the annual value of 1,321 lb CO2 per MWh in 2005. The result for 2016 was initially reported as 1,001 lb/MWh, but was later revised downward to 998 lb/MWh.

"The power industry has made significant progress in reducing emissions for over a decade, as new technology, state and federal policies and market forces have increased power generation from natural gas and renewables, and decreased power generation from coal. As this Change in Power continues, the Carnegie Mellon Power Sector Carbon Index will not only report the results but also provide analysis of the underlying reasons for the changes we're seeing," said Paul Browning, President and CEO of MHPS Americas. "Our team at MHPS is proud to support this important work by Carnegie Mellon researchers."

This year, CMU announced enhancements to the Index. New regional information from within the US will be reported, allowing for greater insight into the impact of regional trends on fuel types, usage, and emissions. In addition, the index will begin to incorporate emissions data from other countries across North and South America. As the Index continues to expand, it will serve as a source of objective insight regarding emissions trends across the Americas for policy makers, regulators, utilities, industry analysts and the public.

"We are excited to regionalize and internationalize our work on the Power Sector Carbon Index," said Ines Azevedo, Professor of Engineering and Public Policy, and co-Director of the Climate and Energy Decision Making Center, "and to help educate and support the decision making process regarding emissions reductions."

For the complete findings of the Index, please visit emissionsindex.org.

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electricity; petroleum; solar energy; energy technology; energy and the environment; renewable energy; environmental policy; global warming

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US power sector carbon emissions intensity drops to lowest on record

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Researchers have announced the release of the 2018 Carnegie Mellon Power Sector Carbon Index. The Index tracks the environmental performance of US power producers and compares current emissions to more than two decades of historical data collected nationwide. This release marks the one-year anniversary of the Index, developed as a new metric to track power sector carbon emissions performance trends.

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April 30, 2018: Scientists have engineered a water based battery that can store both solar energy and wind energy.

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Stanford researchers have developed a water-based battery that could provide a cheap way to store wind or solar energy generated when the sun is shining and wind is blowing so it can be fed back into the electric grid and be redistributed when demand is high.

The prototype manganese-hydrogen battery, reported today in Nature Energy, stands just three inches tall and generates a mere 20 milliwatt hours of electricity, which is on par with the energy levels of LED flashlights one might hang a key ring.

Despite the prototype's diminutive output, the researchers are confident they can take this table-top technology up to an industrial-grade system that could charge and recharge up to 10,000 times, creating a grid-scale battery with a useful lifespan well in excess of a decade.

Yi Cui, a professor of materials science at Stanford and senior author on the paper, said manganese-hydrogen battery technology could be one of the missing pieces in the nation's energy puzzle -- a way to store unpredictable wind or solar energy so as to lessen the need to burn reliable but carbon-emitting fossil fuels when the renewable sources aren't available.

"What we've done is thrown a special salt into water, dropped in an electrode, and created a reversible chemical reaction that stores electrons in the form of hydrogen gas," Cui said.
Clever chemistry
The team that dreamed up the concept and built the prototype was led by Wei Chen, a postdoctoral scholar in Cui's lab. In essence the researchers coaxed a reversible electron-exchange between water and manganese sulfate, a cheap, abundant industrial salt used to make dry cell batteries, fertilizers, paper and other products.

To mimic how a wind or solar source might feed power into the battery, the researchers attached a power source to the prototype. The electrons flowing in reacted with the manganese sulfate dissolved in the water to leave particles of manganese dioxide clinging to the electrodes. Excess electrons bubbled off as hydrogen gas thus storing that energy for future use. Engineers know how to recreate electricity from the energy stored in hydrogen gas so the important next step was to prove was that the water-based battery can be recharged.

The researchers did this by re-attaching their power source to the depleted prototype, this time with the goal of inducing the manganese dioxide particles clinging to the electrode to combine with water, replenishing the manganese sulfate salt. Once this salt was restored, incoming electrons became surplus, and excess power could bubble off as hydrogen gas, in a process that can be repeated again and again and again.

Cui estimated that, given the water-based battery's expected lifespan, it would cost a penny to store enough electricity to power a 100 watt lightbulb for twelve hours.

"We believe this prototype technology will be able to meet Department of Energy (DOE) goals for utility-scale electrical storage practical," Cui said.

The DOE has recommended batteries for grid-scale storage should store and then discharge at least 20 kilowatts of power over a period of an hour, be capable of at least 5,000 recharges, and have a useful lifespan of 10 years or more. To make it practical such a battery system should cost $2,000 or less, or $100 per kilowatt hour.

Former Department of Energy Secretary and Nobel laureate Steven Chu, now a professor at Stanford, has a long-standing interest in encouraging technologies to help the nation transition to renewable energy.

"While the precise materials and design still need development, this prototype demonstrates the type of science and engineering that suggest new ways to achieve low-cost, long-lasting utility-scale batteries," said Chu, who was not a member of research team.
Shifting away from carbon
According to DOE estimates, about 70 percent of U.S. electricity is generated by coal or natural gas plants, which account for 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. Shifting to wind and solar generation is one way to reduce those emissions but it creates new challenge involving the variability of power supply. Most obviously, the sun only shines by day and, sometimes, the wind doesn't blow.

But another less-well understood but import form of variability come from surges of demand on the grid -- that network of high-tension wires that distribute electricity over regions and ultimately to homes. On a hot day, when people come home from work and crank up the air conditioning, utilities must have load-balancing strategies to meet peak demand: some way to boost power generation within minutes to avoid brownouts or blackouts that might otherwise bring down the grid.

Today utilities often accomplish this by firing up on-demand or "dispatchable" power plants that may lay idle much of the day, but can come online within minutes -- producing quick energy but boosting carbon emissions. Some utilities have developed short-term load balancing that does not rely on fossil-fuel burning plants. The most common and cost effect such strategy is pumped hydroelectric storage: using excess power to send water uphill, then letting it flow back down to generate energy during peak demand. However, hydroelectric storage only works in regions with the water and the space, so to make wind and solar more useful DOE has encouraged high capacity batteries as an alternative.
High capacity, low cost
Cui said there are several types of rechargeable battery technologies on the market, but it isn't clear which approaches will meet DOE requirements and prove their practicality to the utilities, regulators and other stakeholders who maintain the nation's electrical grid.

For instance, Cui said rechargeable lithium ion batteries, which store the small amounts of energy needed to run phones and laptops, are based on rare materials and are thus too pricey to store power for a neighborhood or city. Cui said grid-scale storage requires a low-cost, high-capacity, rechargeable battery and the manganese-hydrogen process seems promising.

"Other rechargeable battery technologies are easily more than 5 times of that cost over the life time," Cui added.

Chen said novel chemistry, low cost materials and relative simplicity made the manganese-hydrogen battery ideal for low-cost grid-scale deployment.

"The breakthrough we report in Nature Energy has the potential to meet DOE's grid-scale criteria," Chen said.

The prototype needs development work to prove itself. For one thing it uses platinum as a catalyst to spur the crucial chemical reactions at the electrode that make the recharge process efficient, and the cost of that component would be prohibitive for large-scale deployment. But Chen said the team is already working on cheaper ways to coax the manganese sulfate and water to perform the reversible electron exchange.

"We have identified catalysts that could bring us below the $100 per kilowatt hour DOE target," he said.

The researchers reported doing 10,000 recharges of the prototypes, which is twice the DOE requirements, but say it will be necessary to test the manganese-hydrogen battery under actual electric grid storage conditions in order to truly assess its lifetime performance and cost.

Cui said he has sought to patent process through the Stanford Office of Technology Licensing, and plans to form a company to commercialize the system.

Yi Cui is also a professor in the Photon Science Directorate at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and a Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy, a member of Stanford Bio-X and the Stanford Neurosciences Institute. Additional coauthors include Guodong Li, a visiting scholar in materials science and engineering and now with the Chinese Academy of Sciences; postdoctoral scholars Hongxia Wang, Jiayu Wan, Lei Liao, Guangxu Chen and Jiangyan Wang; visiting scholar Hao Zhang; and graduate students Zheng Liang, Yuzhang Li and Allen Pei.

This work was funded by the Department of Energy.

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batteries; energy technology; electricity; energy and resources; energy and the environment; renewable energy; environmental science; water

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Water-based battery stores solar and wind energy: What is now a prototype could one day lead to an industrial-grade system to store alternative energy to feed into the electric grid

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Stanford researchers have developed a water-based battery that could provide a cheap way to store wind or solar energy generated when the sun is shining and wind is blowing so it can be fed back into the electric grid and be redistributed when demand is high.

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May 3, 2018: A new synthetic photosynthesis device that creates hydrogen and carbon dioxide fuel can provide a new clean energy source.

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A new, stable artificial photosynthesis device doubles the efficiency of harnessing sunlight to break apart both fresh and salt water, generating hydrogen that can then be used in fuel cells.

The device could also be reconfigured to turn carbon dioxide back into fuel.

Hydrogen is the cleanest-burning fuel, with water as its only emission. But hydrogen production is not always environmentally friendly. Conventional methods require natural gas or electrical power. The method advanced by the new device, called direct solar water splitting, only uses water and light from the sun.

"If we can directly store solar energy as a chemical fuel, like what nature does with photosynthesis, we could solve a fundamental challenge of renewable energy," said Zetian Mi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Michigan who led the research while at McGill University in Montreal.

Faqrul Alam Chowdhury, a doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering at McGill, said the problem with solar cells is that they cannot store electricity without batteries, which have a high overall cost and limited life.

