Of all the water on Earth, less than 3 percent is available for human use, and as climates change and populations boom, the strategies used to extract it will become increasingly complex. With increasing demand, policymakers, scientists and leaders must recognize the energy-water nexus. The energy-water nexus describes an interdependent relationship that exists between availability of water resources and the energy required to obtain, distribute and utilize them. The way we manage the delicate relationship between energy and water will have major implications for the future of both critical resources, as EARTH explores in the July issue. [Read More]

Community colleges provide a strong foundation for the nation’s graduating STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) workforce. In its latest Geoscience Currents, the American Geosciences Institute documents the flow of geoscience students from 2-year to 4-year institutions in Texas, adding to an earlier report on similar data from California released in 2012. In 2012, 70 percent of geoscience students in Texas public universities had transferred from Community Colleges. In particular, Texas A&M University admitted students from 32 community colleges statewide, followed closely by Texas Tech which admitted students from 25 2-year institutions. [Read More]

Alexandria, VA — As the Colorado River winds through the Colorado Plateau’s soft sedimentary strata, it picks up a tremendous amount of sediment. This sediment — which once left the river’s waters so muddy that Spanish explorers christened it El Rio Colorado “the reddish river” — is a vital component to the unique ecosystems of the river. However, with the construction of the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams, which trap the sediment, the once-turbid waters have become a dazzling blue-green, signaling major changes with serious implications for the health of the river’s native ecosystems. [Read More]

Alexandria, VA — To what extent is the United States energy independent? In recent years, Americans have heard about the need to be unconstrained from foreign energy sources, but what do the numbers really tell us about the current state of independence? Historically, the United States has relied on a diverse energy mix. From our founding through the final years of World War II, the country was nearly 100 percent energy independent: relying on coal- and oil-fired power plants, as well as a series of massive hydroelectric dams. [Read More]

Alexandria, VA — Congratulations to Kristen Mitchell, the 2013-2014 William L. Fisher Congressional Geoscience Fellow for the American Geosciences Institute (AGI). Mitchell graduated with her B.S. in Marine Chemistry from Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida in 2005. After graduation, Mitchell moved to Europe for a Fulbright Student Fellowship where she studied microbial sulfate reduction at the University of Southern Denmark. During the course of her Ph.D., Mitchell studied at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, Georgia Institute of Technology, and finally the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario. [Read More]

Alexandria, VA — For decades, scientists have used sophisticated instruments and computer models to predict the nature of droughts. With the threat of climate change looming large, the majority of these models have steadily predicted an increasingly frequent and severe global drought cycle. But a recent study from a team of researchers at Princeton University and the Australian National University suggests that one of these widely used tools — the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) — may be incorrect. [Read More]

Alexandria, VA — It’s 3 a.m., and students from two Oregon community colleges are struggling to keep their sea legs as they work on the deck of a research vessel that is pitching and rolling in rough seas. Their objective is to recover an ocean-bottom seismometer that has been lying 160 meters underwater off the west coast of Vancouver Island, where it has been steadily recording seismic signals and long-period pressure trends for the past year. [Read More]

Alexandria, VA — The newest edition of the Directory of Geoscience Departments is now available for purchase in print and as an eBook. As the cornerstone reference publication of the American Geosciences Institute, the 48th edition of the Directory of Geoscience Departments is an invaluable resource for those working in the geosciences, those who must identify experts with specialties in various geoscience fields, or students investigating potential programs to study. [Read More]

Alexandria, VA- When Apollo 17 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Dec. 19, 1972, it marked the end of spaceflight to the moon. The science, however, continues. Armed with analytical techniques not available in the 1970s, researchers around the country have been re-examining the more than 380 kilograms of lunar rocks collected four decades ago during the Apollo missions. Using new investigations, such as petrographic and chemical composition studies and updated solar radiation and engineering measurements, these “cold case” scientists, many of them young innovators, are extracting new knowledge about our nearest celestial neighbor. [Read More]

Alexandria, VA — Much like our voices create sound waves with a variety of low and high pitches, or frequencies, earthquakes produce seismic waves over a broad spectrum. The seismic waves’ frequencies determine, in part, how far they travel and how damaging they are to human-made structures. However, the inaccessibility of fault zones means that very little is known about why and how earthquakes produce different frequencies. With the help of a new tabletop model, scientists have now identified how a process known as fault healing can shape seismic waves and potentially alter their frequencies. [Read More]