Water & Oceans

Scientists think they have solved the mystery of what's killing starfish along the U.S. Pacific coast. It's a virus.

"The state has slapped Madison’s sewage treatment plant with 32 air pollution violations alleging excessive emissions from burning biogas and a near absence of effective monitoring and record keeping."

"To many Toledoans, the Detroit River is just another waterway on a map."

"Whitemarsh Run looks a mess, more a construction site than a stream. With its flow temporarily dammed and diverted, a track hoe is carving out a new, more sinuous channel for the badly degraded waterway running through a built-up patch of northeastern Baltimore County. New banks are being built, armored in places with granite boulders — all part of a $13 million makeover that's intended to help clean up the nearby Bird River and the Chesapeake Bay."

"Just hours into the experiment, the prognosis was grim for salmon that had been submerged in rain runoff collected from one of Seattle's busiest highways. One by one, the fish were removed from a tank filled with coffee-colored water and inspected: They were rigid. Their typically red gills were gray."

"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued an updated alert last week stating that a variant of the BlackEnergy malware had infiltrated the SCADA systems that control critical infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines, water distribution systems and the power grid."

"MECCA, Calif. — The area around this town of date palms attracts two kinds of migrants — hundreds of humans who work the land, and millions of birds that stop to rest and gorge at the nearby Salton Sea. The sea is a 110-year-old, increasingly briny, shallow lake that covers 350 square miles but is dwindling fast."

"Americans recently passed a milestone when federal officials reported that water use across the nation had reached its lowest level in more than 45 years: good news for the environment, great news in times of drought and a major victory for conservation."

"Conservation groups have filed initial paperwork to sue the Tennessee Valley Authority, contending that harmful pollutants have been seeping from 55-year-old coal ash storage ponds at the Gallatin power plant and into drinking water."

"Three years ago, the Chesapeake Bay was hit by an unusually large “dead zone,” a stretch of oxygen-depleted water that killed fish from the Baltimore Harbor to the mid-channel of the Potomac River and beyond, about a third of the bay."