The device is made from the same widely used materials as solar cells and other electronics, including silicon and gallium nitride (often found in LEDs). With an industry-ready design that operates with just sunlight and seawater, the device paves the way for large-scale production of clean hydrogen fuel.

Previous direct solar water splitters have achieved a little more than 1 percent stable solar-to-hydrogen efficiency in fresh or saltwater. Other approaches suffer from the use of costly, inefficient or unstable materials, such as titanium dioxide, that also might involve adding highly acidic solutions to reach higher efficiencies.

Mi and his team, however, achieved more than 3 percent solar-to-hydrogen efficiency. To reach this stable efficiency, the team built a nano-sized cityscape of gallium nitride towers that generated an electric field. The gallium nitride turns light, or photons, into mobile electrons and positively charged vacancies called holes. These free charges split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.

"When this specially engineered wafer is hit by photons, the electric field helps separate photogenerated electrons and holes to drive the production of hydrogen and oxygen molecules efficiently," Chowdhury said.

At present, the silicon backing of the chip does not contribute to its function, but it could be doing more. The next step may be to use the silicon to help capture light and funnel charge carriers to the gallium nitride towers.

"Although the 3 percent efficiency might seem low, when put in the context of the 40 years of research on this process, it's actually a big breakthrough," Mi said. "Natural photosynthesis, depending how you calculate it, has an efficiency of about 0.6 percent."

He adds that 5 percent efficiency is the threshold for commercialization, but his team is aiming for 20 or 30 percent efficiency.

Mi conducts similar research to strip carbon dioxide of its oxygen to turn the resulting carbon into hydrocarbons, such as methanol and syngas. This research path could potentially remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, like plants do.

"That's the truly exciting part," Mi said.

The device is documented in the study, "A photochemical diode artificial photosynthesis system for unassisted high efficiency overall pure water splitting," published in Nature Communications. Along with Mi and Chowdhury, co-authors include Michel Trudeau of the Center of Excellence in Transportation Electrification and Energy Storage, Hydro-Québec, and Hong Guo of McGill University.

The work was supported by the Fuel Cell Technologies Office of the U.S. Department of Energy and Emissions Reduction Alberta.

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alternative fuels; energy and resources; fuel cells; organic chemistry; energy and the environment; renewable energy; water; environmental science

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Harvesting clean hydrogen fuel through artificial photosynthesis

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A new, stable artificial photosynthesis device doubles the efficiency of harnessing sunlight to break apart both fresh and salt water, generating hydrogen that can then be used in fuel cells. The device could also be reconfigured to turn carbon dioxide back into fuel. Hydrogen is the cleanest-burning fuel, with water as its only emission.

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June 5, 2018: South Africa is investing 4 billion dollars in clean energy projects.

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South Africa plans to invite bidders for additional renewable power projects that may amount to as much as 50 billion rand ($4 billion) of investment and help stimulate local and black-owned business.

The fifth bid window for 1,800 MW of renewable projects under the government's independent power producers program will start in November, according to a copy of Energy Minister Jeff Radebe's speech given at a conference in Johannesburg on Friday.

"The intention is to enhance local manufacturing to ensure investment and economic growth as well as the opportunity to encourage opportunities for black industrialists and the development of black independent power producers," he said. The bid window will require similar generation technology to the so-called expedited round announced in 2015, which has expired, he said.

Under President Cyril Ramaphosa, who is leading a drive to attract $100 billion of investment in the next five years, Radebe revived the national renewable-energy program that was once the world's fastest growing, but had since stagnated. The minister signed agreements with 27 independent power producers in April after more than two years of delays.

The independent power producer program will also aim to "take into account the different needs of the communities where the projects are and which will allow the impact to be measured," Radebe said. Two coal-fired projects under the program will bring another 40 billion rand of investment to the country, he said.
©2018 Bloomberg News Lead image credit: warrenski | Flickr

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Paul Burkhardt and Ntando Thukwana, Bloomberg

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South Africa Plans to Add Up to $4 Billion of Renewable Projects

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South Africa plans to invite bidders for additional renewable power projects that may amount to as much as 50 billion rand ($4 billion) of investment and help stimulate local and black-owned business.

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June 7, 2018: New solar products and industries from around the world are going to show off their creations at Intersolar 2018.

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For many companies in the solar industry, June and July in Europe and North America represent some of the most important months of the year - and that's not just because the sun is shining so brightly and for so long during these summer months, it's also because Solar Promotion International's Intersolar Europe and North America take place in June and July, respectively.

Intersolar (Munich)

Fronius Engineering said it is showcasing synergies between solar energy, heat and mobility at Intersolar.

"Energy sector integration is no longer a dream of the future. At Intersolar, we will be exhibiting various application examples for both the home and the commercial sector. For example, the Fronius Ohmpilot not only maximizes your rate of self-consumption by heating water, it is also a simple energy storage solution," said Martin Hackl, Head of Solar Energy at Fronius International GmbH.

Fronius will also be providing detailed information about the integration of third-party components such as heating elements or heat pumps.

In addition, the company said that its Fronius Solar.web online portal allows users to monitor their PV system, analyze data and thus optimize their energy usage. The benefits for installers include a clear overview, automatic yield comparisons of multiple inverters and the ability to manage several systems.

ABB said that it will be showing a comprehensive solar portfolio with a complete "sun-to-socket" solution at Intersolar.

"At Intersolar 2018, we are proud to be showcasing innovative solutions to the market, across all power ranges for grid-connected and microgrid applications. Additions such as the revolutionary PVS-175 high-power string inverter, along with the new REACT 2 storage solution which can be integrated with ABB-free@home and AC Wallbox EVLunic for car charging, demonstrate how solar power can be utilized today and for future needs," said Giovanni Frassineti, head of ABB's Business Unit Solar.

ABB will have its new PVS 1500 Vdc inverter (left) at the show and its new REACT 2 energy storage solution for residential applications.

Trina Solar said it will present new solutions such as TrinaPro, the company's current portfolio of high performance PV modules and energy storage solutions.

TrinaPro is a smart utility-scale PV solution that combines premium components, optimized system integration and smart O&M interconnection. Trina Solar has recently acquired Nclave Renewable, a Spanish tracker manufacturer, whose products are now an integral part of the TrinaPro solution for ground-mounted PV power plants.

Trinahome, the corresponding integrated solution for residential applications, including high performance PV modules, inverters and storage, will also be on display.

Solar Data Systems is planning to present Solar-Log's biggest headliners of 2018 at Intersolar and Intersolar North America. The company's Solar-Log WEB Enerest's compatibility with Amazon's Alexa allows solar PV plant owners to ask Alexa about their plant status.

Plant owners can ask questions like, 'Alexa, how is my plant?' or 'Alexa, how much money have I earned with my plant?'

In addition, Solar Data Systems said Alexa will know the answer to questions like, 'when is the best time to vacuum?'

The answer will not be based on how dirty the floor is, but rather on the current amount of available solar power and the expected energy production surplus over the next two days. Solar-Log Skill will be available in Amazon's Skills store June 2018 in English and German. Demonstrations will be given at Intersolar.

Intersolar North America (San Francisco)

The Copper Development Association's Director of Sustainable Energy, Zolaikha Strong, will discuss copper's impact in the operation of and electrical infrastructure required for renewable energy the show during one of the conference sessions at Intersolar in San Francisco.

The panel presentation, titled "Regional and Local Initiatives Towards 100% Renewables," will feature Strong, alongside energy industry experts Renee Sharp, Bay Area regional director at Grid Alternatives, and Nate Owen, chief executive officer of Ampion, who will each discuss the challenges and opportunities for companies, cities and regions to adopt a 100 percent renewable energy target. The session is scheduled for 12:45 p.m. on July 10.

SunSpec is offering education programs for both industry participants and job seekers who require in depth expertise on California Rule 21, one of which will be offered on July 11 at Intersolar North America.

These all day in-person workshops provide distributed energy business executives, entrepreneurs, and others looking to enter the industry with the foundational understanding of the California Rule 21 opportunity. Topics will include distributed energy market dynamics; market sizing, business models, and competitive barriers; technical details regarding Distributed Energy Resource (DER) data communication and functional requirements; and considerations about how to deploy DER networks in California and across the U.S.

Distributed energy companies can be confident that those holding this certificate of completion possess this highly sought after expertise, said SunSpec.

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Solar Companies Prep for Intersolar 2018

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For many companies in the solar industry, June and July in Europe and North America represent some of the most important months of the year - and that's not just because the sun is shining so brightly and for so long during these summer months, it's also because Solar Promotion International's Intersolar Europe and North America take place in June and July, respectively.

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August 16, 2017: Blue dye from detergents leaked into rivers in India and several stray dogs were dyed blue.

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Dogs of a different color have been spotted roaming the streets of Navi Mumbai in India, according to news reports.

At least five bright blue dogs have been seen in the industrial area of the city, and a polluted river may be to blame, the Hindustan Times reported on Aug. 12.

Stray dogs often wade into the Kasadi River in search of food, but thanks to the industrial waste that's been released into the water, the dogs emerged with a Smurf-like dye job in addition to any scraps they could fish out.

When the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board (MPCB) investigated, the agency found that a private company was using blue dye in products such as detergents, and the waste from that process made its way into the river. Though the area around the company is cordoned off, "five to six dogs entered the site looking for food and got the blue color on them," Jayavant Hajare, a regional officer at the MPCB, told the Hindustan Times.

