Tag: water supply
The Man Working to Keep the Water On in Gaza
Numbers are one way to make the destruction of war legible: number of hostages, number of children killed, number of buildings destroyed, number of aid trucks that made it across the Egyptian border. For Marwan Bardawil, who lives in Gaza, the unit of peril he tracks is cubic meters per hour. Bardawil is a water engineer with the Palestinian Water Authority overseeing Gaza. And these days he is measuring, in cubic meters per hour, the quantity of water flowing through
We Are Grossly Undercounting Extinctions
This article was originally published in Undark Magazine.
It could have been a scene from Jurassic Park: 10 golden lumps of hardened resin, each encasing insects. But these weren’t from the age of the dinosaurs; these younger resins were formed in eastern Africa within the past few hundreds or thousands of years. Still, they offered a glimpse into a lost past: the dry evergreen forests of coastal Tanzania.
An international team of scientists recently took a close look
Why 2021 Was So Hot in the West
After this summer’s first searing heat wave baked the Pacific Northwest, the environmental scientist Robert Rohde posted an unusual observation on Twitter.
Looking through a report that analyzed temperature patterns for the region over the past 70 years, he noted, “the heatwave was statistically ‘impossible.’” Obviously, the heat wave wasn’t literally impossible, given that, after all, it happened. But the broiling temperature that the Northwest reached—108 degrees Fahrenheit at one point in Seattle, 121 degrees in British Columbia—was so