In rural West Bengal, India, life is tenuous for millions of people. Desperate poverty, hunger and disease are a daily reality. To make matters worse, their water, laced with naturally occurring arsenic, is killing them. Thankfully, village-by-village, simple, locally developed solutions are making a change for the better by providing safe water and empowering communities.
Researchers are working to build the world's largest neutrino telescope in the Antarctic ice, far beneath the continent's snow-covered surface. Dubbed "IceCube," the telescope will occupy a cubic kilometer of Antarctica when it is completed in 2011. Rather than a giant lens aimed at the heavens, the IceCube telescope consists of kilometer-long strings of 60 optical detectors frozen more than a mile deep in the Antarctic ice, and drilling is a 24/7 operation.
IODP scientists aboard the drilling ship CHIKYU returned from a 40-day expedition in early October. Expedition 322 conducted drilling, logging and sampling beneath the ocean floor off the shore of Japan, and drilling operations were carried out at two sites.
Volcanic ground is a challenging place to drill
water wells. In central Nicaragua, situated on volcanic bedrock, only three of
every 10 wells drilled produces sufficient water even for one household.
The Georgia World Congress Center Authority soon will be able to water its green space and turn its fountains back on after a water ban that went into effect October 2007. While water restrictions still are in place, the 200-acre campus no longer will be as much of a strain on the local water supply. Located in the heart of downtown Atlanta, the GWCCA has bored two 660-foot deep wells, which will be used for watering lawns and plants, as well as operating ornamental water features.
Ancient African megadroughts may
have driven the evolution of humans and fishes, new research reveals. A
core extracted from Lake Malawi represents as much as 1.5 million years
of tropical Africa's past, and sheds light on the region’s climate and
ecological history.
Scientists are exploring another path for cutting emissions of carbon dioxide. Carbon capture and storage traps carbon dioxide after it is produced and injects it underground, pumping it down through wells, and dissolving it.
For the first time, geologists have extracted intact rock samples from 2 miles beneath the surface of the San Andreas Fault, the infamous rupture that runs 800 miles along the length of California.
For eight weeks beginning in November 2009, off the
coast of New Zealand, an international team on board the scientific drilling
vessel JOIDES Resolution (JR) investigated sea-level change in a region
called the Canterbury Basin. It proved to be a record-breaking trip. The research
team drilled four sites in the seafloor. One site marked the deepest hole
drilled by the JR on the continental shelf, and another was the
deepest hole drilled on a single expedition in the history of scientific ocean
drilling.
A massive water infrastructure overhaul currently taking place in the Indiana city of Martinsville is using horizontal directional drilling and CertainTeed Certa-Lok C900/RJ PVC pipe to minimize disruption to residential areas and farmland. The 21,000-foot project involves replacing old cast iron potable water pipes, and connecting the community’s rural homes with the City of Martinsville water supply.
On Indonesian Moluccas, many people still are living without access to clean water. Every day, they use many hours on procuring water from streams or from boats bringing drinking water to the islands. Thanks to the 100 Villages project, however, those conditions will be changed for 100 villages on the islands.
University of Utah researchers will inject cool water and pressurized water into a dry geothermal well during a 5-year, $10.2 million study aimed at boosting the productivity of geothermal power plants and making them feasible nationwide.
An international team of scientists has been given the go-ahead to explore one of the planet's last great frontiers – an ancient lake hidden deep beneath Antarctica's ice sheet. Scientists will drill through 1.86 miles of ice to reach the lake, which may have been isolated for hundreds of thousands of years. The team hopes the exploration will yield vital clues about life on Earth, climate change and future sea-level rise.
A new approach to desalination could lead to small, portable desalination units that could be powered by solar cells or batteries, and could deliver enough fresh water to supply the needs of a family or small village.
Every day, more than
140 million people in southern Asia drink ground water contaminated with
arsenic. More than 15 years ago, scientists pinpointed the source of the
contamination in the Himalaya Mountains, where sediments containing naturally
occurring arsenic were carried downstream to heavily populated river basins
below. But one mystery remained: Instead of remaining chemically trapped in the
river sediments, arsenic somehow was working its way into the ground water more
than 100 feet below the surface. After an extensive field study, today the
research team appears to have solved the arsenic mystery, and is working with
officials to prevent the health crisis from escalating.
Researchers at MIT believe they have pinpointed a
pathway by which arsenic may be contaminating the drinking water in Bangladesh. Their research suggests that human
alteration to the landscape, the construction of villages with ponds, and the
adoption of irrigated agriculture are responsible for the current pattern of
arsenic concentration underground.
Numerous studies
over the past four decades have established that pesticides can move downward
to reach the water table at detectable concentrations. This study found that
the pesticides detected most frequently in shallow ground-water samples were
predominantly from two classes of herbicides.
A team of scientists from the United States, Germany,
Russia and Austria has just returned from a 6-month drilling expedition to a
frozen lake in Siberia: Lake El'gygytgyn, which was created 3.6 million years
ago when a meteor hit Earth and formed an 11-mile wide crater. There, from
three holes drilled under the frozen lake, the researchers collected the
longest sediment core samples retrieved in the Arctic region, recovering a
total of 1,165 feet of sediments. The sediment record collected extends back
roughly 2 million years.
Solar-powered drip irrigation systems significantly enhance household incomes and nutritional intake of villagers in arid sub-Saharan Africa, according to a new Stanford University study. The two-year study found that solar-powered pumps installed in remote villages in the West African nation of Benin are a cost-effective way of delivering much-needed irrigation water, particularly during the long dry season.
Despite harsh atmospheric and ocean conditions, and complex geological characteristics of its drill site, the deep-sea drilling vessel CHIKYU conducted riser-drilling operations to successfully drill down to a depth of a mile beneath the seafloor.
Members of the U.S. Army and Navy worked together with the Nicaraguan National Assembly to construct three water wells in Los Sanchez, Samaria and La Noria, Nicaragua, as part of Army South's Beyond the Horizon mission.
S&S Directional Boring Ltd. recently used directional drilling and PVC pipe to replace an 11,000-foot corroded cast-iron water main for the City of Fort Wayne, Ind.
The most common source of arsenic contamination in ground water is the mobilization of naturally occurring arsenic on sediments. Given the right chemical conditions in the subsurface, arsenic can dissolve into ground water used for drinking water.