Nearly 1,000 pharmaceutical, food and engineering factories that are located in the area release their waste into that river. Testing done by the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation found that the water is too polluted to support life, the newspaper reported.

So far, dogs seem to be the only animals affected by the blue dye. But animal rights activists said that other animals, including birds and reptiles, may also be affected.

Read more at the Hindustan Times.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Who's a Blue Boy? Indian Dogs Tinted by Polluted River

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Dogs of a different color have been spotted roaming the streets of Navi Mumbai in India, according to news reports. At least five bright blue dogs have been seen in the industrial area of the city, and a polluted river may be to blame, the Hindustan Times reported on Aug.

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June 7, 2018: In the future, we will be able to take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it to fuel.

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Someday, the gasoline you buy might trace its heritage to carbon dioxide pulled straight out of the sky rather than from oil pumped out of the ground. By removing emitted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turning it into fresh fuels, engineers at a Canadian firm have demonstrated a scalable and cost-effective way to make deep cuts in the carbon footprint of transportation with minimal disruption to existing vehicles. Their work appears June 7 in the journal Joule.

"The carbon dioxide generated via direct air capture can be combined with sequestration for carbon removal, or it can enable the production of carbon-neutral hydrocarbons, which is a way to take low-cost carbon-free power sources like solar or wind and channel them into fuels that can be used to decarbonize the transportation sector," says lead author David Keith, founder and chief scientist of Carbon Engineering, a Canadian CO ₂-capture and clean fuels enterprise, and a professor of applied physics and public policy at Harvard University.

Direct air capture technology works almost exactly like it sounds. Giant fans draw ambient air into contact with an aqueous solution that picks out and traps carbon dioxide. Through heating and a handful of familiar chemical reactions, that same carbon dioxide is re-extracted and ready for further use -- as a carbon source for making valuable chemicals like fuels, or for storage via a sequestration strategy of choice. It's not just theory -- Carbon Engineering's facility in British Columbia is already achieving both CO ₂ capture and fuel generation.

The idea of direct air capture is hardly new, but the successful implementation of a scalable and cost-effective working pilot plant is. After conducting a full process analysis and crunching the numbers, Keith and his colleagues claim that realizing direct air capture on an impactful scale will cost roughly $94-$232 per ton of carbon dioxide captured, which is on the low end of estimates that have ranged up to $1,000 per ton in theoretical analyses.

That price-point is low enough to use direct air capture to start tackling the roughly 20% of global carbon emissions that result from driving, flying, trucking, and other ways of getting people and goods around. "Electricity from solar and wind is intermittent; we can take this energy straight from big solar or wind installations at great sites where it's cheap and apply it to reclaim and recycle carbon dioxide into new fuel," Keith says, adding that "Making fuels that are easy to store and transport eases the challenge of integrating renewables into the energy system."

The resulting fuels, including gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, are compatible with existing fuel distribution and transportation infrastructure. Thanks to ultra-low life cycle carbon intensities, they are a promising route for reducing carbon emissions in heavy transportation and other sectors of the energy system that are demanding and difficult to electrify.

Centuries of unchecked human carbon emissions also mean that atmospheric carbon dioxide is a virtually unlimited feedstock for transformation into new fuels. "We are not going to run out of air anytime soon," adds Steve Oldham, CEO of Carbon Engineering. "We can keep collecting carbon dioxide with direct air capture, keep adding hydrogen generation and fuel synthesis, and keep reducing emissions through this AIR TO FUELSTM pathway."

Keith and Oldham are optimistic that they have reduced scale-up risks by implementing direct air capture at reasonable costs using standard industrial equipment. That means that all the pieces are in place to move on to full-size plants capable of manufacturing 2,000 barrels of fuels per day -- totaling over 30 million gallons per year across plants. Commercialization of such plants would allow direct air capture to make a dent in transportation emissions by connecting low-cost renewable energy to low-carbon transportation fuels using Carbon Engineering's AIR TO FUELSTM pathway.

"After 100 person-years of practical engineering and cost analysis, we can confidently say that while air capture is not some magical cheap solution, it is a viable and buildable technology for producing carbon-neutral fuels in the immediate future and for removing carbon in the long run," says Keith.

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organic chemistry; energy and resources; graphene; energy policy; air quality; global warming; environmental science; energy and the environment

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How to suck carbon dioxide from the sky for fuels and more

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Someday, the gasoline you buy might come from carbon dioxide pulled out of the sky rather than from oil pumped out of the ground. By removing emitted carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turning it into fresh fuels, engineers have demonstrated a scalable and cost-effective way to make deep cuts in the carbon footprint of transportation with minimal disruption to existing vehicles.

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February 15, 2018: Radioactive uranium particles were found over Alaska with no clear explanation.

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A Department of Transportation photo captures Unalaska, part of Alaska's Aleutian Islands.

Credit: US Department of Transportation

There's a whiff of something radioactive in the air.

A research plane flying over the Aleutian Islands on Aug. 3, 2016 detected a single speck of enriched uranium floating about 4.3 miles (7 kilometers) above Alaska's far-western island chain, according to a new research paper that will be published in April in The Journal of Environmental Radioactivity.

The uranium sample was tiny and harmless, a small chunk of a mote of dust just 580 nanometers wide (about half the size of a red blood cell). And it was completely alone; no other radioactive material turned up in that stretch of sky. But, the researchers wrote, it was "definitely not from a natural source."

And the scientists can't explain how it got there.

The plane's onboard mass spectrometer, brought along to analyze standard-issue pollution, detected just a single uranium particle, mixed with traces of chemicals from burning oil, the authors reported. And on its own, that find wouldn't be too remarkable - uranium is the heaviest element commonly found on Earth, after all.

"Particulate matter containing uranium can originate from sources such as combustion of coals with trace uranium, windblown crustal material, and mining and processing of ores, whether it be for the uranium itself or other minerals such as rare earths [a group of chemically similar elements that aren't actually that rare, but are difficult to mine] and phosphate," the researchers wrote. [ The 10 Greatest Explosions Ever]

What makes this particle unusual is that it was rich in an isotope called uranium-235, or U-235, which made up about 2.6 percent to 3.6 percent of its mass, according to the paper. Naturally occurring uranium typically contains just 0.7 percent U-235, with the rest given over to the much more common uranium-238.

That's a big deal.

As Richard Rhodes described in his book "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," published by Simon and Schuster in 1987, uranium-235, an atom made up of 92 protons and 143 neutrons, is special because it can easily sustain a nuclear chain reaction. That's the process of one atom splitting, flinging neutrons out into space, those neutrons smashing into the atom's neighbors and causing them to split, and so on. Uranium-238, with its extra three neutrons, just doesn't give itself over to sustained chain reactions of the kind needed for nuclear power, or nuclear weapons.

Rhodes wrote that refining uranium-235 out of large natural samples of mostly uranium-238 was one of the most important challenges during the race to build the first atomic bomb in the 20th century. And that process remains a challenge today.

The Aleutian Islands sample, with its relatively high percentage of uranium-235 content, is already refined enough to serve in a nuclear reactor, the researchers wrote. (A bomb requires something closer to 90 percent uranium-235 content.)

Finding a sample of refined uranium in the open air is bizarre and remarkable, but it's not dangerous on its own, experts said.

"It's not a significant amount of radioactive debris by itself," Dan Murphy, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist and one of the paper's authors, told Gizmodo, which originally reported on the paper. "But it's the implication [of this finding is] that there's some very small source of uranium that we don't don't understand."

For one thing, as the paper stated, the particle is much smaller than the particles of uranium dust that emerge from typical nuclear facilities. It's possible, the authors suggested, that a forest fire or something similar kicked up old particles from an event like the Chernobyl meltdown - but there haven't been any recent incidents that would be obvious culprits for that kind of thing.

Beyond the uranium particle itself, the air sample the plane collected wasn't unusual, with its only notable feature being some diluted trace burnt-oil pollution, the researchers wrote. Based on prevailing air currents, it's likely the particle came to Alaska from somewhere within a broad swath of Asia, including China, Japan and the Korean Peninsula.

But, the researchers cautioned, the science of figuring out just how individual particles might have arrived in a given patch of air is too inexact to determine the mysterious uranium's origin with any certainty.

Originally published on Live Science.

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Enriched Uranium Particle Appears Over Alaska - and No One Knows Why

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There's a whiff of something radioactive in the air. A research plane flying over the Aleutian Islands on Aug. 3, 2016 detected a single speck of enriched uranium floating about 4.3 miles (7 kilometers) above Alaska's far-western island chain, according to a new research paper that will be published in April in The Journal of Environmental Radioactivity.

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April 17, 2018: A lab accident led to the creation of an enzyme that eats plastic, which could help the pollution prevention effort.

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An electron microscope image shows an engineered enzyme digesting PET plastic.

Credit: Dennis Schroeder/NREL

Scientists accidentally created an enzyme that has an appetite for ... plastic, the pervasive kind that's used to make bottles for water and soda, and which can normally take hundreds of years to degrade.

It all began when researchers took a closer look at the crystal structure of a recently discovered enzyme called PETase, which evolved naturally and was already known to break down and digest plastic made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET).

But their investigation had an unlikely result - they introduced a mutation to PETase. The result was a new type of enzyme that digests plastic more efficiently than the original. The improvement was small, but it hinted at the possibility of tweaking plastic-devouring enzymes to dramatically increase their "appetite" for PET, the scientists reported in a new study. [ In Images: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch]

"Serendipity often plays a significant role in fundamental scientific research, and our discovery here is no exception," John McGeehan, a professor of structural biology at the University of Portsmouth in the U.K., said in a statement.

