Water & Oceans

"Philadelphia got the green light Wednesday for a $2 billion storm-water plan that will transform the way the city deals with rain. The 25-year plan, which has been hailed as a national model, envisions green roofs on office buildings, porous pavement on city streets and parking lots, and plants and trees with tubs of gravel below ground to hold water and stall runoff in a storm."

"Libya’s enormous aquatic reserves could potentially become a new weapon of choice if government forces opt to starve coastal cities that heavily rely on free flowing freshwater."

"Scientists have been using small variations in the Earth’s gravity to identify trouble spots around the globe where people are making unsustainable demands on groundwater, one of the planet’s main sources of fresh water."

"The massive amount of nutrient-heavy river water pouring out of spillways and through the mouths of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers will likely trigger a record-setting Gulf of Mexico dead zone, an area of low-to-no oxygen water that forms annually off Louisiana’s coast."

"Since the first plea for help came over a Keys radio station, hundreds of volunteers have worked around the clock to save pilot whales that mysteriously stranded themselves in shallow waters."

"Radiation has contaminated the underground pipes, water tanks, and plumbing that provide drinking water for much of Central Texas and the famed Texas Hill Country, according to concerned city officials in the region who have tested the pipes with Geiger counters."

"An old compact may not be enough to keep the Tongue River from running dry."

"For the second time in six years, the Washington, D.C.-based conservation group American Rivers today put the Susquehanna at the top of its annual 'Endangered Rivers' list, citing rapidly growing and 'poorly regulated' natural gas drilling using hydraulic fracturing, or 'fracking.'"