#surface water

New chemical substances are increasingly appearing in rivers, lakes, ditches, and canals, with concentrations of some exceeding legal limits. This poses a concern because surface water is frequently used for drinking water production, and these substances are hard to remove, the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) has said. The institute also urged measures to reduce their discharge. The RIVM is calling on Rijkswaterstaat and the water boards, responsible for water management, to take action against five chemicals. Lithium, used in batteries, can cause long-term kidney damage. Bromate may lead to cancer if exposure is excessive. The RIVM also points to dibromoacetic acid, N, N-dimethylsulfamide, and trichloroacetic acid as substances of concern. Cutting back on discharges is expected to reduce the levels of these chemicals in the water. The substances come from sources such as industry, pesticides, and leftover medicines. -“I take the RIVM’s findings seriously,” stated outgoing Minister of Water Management Robert Tieman. “It is important to assess whether these four substances actually pose health risks.” He was referring to the five chemicals identified by the RIVM, excluding lithium, whose risks have already been examined. The minister stressed that the study focuses on surface water and that drinking water remains “of excellent quality.”

An experiment, 1 October 2019 — 30 September 2020, on twitch and elsewhere. Particularly engaged with the US Drought Monitor, the Los Angeles Times and first-hand water reports from y’all in the twitch chat on Thursday nights (Pacific).

TOULOUSE, France — A lot of the water on Earth’s surface has shifted locales in the past few decades. That’s the finding of a surprising new study. Some lakes once thought to be permanent now exist only part of the year. Others have disappeared altogether. In still other places, new lakes and wetlands have been emerging.

Scientists sometimes refer to the depiction of Earth’s surface waters as its water “map.” At first glance, the reasons for changes in the map might seem unrelated. In fact, some sort of human activity is the root cause for many.

When people build a dam, it almost immediately begins to collect water. That change can be seen right away. But in most places, the landscape changes too slowly to notice. So it can be hard to spot a change in the map of surface waters unless you compare two time periods that are far apart, explains Luca De Felice. He’s an analyst who focuses on geospatial (GEE-oh-spay-shul) data — the types that map what’s happening across wide swaths of the globe. He works at the European Commission’s Joint Research Center in Brussels, Belgium.

De Felice looks at a lot of satellite images. For the past couple of years, he has been part of a team analyzing images taken by Landsat satellites between 1984 and 2015. The researchers focused on Earth’s lakes, rivers and other surface waters.

The task was not easy, De Felice notes. The group had more than 3 million images to review. Plus, team members had to develop software that would highlight where the water is. That’s not as simple as finding the blue stuff in an image. Microbes in lake water, for instance, might turn the water greenish. And some rivers, especially muddy ones, appear brown. That can make water difficult to distinguish from land.

To tackle the job, the team’s computers worked overtime. There were 10,000 of them working together to analyze all of those satellite photos, De Felice says. If the researchers had been running their study on just one laptop, their analysis might have taken more than 1,200 years, he estimates.

Nearly all rivers, lakes and ponds in England tested for a range of Pfas, known as “forever chemicals”, exceed proposed new safety limits and 85% contain levels at least five times higher, analysis of official data reveals. Out of 117 water bodies tested by the Environment Agency for multiple types of Pfas, 110 would fail the safety standard, according to analysis by Wildlife and Countryside Link and the Rivers Trust. They also found levels of Pfos – a banned carcinogenic Pfas – in fish were on average 322 times higher than planned limits for wildlife. If just one portion of such freshwater fish was eaten each month this would exceed the safe threshold of Pfos for people to consume over a year, according to the NGOs. Pfas, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a group of thousands of human-made chemicals used in industrial processes and products such as non-stick pans, clothing and firefighting foams. They do not break down in the environment and some are linked to diseases, including cancers and hormone disruption.

The Netherlands has made almost no progress in removing 15 very harmful industrial substances from our surface water in the past 12 years, the Court of Audit determined. In 2000, the Netherlands agreed within the European Union to reduce the presence of these substances by 2027. “It is unlikely that this will be achieved,” the Court of Audit said. The Court of Audit examined the concentration of the 15 most harmful substances from the total list of 122 harmful substanceslisted in the Water Framework Directive (WFD). These include carcinogenic PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), PFOS, heavy metals such as lead, mercury, and dioxins - all substances that pose a risk to human health and the environment. The researchers measured the concentration of these 15 substances at all 61 monitoring points in national waters in the Netherlands. They found that the concentration of one substance decreased, three increased, and nine remained about the same as 12 years ago. For two substances, there were not enough measurements to be definitive. According to the WDF, the concentration of all harmful 122 substances must be decreased to a certain level by 2027. If one substance does not meet the standard, the chemical quality of the water is deemed insufficient. According to the Court of Audit, almost all measurement points exceed at least one value.