PETase was first detected in the bacterium Ideonella sakaiensis, which used the enzyme to munch on plastic in the soil of a PET bottle-recycling facility in Japan, according to the study. The scientists think that enzyme's function in the distant past was to break down a waxy coating on plants. And so the researchers were interested in finding out how the enzyme may have evolved from digesting plant material to plastic.

But, during their exploration, they tweaked the enzyme's structure enough to improve the enzyme's plastic consumption, the scientists wrote in the study.

PETase doesn't work very quickly - at least, not quickly enough to put a dent in the plastic garbage accumulating worldwide. While the newcomer mutant enzyme works somewhat more quickly than PETase does, its more important feature lies in its ability to consume another type of plastic: polyethylene furandicarboxylate (PEF), "literally drilling holes through the PEF sample," study co-author Gregg Beckham, a senior engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), said in a statement issued by NREL.

Ocean currents and winds distribute plastic pollution in waters around the world.

Credit: David Jones

However, even the most voracious plastic-eating enzyme will have a lot of plastic trash to plow through before it goes hungry. Humans have loaded down the planet with an estimated 9 billion tons (8.3 billion metric tons) of plastic, half of which has been produced since 2004, Live Science previously reported.

The new findings suggest that it may be possible to solve the global problem of plastic pollution by introducing human-engineered improvements to an enzyme that is already adept at consuming plastics (such as the mutant PETase) - and further work with this enzyme (and its mutant cousins) could make them even more efficient plastic eaters, the study authors reported.

"Given these results, it's clear that significant potential remains for improving its activity further," study co-author Nicholas Rorrer, a postdoctoral researcher at NREL, said in the NREL statement.

The findings were published online April 16 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Lab 'Accident' Becomes Mutant Enzyme That Devours Plastic

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Scientists accidentally created an enzyme that has an appetite for ... plastic, the pervasive kind that's used to make bottles for water and soda, and which can normally take hundreds of years to degrade.

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June 5, 2018: A pilot whale that swallowed over 80 plastic bags died as a result.

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A pilot whale that swallowed more than 80 plastic bags is seen in this still image from a June 1 video taken by Thailand's Department of Marine and Coastal Resources.

Credit: Thailand's Department of Marine and Coastal Resources/Social Media/REUTERS/Newscom

More than 80 plastic bags were found clogging the stomach of a small male pilot whale that died in Thailand on Friday (June 1), just days before World Ocean Day on June 8.

Veterinarians tried to save the whale for five straight days after spotting it in a Thai canal by the Malaysian border, according to National Geographic. When rescuers first spotted the whale, it was struggling to swim and breathe. So, rescuers used buoys to keep it afloat and opened red umbrellas to keep the whale from getting a sunburn.

Although the whale spit up five plastic bags, that wasn't enough to save it. A necropsy (an animal autopsy) revealed that it had more than 17 lbs. (8 kilograms) of plastic bags and other human-made trash in its stomach, according to Reuters. [ Photos: Pilot Whales in Trouble off Everglades]

The whale likely mistook the plastic bags for food, said Regina Asmutis-Silvia, the executive director of Whale and Dolphin Conservation's North American operation. As the bags piled up in its stomach, the animal would have felt full and may have stopped hunting for its natural diet of squid, fish and octopus.

"At some point, their stomach fills up with trash and they can't eat real food," Asmutis-Silvia told National Geographic. "You're not getting any nutrients in, and you've basically completely clogged your digestive system."

This pilot whale is hardly the only creature that has mistakenly dined on plastic with fatal consequences. At least 300 marine animals die in Thai waters each year after gulping down too much plastic, Thon Thamrongnawasawat, a marine biologist and lecturer at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, told Agence France-Presse. Worldwide, seabirds also mistake plastic trash for food, as do turtles, other whales, dolphins, seal pups and tiny crustaceans living in the Mariana Trench, the deepest place in the ocean, Live Science previously reported.

Some 18 billion lbs. (8 million kg) of plastic waste end up in the oceans annually, according to National Geographic. In the United States, the average person discards 185 lbs. (84 kg) of plastic trash, but this number can be reduced if people avoid single-use products - such as plastic bags and straws - and by properly recycling plastic products.

Original article on Live Science.

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Pilot Whale Dies After Eating More Than 80 Plastic Bags

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More than 80 plastic bags were found clogging the stomach of a small male pilot whale that died in Thailand on Friday (June 1), just days before World Ocean Day on June 8. Veterinarians tried to save the whale for five straight days after spotting it in a Thai canal by the Malaysian border, according to National Geographic.

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December 21, 2017: In an effort to help waste prevention, carmakers are making cars from reused material.

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Wheels

FLINT, Mich. - Mammoth bins and barrels line the edge of a General Motors factory floor, stuffed with industrial detritus like shavings of aluminum, pieces of plastic and glass and chemical sludge that has come off the machines that are used to assemble engines for three models of Chevrolet. Every bit of it, G.M. promises, has a future.

It has been more than 12 years since this plant in Central Michigan has sent anything to a dump. The 733,000-square-foot Flint Engine facility was G.M.'s first to achieve what is known as zero-waste to landfill - a designation now held by more than 150 of its factories and office buildings worldwide.

Not only is G.M. trying to avoid sending waste to landfills, it's trying to intercept other would-be garbage.

John Bradburn, G.M.'s global waste reduction manager, showed off air filters and noise-damping insulation for the Chevrolet Equinox engine that had been made from some of the millions of plastic water bottles from the Flint water contamination crisis. The company also converted 227 miles of oil-absorbing boom used in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010 into air deflectors for the engines of the Chevrolet Volt.

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The assembly line at the G.M. Flint Engine facility, the company's first to achieve what is known as zero-waste to landfill. Credit Joe Vaughn for The New York Times

"What's great is when you can utilize those materials, upcycle them, either in a facility-related product or even a vehicle part," said Mr. Bradburn. G.M. realizes $1 billion in revenue each year from the sale of recyclable materials, he said.

G.M. is not the only automaker for which environmental considerations extend beyond what their cars release into the air to what they put into the ground. Ford has 82 zero-waste facilities worldwide, including the century-old Rouge Center complex in Dearborn, Mich., which includes six factories and a steel foundry. Toyota, which has 27 zero-waste facilities in North America, said it reused or recycled 96 percent of its unregulated waste. Fiat Chrysler, Honda, Subaru and others also boast of their waste-reduction efforts to shareholders, customers and the general public.

"The auto industry has definitely been in the lead, paving the way for zero waste for heavy manufacturing," said Gary Liss, the first president of the U.S. Zero Waste Business Council and a board member of the Zero Waste International Alliance.

Part of the reason is, of course, economic. In the 1990s, automakers manufacturing parts and assembling vehicles in Europe and Asia faced new regulations and increasing costs as landfill space became scarce. By the early 2000s, auto companies operating in the North America, where sending waste to landfills has long been cheap because space is plentiful, realized that reducing waste through recycling and reuse yields considerable cost savings as well as positive public relations, said Andy Hobbs, Ford's director of environmental quality.

"This is not just good environmentally and good for our communities, it's also great for shareholders because we pay less to dispose of waste, we reduce our liabilities going forward and we're not putting stuff in a hole in the ground," said Mr. Hobbs, who said Ford now sends 8.6 pounds of waste per vehicle to landfills worldwide, compared to about 85 pounds in 2007. Less waste and less expensive means of disposal help keep costs down. "That enables our marketing team and dealers to lower the price of the car," he said.

Auto shavings at the Flint Engine facility that will go to a foundry. Credit Joe Vaughn for The New York Times

Mr. Bradburn said he expected there would be a significant push in the United States to find ways to recycle and reuse materials closer to home because China began severely restricting foreign companies' abilities to send refuse there in September. The Chinese government said hazardous waste mixed in with the recyclable material was causing environmental problems. Operation Green Fence, as China has called it, bans the import of 24 varieties of solid waste, including certain plastics and unsorted paper.

"China doesn't want our crap anymore," said Mr. Liss, the business council president. "In five or 10 years, China may not want any of our materials. They're saying, 'We don't want your trash. We only want good quality recyclables.' And they generate a lot of their own."

But Mr. Bradburn was optimistic about the potential benefits.

"This will create economic opportunities to develop jobs and to process materials close to home to reduce energy and carbon footprint," he said. "I see that developing in a significant way into 2018."

The first zero-waste car plant in North America was Subaru's assembly factory in Lafayette, Ind., in 2004. Tom Easterday, a Subaru executive vice president, said the company continued to find ways to reduce the creation of excess material. The employee cafeteria, for instance, switched to compostable potato-based plates, and the plant's lighting has been switching to LED fixtures to prevent the need to extract and recycle the mercury found in other bulbs.

Each company has a long list of intriguing changes it points to as examples of new uses for materials formerly destined for the dump or new materials that are easier to recycle. Ford, for instance, said it had 300 vehicle parts that were derived from soybeans, cotton, wood and other renewable sources and has been working with the tequila maker Jose Cuervo to explore whether agave fiber can be turned into bioplastic material.

Racks of engine blocks at the Flint Engine facility. Machines at the factory assemble engines for three models of Chevrolet. Credit Joe Vaughn for The New York Times

The zero-waste push has given rise to dozens of small businesses focused on various minute aspects of the production chain. Peter Feamster, owner of Innovo, has repurposed plastic in parts containers for automakers including G.M. and Ford, and has tried to persuade companies to let him fix up and resell car headlamps that are damaged during assembly. Many of those parts end up in a landfill, Mr. Feamster said, but don't count against a corporation's zero-waste data because they are first sent to a third party for recycling.

Mr. Feamster said automakers or suppliers sometimes use original material when recycled material would do just as well because the part's official specifications demand it.

"I've got customers making parts that go underneath the body of the car, you hardly see it, but the specs say it must be 100 percent virgin material," Mr. Feamster said. "Why would a spare tire cover have to be 100 percent virgin? Because maybe a customer will say, 'You're using what? Recycled material on my car I just spent $40,000 for?' But I think that's changing."

Kevin Butt, Toyota's North America environmental sustainability director, said automakers had noticed that the change had already arrived.

His company announced in April that part of its $1.33 billion investment in the Georgetown, Ky., plant where the Camry is assembled would include a new paint shop that will eliminate a currently unrecyclable hazardous waste byproduct of preparing aluminum for painting.

"There's data out there that more and more people are coming to the conclusion that how we build cars is extremely important to them," he said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: Carmakers Are Turning Their Old Scraps Into New Parts. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Carmakers Try to Keep Waste Out of the Ground as Well as the Air

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Wheels FLINT, Mich. - Mammoth bins and barrels line the edge of a General Motors factory floor, stuffed with industrial detritus like shavings of aluminum, pieces of plastic and glass and chemical sludge that has come off the machines that are used to assemble engines for three models of Chevrolet.

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January 23, 2018: A bad winter storm caused Lebanon beaches to be flooded with trash.

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BEIRUT, Lebanon - A winter storm in Lebanon has resurfaced a longstanding national problem, in the form of a swirling sea of garbage.

Piles of trash began washing up Monday on the beaches of Zouk Mosbeh, a town 10 miles north of Beirut, leaving the shore littered with refuse. An earlier storm surge had dragged trash from a landfill out to sea, later depositing it along the coastline and up to 100 feet inland.

Prime Minister Saad Hariri on Tuesday ordered a cleanup of the beaches in the Kaserwan district, home to Zouk Mosbeh and a region filled with beach resorts.

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BEIRUT, Lebanon - A winter storm in Lebanon has resurfaced a longstanding national problem, in the form of a swirling sea of garbage. Piles of trash began washing up Monday on the beaches of Zouk Mosbeh, a town 10 miles north of Beirut, leaving the shore littered with refuse.

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March 22, 2018: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is estimated to be 87,000 tons and counting.

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The stomach contents of a sea turtle, according to the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, which is funding research into plastic debris found in the Pacific. Credit Ocean Cleanup Foundation

In the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii, hundreds of miles from any major city, plastic bottles, children's toys, broken electronics, abandoned fishing nets and millions more fragments of debris are floating in the water - at least 87,000 tons' worth, researchers said Thursday.

In recent years, this notorious mess has become known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling oceanic graveyard where everyday objects get deposited by the currents. The plastics eventually disintegrate into tiny particles that often get eaten by fish and may ultimately enter our food chain.

Researchers said nets made up a surprising proportion of the waste they identified. Credit Ocean Cleanup Foundation

A study published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports quantified the full extent of the so-called garbage patch: It is four to 16 times bigger than previously thought, occupying an area roughly four times the size of California and comprising an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of rubbish. While the patch was once thought to be more akin to a soup of nearly invisible microplastics, scientists now think most of the trash consists of larger pieces. And, they say, it is growing "exponentially."

"It's just quite alarming, because you are so far from the mainland," said Laurent Lebreton, the lead author of the study and an oceanographer with the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, a nonprofit that is developing systems to remove ocean trash and which funded the study. "There's no one around and you still see those common objects, like crates and bottles."

Just one word: plastics

In the late summer of 2015, Mr. Lebreton and his colleagues measured the amount of plastic debris in the patch by trawling it with nets and flying overhead to take aerial photographs. Though they also found glass, rubber and wood, 99.9 percent of what the researchers pulled out of the ocean was plastic.

They also recovered a startling number of abandoned plastic fishing nets, Mr. Lebreton said. These "ghost nets" made up almost half of the total weight of the debris. (One explanation is the patch's proximity to fishing grounds; another is that fishing material is designed to be resilient at sea and stays intact longer than other objects.)

"We found a few unexpected objects," Mr. Lebreton said. "Among them were plastic toys, which I found really sad, as some of them may have come from the tsunami in Japan," he added, referring to the 2011 disaster that sent millions of tons of debris into the ocean.

The researchers also fished out a '90s-era Game Boy cover, construction-site helmets and a toilet seat, as well as a number of objects with Japanese and Chinese inscriptions. Other objects, Mr. Lebreton said, had "little bite marks from fish."

Some sea turtles caught near the patch were eating so much plastic that it made up around three-quarters of their diet, according to the foundation.

The garbage patch is not exactly a "patch"

After its discovery in the late '90s, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch took on an image in the popular imagination akin to an island or even a seventh continent made of trash. That myth was debunked, and the patch became understood as more like a region that looked like the rest of the ocean to the naked eye, but was polluted with tiny microplastics.

However the new study says that the microplastics, while still a problem, account for just 8 percent of the mass of the patch. Until now, most of the sampling used an ocean trawl designed to pick up small particles, and therefore, Mr. Lebreton said, underestimated the number of larger pieces of debris floating in the sea, like bottles, buoys and fishing nets.

"Most of the mass is actually large debris, ready to decompose into microplastic," Mr. Lebreton said.

Still, "it's not an island," Mr. Lebreton said. "It's very scattered." (A visual model, however, shows how the debris is condensed in one area in the ocean.)

"I think the name 'patch' is a little bit confusing," said Nancy Wallace, the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Marine Debris Program, who was not involved in the study. Describing it that way, she said, gave the wrong impression that it "would be easy to go pick it up."

There may still be time to act

The worry is that, within a few decades, the larger pieces of debris could break up into microplastics, which are much harder to remove from the ocean. "It's like a ticking time bomb," said Joost Dubois, a spokesman for the Ocean Cleanup Foundation.

The foundation says it would be almost impossible to remove the plastic already in the patch by traditional methods, like nets attached to boats. Instead, the group has developed a mechanical system that floats through the water and concentrates the plastics into denser areas that can then be collected by boats and taken back to shore to be recycled.

The foundation plans to launch the first such system this summer from Alameda, Calif.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: 87,000 Tons of Plastic And Counting in Pacific. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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The 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' Is Ballooning, 87,000 Tons of Plastic and Counting

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In the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii, hundreds of miles from any major city, plastic bottles, children's toys, broken electronics, abandoned fishing nets and millions more fragments of debris are floating in the water - at least 87,000 tons' worth, researchers said Thursday.

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May 29, 2018: Since China has recently banned taking in and processing foreign waste from the US, a lot of recyclables are ending up in landfills.

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Plastics and papers from dozens of American cities and towns are being dumped in landfills after China stopped recycling most "foreign garbage."

Oregon is serious about recycling. Its residents are accustomed to dutifully separating milk cartons, yogurt containers, cereal boxes and kombucha bottles from their trash to divert them from the landfill. But this year, because of a far-reaching rule change in China, some of the recyclables are ending up in the local dump anyway.

In recent months, in fact, thousands of tons of material left curbside for recycling in dozens of American cities and towns - including several in Oregon - have gone to landfills.

In the past, the municipalities would have shipped much of their used paper, plastics and other scrap materials to China for processing. But as part of a broad antipollution campaign, China announced last summer that it no longer wanted to import "foreign garbage." Since Jan. 1 it has banned imports of various types of plastic and paper, and tightened standards for materials it does accept.

While some waste managers already send their recyclable materials to be processed domestically, or are shipping more to other countries, others have been unable to find a substitute for the Chinese market. "All of a sudden, material being collected on the street doesn't have a place to go," said Pete Keller, vice president of recycling and sustainability at Republic Services, one of the largest waste managers in the country.

China's stricter requirements also mean that loads of recycling are more likely to be considered contaminated if they contain materials that are not recyclable. That has compounded a problem that waste managers call wishful or aspirational recycling: people setting aside items for recycling because they believe or hope they are recyclable, even when they aren't.
[Here's a guide to avoiding "aspirational recycling." First lesson: Don't recycle greasy pizza boxes.]
In the Pacific Northwest, Republic has diverted more than 2,000 tons of paper to landfills since the Chinese ban came into effect, Mr. Keller said. The company has been unable to move that material to a market "at any price or cost," he said. Though Republic is dumping only a small portion of its total inventory so far - the company handles over five million tons of recyclables nationwide each year - it sent little to no paper to landfills last year.

But for smaller companies, like Rogue Disposal and Recycling, which serves much of Oregon, the Chinese ban has upended operations. Rogue sent all its recycling to landfills for the first few months of the year, said Garry Penning, a spokesman.

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Credit Wiqan Ang for The New York Times

Western states, which have relied the most on Chinese recycling plants, have been hit especially hard. In some areas - like Eugene, Ore., and parts of Idaho, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii - local officials and garbage haulers will no longer accept certain items for recycling, in some cases refusing most plastics, glass and certain types of paper. Instead, they say, customers should throw these items in the trash.

Theresa Byrne, who lives in Salem, Ore., said the city took too long to inform residents that most plastics and egg and milk cartons were now considered garbage. "I was angry," she said. "I believe in recycling."

Other communities, like Grants Pass, Ore., home to about 37,000 people, are continuing to encourage their residents to recycle as usual, but the materials are winding up in landfills anyway. Local waste managers said they were concerned that if they told residents to stop recycling, it could be hard to get them to start again.

It is "difficult with the public to turn the spigot on and off," said Brian Fuller, a waste manager with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality.

The fallout has spread beyond the West Coast. Ben Harvey, the president of E.L. Harvey & Sons, a recycling company based in Westborough, Mass., said that he had around 6,000 tons of paper and cardboard piling up, when he would normally have a couple hundred tons stockpiled. The bales are filling almost half of his 80,000-square-foot facility.

"It's really impacted our day-to-day operations," Mr. Harvey said. "It's stifling me."

Recyclers in Canada, Australia, Britain, Germany and other parts of Europe have also scrambled to find alternatives.

Still, across much of the United States, including most major cities, recycling is continuing as usual. Countries like India, Vietnam and Indonesia are importing more of the materials that are not processed domestically. And some waste companies have responded to China's ban by stockpiling material while looking for new processors, or hoping that China reconsiders its policy.

Republic Services collecting recycled materials in Kent, Wash. Credit Wiqan Ang for The New York Times

Americans recycle roughly 66 million tons of material each year, according to the most recent figures from the Environmental Protection Agency, about one-third of which is exported. The majority of those exports once went to China, said David Biderman, the executive director of the Solid Waste Association of North America, a research and advocacy group.

But American scrap exports to China fell by about 35 percent in the first two months of this year, after the ban was implemented, said Joseph Pickard, chief economist for the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, a trade group.

"It's a huge concern, because China has just been such a dominant overseas market for us," Mr. Pickard said.

In particular, exports of scrap plastic to China, valued at more than $300 million in 2015, totaled just $7.6 million in the first quarter of this year, down 90 percent from a year earlier, Mr. Pickard said. Other countries have stepped in to accept more plastics, but total scrap plastic exports are still down by 40 percent this year, he said.

"There is a significant disruption occurring to U.S. recycling programs," Mr. Biderman said. "The concern is if this is the new normal."

Curbside recycling is typically hauled by a private company to a sorting plant, where marketable goods are separated out. Companies or local governments then sell the goods to domestic or overseas processors. Some states and cities prohibit these companies from dumping plastic, paper and cardboard, but some local officials - including in Oregon, Massachusetts and various municipalities in Washington State - have granted waivers so that unmarketable materials can be sent to the landfill.

Recycling companies "used to get paid" by selling off recyclable materials, said Peter Spendelow, a policy analyst for the Department of Environmental Quality in Oregon. "Now they're paying to have someone take it away."

In some places, including parts of Idaho, Maine and Pennsylvania, waste managers are continuing to recycle but are passing higher costs on to customers, or are considering doing so.

"There are some states and some markets where mixed paper is at a negative value," said Brent Bell, vice president of recycling at Waste Management, which handles 10 million tons of recycling per year."We'll let our customers make that decision, if they'd like to pay more and continue to recycle or to pay less and have it go to landfill."

Credit Wiqan Ang for The New York Times

Mr. Spendelow said companies in rural areas, which tend to have higher expenses to get their materials to market, were being hit particularly hard. "They're literally taking trucks straight to the landfill," he said.

Will Posegate, the chief operations officer for Garten Services, which processes recycling for a number of counties in Oregon, said his company had tried to stockpile recyclables but eventually used a waiver to dump roughly 900 tons. "The warehouse builds up so much that it's unsafe," he said.

In California, officials are concerned that improperly stored bales of paper could become hazards during wildfire season, said Zoe Heller, the policy director for the state's recycling department.

While China has entirely banned 24 materials, including post-consumer plastic and mixed paper, it has also demanded that other materials, such as cardboard and scrap metal, be only 0.5 percent impure. Even a small amount of food scraps or other rubbish, if undetected, can ruin a batch of recycling.

Some waste managers say that China's new contamination standards are impossible to meet, while others are trying to clean up their recycling streams by slowing down their processing facilities, limiting the types of materials they accept or trying to better educate customers on what belongs in the recycling bin.

Waste traveling along a conveyor belt to be sorted. Credit Wiqan Ang for The New York Times

Mr. Bell, the Waste Management executive, said he had seen everything from Christmas lights to animal carcasses to artillery shells come through the company's recycling facilities. "Most of our facilities get a bowling ball every day or two," he said.

Some materials can ruin a load, he said, while others pose fire or health hazards and can force facilities to slow their operations and in some cases temporarily shut down. (And a bowling ball could do serious damage to the equipment.) Approximately 25 percent of all recycling picked up by Waste Management is contaminated to the point that it is sent to landfills, Mr. Bell said.

Recyclers have always disposed of some of their materials. But the percentage has climbed as China and other buyers of recyclable material have ratcheted up quality standards.

Most contamination, Mr. Bell said, happens when people try to recycle materials they shouldn't. Disposable coffee cups - which are usually lined with a thin film that makes them liquid-proof but challenging and expensive to reprocess - are an example. Unwashed plastics can also cause contamination.

"If we don't get it clean, we're not going to be able to market it, and if we can't market it unfortunately it's going to go to the landfill," said Mr. Penning, the Rogue spokesman. In March, Rogue told customers to put everything in the trash except for corrugated cardboard, milk jugs, newspapers and tin and aluminum cans, which the company is finding domestic markets for, Mr. Penning said.

Rogue customers who make mistakes might see an "Oops" sticker the next time they check their recycling bin, he said.

In Eugene, similar restrictions have been imposed by the waste company Sanipac. These have not sat well with some residents. "Eugene is a very green city and people love their recycling here," said Diane Peterson, a resident. "There are a lot of things like yogurt containers that we get all the time, and now we can't recycle them."

Leah Geocaris, another Eugene resident, said the change had prompted her to try to consume less overall. "On the one hand, I hate it, because I don't want stuff to end up in landfill," she said. "On the other hand, it's a wake-up call."

"Recycling is the third R," she said. "You have to reduce and reuse first."

Here's how to recycle smarter

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Your Recyclables Get Recycled, Right?. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Your Recycling Gets Recycled, Right? Maybe, or Maybe Not

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Plastics and papers from dozens of American cities and towns are being dumped in landfills after China stopped recycling most "foreign garbage." Oregon is serious about recycling. Its residents are accustomed to dutifully separating milk cartons, yogurt containers, cereal boxes and kombucha bottles from their trash to divert them from the landfill.

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May 28th, 2018: Europe is banning single-use plastics to reduce oceanic pollution.

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BRUSSELS - The European Commission on Monday proposed an ambitious set of measures to clean up Europe's beaches and rid its seas and waterways of disposable plastics, and urged the European Union to lead the way in reducing marine litter worldwide.

The measures, which will need to be approved by the European Union's 28 member states, would reduce or alter the consumption and production of the top 10 plastic items most commonly found on beaches, including straws, cotton swabs, disposable cutlery and fishing gear.

"We are at risk of choking our oceans in plastic, with a knock-on effect on our food chain and human health," said Frans Timmermans, the vice president of the European Commission, which is the bloc's executive arm responsible for proposing legislation. "It's in the air, it's in our oceans, it's in our food and also in our bodies."

"We will ban single-use plastics," he said, and "lead the way" in a "global race to the top" to clean up the world's oceans.

Several European countries, like Denmark, France, Belgium, Italy and Portugal, have already taken steps to reduce waste from plastics on a national level in recent years, and more than 85 percent of respondents in a European Union survey expressed strong support for the measures.

Although the process could take a year or more, if adopted, the proposal will impose different kinds of measures for different products. Where viable alternatives exist, single-use plastic products will be banned from the European single market. In other cases, member states will be directed to set national reduction targets.

For some plastics, producers will help cover the costs of waste management and raising awareness about the threats posed by plastic waste. Deposit-refund systems will be further encouraged, and member states will aim to collect for recycling 90 percent of all plastic bottles by 2025.

"What this means in practice is that you won't see single-use plastic cotton buds on your supermarket shelves, but ones made with more environmental friendly materials instead," Mr. Timmermans said. "The same will go for straws, drink stirrers, sticks for balloons, cutlery and plates."

"You can still organize a picnic, drink a cocktail and clean your ears, just like before," he said. "And you get the added bonus that when you do so, you can have a clear conscience about the environmental impact of your actions."

Taken together, the measures would also contribute significantly to the achievement of the European Union's climate goals, avoiding about 3.4 million metric tons, or about 3.7 million tons, of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, according to the European Union.

Forty-six billion bottles, 36 billion straws, 16 billion coffee cups and two billion plastic takeout containers are consumed annually in the European Union, according to a 2017 report from Seas at Risk, an organization of environmental groups across Europe that promote marine protection.

The report also stated that about 580 billion cigarettes are consumed and their butts discarded annually in the European Union. Under the proposed measures, each country would have to conduct awareness-raising educational campaigns about the disposal of "tobacco product filters," and producers would have to share the costs of waste management.

Stakeholders from the plastics production industry and the fishing gear industry generally favored the European Commission's proposal and indicated that further action was necessary, and even urgent. They particularly welcomed measures that urged producers to share responsibility for raising awareness and managing waste.

But some lobbyist watchdog groups warned that the efforts to approve the commission's proposed measures would be met with resistance from some quarters of the plastics and packaging industry, which view the proposed regulations as "a horror prospect," said Vicky Cann of the Corporate Europe Observatory, a nonprofit group that aims to expose the effects of corporate lobbying campaigns.

"We expect to see a big backlash from producers in the next months, who have already been very vocal against bans and financial obligations on producers, and who insist voluntary initiatives are enough to end the plastic crisis," Ms. Cann said. "In the end, today's proposal is only as good as its eventual implementation, which will follow after what is sure to be a fierce lobby battle."

Many European countries have already introduced measures banning plastics in recent years. France banned ultralightweight plastic bags in 2015, and Italy did so in 2016. This year, Belgium, Denmark and Scotland are planning to ban several single-use plastic products, and Italy, Portugal and Spain are expected to introduce similar measures in the coming years.

Asked whether the European Union was planning to ban balloons, Mr. Timmermans insisted, "We're not going to ban balloons."

"I want to be very clear, these products won't disappear," he said, "they will just be made with different materials."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: E.U. Proposes Plastics Ban To Cut Down Sea Pollution. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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E.U. Proposes Ban on Some Plastic Items to Reduce Marine Pollution

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BRUSSELS - The European Commission on Monday proposed an ambitious set of measures to clean up Europe's beaches and rid its seas and waterways of disposable plastics, and urged the European Union to lead the way in reducing marine litter worldwide.

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May 24, 2018: Climate change may lead to an increase of intensity of atmospheric rivers, long narrow stips in the atmosphere that carry a large amount of water vapor from the tropics.

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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A new NASA-led study shows that climate change is likely to intensify extreme weather events known as atmospheric rivers across most of the globe by the end of this century, while slightly reducing their number.

The new study projects atmospheric rivers will be significantly longer and wider than the ones we observe today, leading to more frequent atmospheric river conditions in affected areas.

"The results project that in a scenario where greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current rate, there will be about 10 percent fewer atmospheric rivers globally by the end of the 21st century," said the study's lead author, Duane Waliser, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "However, because the findings project that the atmospheric rivers will be, on average, about 25 percent wider and longer, the global frequency of atmospheric river conditions -- like heavy rain and strong winds -- will actually increase by about 50 percent."

The results also show that the frequency of the most intense atmospheric river storms is projected to nearly double.

Atmospheric rivers are long, narrow jets of air that carry huge amounts of water vapor from the tropics to Earth's continents and polar regions. These "rivers in the sky" typically range from 250 to 375 miles (400 to 600 kilometers) wide and carry as much water -- in the form of water vapor -- as about 25 Mississippi Rivers. When an atmospheric river makes landfall, particularly against mountainous terrain (such as the Sierra Nevada and the Andes), it releases much of that water vapor in the form of rain or snow.

These storm systems are common -- on average, there are about 11 present on Earth at any time. In many areas of the globe, they bring much-needed precipitation and are an important contribution to annual freshwater supplies. However, stronger atmospheric rivers -- especially those that stall at landfall or that produce rain on top of snowpack -- can cause disastrous flooding.

Atmospheric rivers show up on satellite imagery, including in data from a series of actual atmospheric river storms that drenched the U.S. West Coast and caused severe flooding in early 2017.

The study

Climate change studies on atmospheric rivers to date have been mostly limited to two specific regions, the western United States and Europe. They have typically used different methodologies for identifying atmospheric rivers and different climate projection models -- meaning results from one are not quantitatively comparable to another.

The team sought to provide a more streamlined and global approach to evaluating the effects of climate change on atmospheric river storms.

The study relied on two resources -- a set of commonly used global climate model projections for the 21st century developed for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest assessment report, and a global atmospheric river detection algorithm that can be applied to climate model output. The algorithm, developed earlier by members of the study team, identifies atmospheric river events from every day of the model simulations, quantifying their length, width and how much water vapor they transport.

The team applied the atmospheric river detection algorithm to both actual observations and model simulations for the late 20 th century. Comparing the data showed that the models produced a relatively realistic representation of atmospheric rivers for the late 20 th century climate.

They then applied the algorithm to model projections of climate in the late 21 st century. In doing this, they were able to compare the frequency and characteristics of atmospheric rivers for the current climate with the projections for future climate.

The team also tested the algorithm with a different climate model scenario that assumed more conservative increases in the rate of greenhouse gas emissions. They found similar, though less drastic changes. Together, the consideration of the two climate scenarios indicates a direct link between the extent of warming and the frequency and severity of atmospheric river conditions.

What does this mean?

The significance of the study is two-fold.

First, "knowing the nature of how these atmospheric river events might change with future climate conditions allows for scientists, water managers, stakeholders and citizens living in atmospheric river-prone regions [e.g. western N. America, western S. America, S. Africa, New Zealand, western Europe] to consider the potential implications that might come with a change to these extreme precipitation events," said Vicky Espinoza, postdoctoral fellow at the University of California-Merced and first author of the study.

And secondly, the study and its approach provide a much-needed, uniform way to research atmospheric rivers on a global level -- illustrating a foundation to analyze and compare them that did not previously exist.

Limitations

Data across the models are generally consistent -- all support the projection that atmospheric river conditions are linked to warming and will increase in the future; however, co-author Marty Ralph of the University of California, San Diego, points out that there is still work to be done.

"While all the models project increases in the frequency of atmospheric river conditions, the results also illustrate uncertainties in the details of the climate projections of this key phenomenon," he said. "This highlights the need to better understand why the models' representations of atmospheric rivers vary."

The study, titled "Global Analysis of Climate Change Projection Effects on Atmospheric Rivers," was recently published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

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intergovernmental panel on climate change

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Climate change may lead to bigger atmospheric rivers - Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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A new NASA-led study shows that climate change is likely to intensify extreme weather events known as atmospheric rivers across most of the globe by the end of this century, while slightly reducing their number. The new study projects atmospheric rivers will be significantly longer and wider than the ones we observe today, leading to more frequent atmospheric river conditions in affected areas.

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May 16, 2018: April 2018 was the third warmest globally on record, being .86 C warmer than average. The past three Aprils have been the warmest in 138 years.

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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In spite of the low temperatures in parts of the United States last month, 2018 experienced globally the third warmest April in 138 years of modern record-keeping, according to a monthly analysis of global temperatures by scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

Last month was +0.86 °C warmer than the average April of the 1951-1980 period; this value is in line with the 1.8 °C/century rate of increase of the past 40 years. Only April 2016 (+1.07 °C) and April 2017 (+0.92 °C) were warmer than the past month, and April 2010 (+0.84 °C) was only insignificantly cooler than this year's April.

The GISTEMP monthly temperature anomalies superimposed on a 1980-2015 mean seasonal cycle. View larger image or PDF.

The monthly analysis by the GISS team is assembled from publicly available data acquired by about 6,300 meteorological stations around the world, ship- and buoy-based instruments measuring sea surface temperature, and Antarctic research stations.

The modern global temperature record begins around 1880 because previous observations didn't cover enough of the planet. Monthly analyses are sometimes updated when additional data becomes available, and the results are subject to change.

Related links

For more information on NASA GISS's monthly temperature analysis, visit data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp.

For more information about NASA GISS, visit www.giss.nasa.gov.

Media contact

Leslie McCarthy, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, N.Y., 212-678-5507, leslie.m.mccarthy@nasa.gov

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NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies

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April 2018 was third warmest April on record - Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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In spite of the low temperatures in parts of the United States last month, 2018 experienced globally the third warmest April in 138 years of modern record-keeping, according to a monthly analysis of global temperatures by scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

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March 5th, 2018: Permafrost in the north may unleash a massive amount of carbon in the coming decades as it melts from warming temperatures.

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Permafrost in the coldest northern Arctic - formerly thought to be at least temporarily shielded from global warming by its extreme environment - will thaw enough to become a permanent source of carbon to the atmosphere in this century, with the peak transition occurring in 40 to 60 years, according to a new NASA-led study.

The study calculated that as thawing continues, total carbon emissions from this region over the next 300 years or so will be 10 times as much as all human-produced fossil fuel emissions in the single year 2016.

The study, led by scientist Nicholas Parazoo of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, found that warmer, more southerly permafrost regions will not become a carbon source until the end of the 22nd century, even though they are thawing now. That is because other changing Arctic processes will counter the effect of thawing soil in these regions.

The finding that the colder region would transition sooner than the warmer one came as a surprise, according to Parazoo. "Permafrost in southern Alaska and southern Siberia is already thawing, so it's obviously more vulnerable," he said. "Some of the very cold, stable permafrost in the highest latitudes in Alaska and Siberia appeared to be sheltered from extreme climate change, and we didn't expect much impact over the next couple hundred years."

Permafrost is soil that has remained frozen for years or centuries under topsoil. It contains carbon-rich organic material, such as leaves, that froze without decaying. As rising Arctic air temperatures cause permafrost to thaw, the organic material decomposes and releases its carbon to the atmosphere in the form of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane.

Parazoo and his colleagues used data on soil temperatures in Alaska and Siberia from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, with a numerical model from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, that calculates changes in carbon emissions as plants grow and permafrost thaws in response to climate change. They assessed when the Arctic will transition to a carbon source instead of the carbon-neutral area it is today - with some processes removing about as much carbon from the atmosphere as other processes emit. They divided the Arctic into two regions of equal size, a colder northern region and a warmer, more southerly belt encircling the northern region.

There is far more permafrost in the northern region than in the southern one. Over the course of the model simulations, northern permafrost lost about five times more carbon per century than southern permafrost.

The southern region transitioned more slowly in the model simulations, Parazoo said, because plant growth increased much faster than expected in the south. Plants remove carbon dioxide from the air during photosynthesis, so increased plant growth means less carbon in the atmosphere. According to the model, as the southern Arctic grows warmer, increased photosynthesis will balance increased permafrost emissions until the late 2100s.

Results of the study are published in the journal The Cryosphere. To read the paper, visit:
https://www.the-cryosphere.net/12/123/2018/ Updated on 3/7/18 at 6:20 a.m. to clarify the total amount of Arctic carbon emitted by thawing permafrost, in paragraph 2, and adding a link to the study​

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Far northern permafrost may unleash carbon within decades - Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Permafrost in the coldest northern Arctic - formerly thought to be at least temporarily shielded from global warming by its extreme environment - will thaw enough to become a permanent source of carbon to the atmosphere in this century, with the peak transition occurring in 40 to 60 years, according to a new NASA-led study.

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March 23rd, 2018: Arctic ice extent during the winter months is amongst the lowest it’s ever been.

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Sea ice in the Arctic grew to its annual maximum extent last week, and joined 2015, 2016 and 2017 as the four lowest maximum extents on record, according to scientists at the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and NASA.

On March 17, the Arctic sea ice cover peaked at 5.59 million square miles (14.48 million square kilometers), making it the second lowest maximum on record, at about 23,200 square miles (60,000 square kilometers) larger than the record low maximum reached on March 7, 2017.

More significantly from a scientific perspective, the last four years reached nearly equally low maximum extents and continued the decades-long trend of diminishing sea ice in the Arctic. This year's maximum extent was 448,000 square miles (1.16 million square kilometers) - an area larger than Texas and California combined - below the 1981 to 2010 average maximum extent.

Arctic sea ice reached its annual maximum extent on March 17, according to analysis by NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/ Katy Mersmann. This video is available for download at NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio.

Every year, the sea ice cover blanketing the Arctic Ocean and surrounding seas thickens and expands during the fall and winter, reaching its maximum yearly extent sometime between late February and early April. The ice then thins and shrinks during the spring and summer until it reaches its annual minimum extent in September. Arctic sea ice has been declining both during the growing and melting seasons in recent decades.

The decline of the Arctic sea ice cover has myriad effects, from changes in climate and weather patterns to impacts on the plants and animals dependent on the ice, and to the indigenous human communities that rely on them. The disappearing ice is also altering shipping routes, increasing coastal erosion and affecting ocean circulation.

On March 17, the Arctic sea ice cover peaked at 5.59 million square miles (14.48 million square kilometers), making it the second lowest maximum on record. Credit: NASA/ Nathan Kurtz

"The Arctic sea ice cover continues to be in a decreasing trend and this is connected to the ongoing warming of the Arctic," said Claire Parkinson, senior climate scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "It's a two-way street: the warming means less ice is going to form and more ice is going to melt, but also, because there's less ice, less of the sun's incident solar radiation is reflected off, and this contributes to the warming."

The Arctic has gone through repeated warm episodes this winter, with temperatures climbing more than 40 degrees above average in some regions. The North Pole even experienced temperatures above the freezing point for a few days in February.

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Arctic wintertime sea ice extent is among lowest on record - Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Sea ice in the Arctic grew to its annual maximum extent last week, and joined 2015, 2016 and 2017 as the four lowest maximum extents on record, according to scientists at the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and NASA.

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May 16,2018: The Earth’s wet areas are becoming wetter, whereas the dry areas are getting drier due to changing climate worldwide.

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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In a first-of-its-kind study, scientists have combined an array of NASA satellite observations of Earth with data on human activities to map locations where freshwater is changing around the globe and why.

The study, published today in the journal Nature, finds that Earth's wet land areas are getting wetter and dry areas are getting drier due to a variety of factors, including human water management, climate change and natural cycles.

Between 2002 and 2016, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) tracked the movement of freshwater around the planet. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Katy Mersmann

Between 2002 and 2016, the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) tracked the movement of freshwater around the planet. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Katy Mersmann

A team led by Matt Rodell of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, used 14 years of observations from the U.S./German-led Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment ( GRACE) spacecraft mission to track global trends in freshwater in 34 regions around the world. To understand why these trends emerged, they needed to pull in satellite precipitation data from the Global Precipitation Climatology Project, NASA/U.S. Geological Survey Landsat imagery, irrigation maps, and published reports of human activities related to agriculture, mining and reservoir operations. Only through analysis of the combined data sets were the scientists able to get a full understanding of the reasons for Earth's freshwater changes, as well as the sizes of those trends.

"This is the first time that we've used observations from multiple satellites in a thorough assessment of how freshwater availability is changing everywhere on Earth," said Rodell. "A key goal was to distinguish shifts in terrestrial water storage caused by natural variability -- wet periods and dry periods associated with El Niño and La Niña, for example -- from trends related to climate change or human impacts, like pumping groundwater out of an aquifer faster than it is replenished."

Freshwater is found in lakes, rivers, soil, snow, groundwater and ice. Freshwater loss from the ice sheets at the poles -- attributed to climate change -- has implications for sea level rise. On land, freshwater is one of the most essential of Earth's resources, for drinking water and agriculture. While some regions' water supplies are relatively stable, others experienced increases or decreases.

"What we are witnessing is major hydrologic change," said co-author Jay Famiglietti of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which also managed the GRACE mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "We see a distinctive pattern of the wet land areas of the world getting wetter -- those are the high latitudes and the tropics -- and the dry areas in between getting dryer. Embedded within the dry areas we see multiple hotspots resulting from groundwater depletion."

Famiglietti noted that while water loss in some regions, like the melting ice sheets and alpine glaciers, is clearly driven by warming climate, it will require more time and data to determine the driving forces behind other patterns of freshwater change.

"The pattern of wet-getting-wetter, dry-getting-drier during the rest of the 21st century is predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change models, but we'll need a much longer dataset to be able to definitively say whether climate change is responsible for the emergence of any similar pattern in the GRACE data," Famiglietti said.

The twin GRACE satellites, launched in 2002 as a joint mission with the German Aerospace Center (DLR), precisely measured the distance between the two spacecraft to detect changes in Earth's gravity field caused by movements of mass on the planet below. Using this method, GRACE tracked monthly variations in terrestrial water storage until its science mission ended in October 2017.

Artist's illustration of the twin spacecraft of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission. GRACE Follow-On will soon continue the legacy of the original GRACE mission, providing valuable data that will help manage Earth's critical water resources. › Full image and caption

However, the GRACE satellite observations alone couldn't tell Rodell, Famiglietti and their colleagues what was causing the apparent trends.

"We examined information on precipitation, agriculture and groundwater pumping to find a possible explanation for the trends estimated from GRACE," said co-author Hiroko Beaudoing of Goddard and the University of Maryland in College Park.

For instance, although pumping groundwater for agricultural uses is a significant contributor to freshwater depletion throughout the world, groundwater levels are also sensitive to cycles of persistent drought or rainy conditions. Famiglietti noted that such a combination was likely the cause of the significant groundwater depletion observed in California's Central Valley from 2007 to 2015, when decreased groundwater replenishment from rain and snowfall combined with increased pumping for agriculture.

Southwestern California lost 4 gigatons of freshwater per year during the period. A gigaton of water would fill 400,000 Olympic swimming pools. A majority of California's freshwater comes in the form of rainfall and snow that collect in the Sierra Nevada snowpack and then is managed as it melts into surface waters through a series of reservoirs. When natural cycles led to less precipitation and caused diminished snowpack and surface waters, people relied on groundwater more heavily.

Downward trends in freshwater seen in Saudi Arabia also reflect agricultural pressures. From 2002 to 2016, the region lost 6.1 gigatons per year of stored groundwater. Imagery from Landsat satellites shows an explosive growth of irrigated farmland in the arid landscape from 1987 to the present, which may explain the increased drawdown.

The team's analyses also identified large, decade-long trends in terrestrial freshwater storage that do not appear to be directly related to human activities. Natural cycles of high or low rainfall can cause a trend that is unlikely to persist, Rodell said. An example is Africa's western Zambezi basin and Okavango Delta, a vital watering hole for wildlife in northern Botswana. In this region, water storage increased at an average rate of 29 gigatons per year from 2002 to 2016. This wet period during the GRACE mission followed at least two decades of dryness. Rodell believes it is a case of natural variability that occurs over decades in this region of Africa.

The researchers found that a combination of natural and human pressures can lead to complex scenarios in some regions. Xinjiang province in northwestern China, about the size of Kansas, is bordered by Kazakhstan to the west and the Taklamakan desert to the south and encompasses the central portion of the Tien Shan Mountains. During the first decades of this century, previously undocumented water declines occurred in Xinjiang.

Rodell and his colleagues pieced together multiple factors to explain the loss of 5.5 gigatons of terrestrial water storage per year in Xinjiang province. Less rainfall was not the culprit. Additions to surface water were also occurring from climate change-induced glacier melt, and the pumping of groundwater out of coal mines. But these additions were more than offset by depletions caused by an increase in water consumption by irrigated cropland and evaporation of river water from the desert floor.

The successor to GRACE, called GRACE Follow-On, a joint mission with the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ), currently is at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California undergoing final preparations for launch no earlier than May 22.

For more information on how NASA studies Earth, visit:
https://www.nasa.gov/earth
For more information on GRACE and GRACE-FO, visit:
http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace https://grace.jpl.nasa.gov
and
https://www.nasa.gov/gracefo
News media contact

Alan Buis
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-0474
Alan.Buis@jpl.nasa.gov

Steve Cole
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-0918
Stephen.e.cole@nasa.gov

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NASA satellites reveal major shifts in global freshwater - Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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In a first-of-its-kind study, scientists have combined an array of NASA satellite observations of Earth with data on human activities to map locations where freshwater is changing around the globe and why.