biological
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Survey suggests climate change has reduced presence of invasive Argentine ants
A nearly 30-year survey, conducted at Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, has found that the distribution of Argentine ants has shrunk as a result of climate change. Meanwhile, native species are faring better.
How the 1% are preparing for the apocalypse.
The threat of global annihilation may feel as present as it did during the Cold War, but today's high-security shelters could not be more different from their 20th-century counterparts.
Say "doomsday bunker" and most people would imagine a concrete room filled with cots and canned goods.
The threat of global annihilation may feel as present as it did during the Cold War, but today's high-security shelters could not be more different from their 20th-century counterparts.
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A number of companies around the world are meeting a growing demand for structures that protect from any risk, whether it's a global pandemic, an asteroid, or World War III -- while also delivering luxurious amenities.
"Your father or grandfather's bunker was not very comfortable," says Robert Vicino, a real estate entrepreneur and CEO of Vivos, a company he founded that builds and manages high-end shelters around the world.
"They were gray. They were metal, like a ship or something military. And the truth is mankind cannot survive long-term in such a Spartan, bleak environment."
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The Oppidum, Czech Republic
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The demand for designer bunkers has grown rapidly in recent years. Credit: the oppidum
Doomsday demand
Many of the world's elite, including hedge fund managers, sports stars and tech executives (Bill Gates is rumored to have bunkers at all his properties) have chosen to design their own secret shelters to house their families and staff.
Gary Lynch, general manager of Texas-based Rising S Company, says 2016 sales for their custom high-end underground bunkers grew 700% compared to 2015, while overall sales have grown 300% since the November US presidential election alone.
Related:
Apocalypse now: Our incessant desire to picture the end of the world
The company's plate steel bunkers, which are designed to last for generations, can hold a minimum of one year's worth of food per resident and withstand earthquakes.
But while some want to bunker down alone, others prefer to ride out the apocalypse in a community setting that offers an experience a bit closer to the real world.
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1/17 – Five-star shelter
A secret bunker in South-East London, built to protect key government employees during a nuclear winter, has been transformed into a $4 million luxury residence. Credit: JDM estate agents
Developers of community shelters like these often acquire decommissioned military bunkers and missile silos built by the United States or Soviet governments -- sites that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build today.
The fortified structures are designed to withstand a nuclear strike and come equipped with power systems, water purification systems, blast valves, and Nuclear-Biological-Chemical (NBC) air filtration.
Most include food supplies for a year or more, and many have hydroponic gardens to supplement the rations. The developers also work to create well-rounded communities with a range of skills necessary for long-term survival, from doctors to teachers.
Vicino says Vivos received a flurry of interest in its shelters around the 2016 election from both liberals and conservatives, and completely sold out of spaces in its community shelters in the past few weeks.
Designer ark
One of those shelters, Vivos xPoint, is near the Black Hills of South Dakota, and consists of 575 military bunkers that served as an Army Munitions Depot until 1967.
Presently being converted into a facility that will accommodate about 5,000 people, the interiors of each bunker are outfitted by the owners at a cost of between $25,000 to $200,000 each. The price depends on whether they want a minimalist space or a home with high-end finishes.
The compound itself will be equipped with all the comforts of a small town, including a community theater, classrooms, hydroponic gardens, a medical clinic, a spa and a gym.
Vivos Europa One in Germany
Vivos Europa One in Germany Credit: © Copyright Terravivos.com
For clients looking for something further afield and more luxurious, the company also offers Vivos Europa One, billed as a "modern day Noah's Ark" in a former Cold War-era munitions storage facility in Germany.
The structure, which was carved out of solid bedrock, offers 34 private residences, each starting at 2,500 square feet, with the option to add a second story for a total of 5,000 square feet.
Stunning mural appears in secret forest
The units will be delivered empty and each owner will have the space renovated to suit their own tastes and needs, choosing from options that include screening rooms, private pools and gyms.
Vicino compares the individual spaces to underground yachts, and even recommends that owners commission the same builders and designers that worked on their actual vessels.
"Most of these people have high-end yachts, so they already have the relationship and they know the taste, fit, and finish that they want," he explains.
The vast complex includes a tram system to transport residents throughout the shelter, where they can visit its restaurants, theater, coffee shops, pool and game areas.
"We have all the comforts of home, but also the comforts that you expect when you leave your home," Vicino adds.
Survival Condo in Kansas
Survival Condo in Kansas Credit: Courtesy of Survival Condo
Nuclear hardened homes
Developer Larry Hall's Survival Condo in Kansas utilizes two abandoned Atlas missile silos built by the US Army Corps of Engineers to house warheads during the early 1960s.
Super-rich building luxury doomsday bunkers
"Our clients are sold on the unique advantage of having a luxury second home that also happens to be a nuclear hardened bunker," says Hall, who is already starting work on a second Survival Condo in another silo on site.
"This aspect allows our clients to invest in an appreciating asset as opposed to an expense."
The Survival Condo has several different layouts, from a 900-square-foot half-floor residence to a two-level, 3,600-square-foot penthouse that starts at $4.5 million.
Owners have access to their homes and the facilities at anytime, whether a disaster is imminent or they just want to get away from it all, and the complex features a pool, general store, theater, bar and library.
The condo association sets the rules for the community, and during an emergency, owners would be required to work four hours a day.
Long-term luxury
If you prefer to spend the end of days solo, or at least with hand-selected family and friends, you may prefer to consider The Oppidum in the Czech Republic, which is being billed as "the largest billionaire bunker in the world."
The top-secret facility, once a joint project between the former Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), was built over 10 years beginning in 1984.
An interior shot of the Oppidum in Czech Republic
An interior shot of the Oppidum in Czech Republic Credit: Courtesy of the Oppidum
The site now includes both an above-ground estate and a 77,000-square-foot underground component. While the final product will be built out to the owner's specifications, the initial renderings include an underground garden, swimming pool, spa, cinema and wine vault.
While many might see the luxury amenities at these facilities as unnecessary, the developers argue that these features are critical to survival.
"These shelters are long-term, a year or more," Vicino says. "It had better be comfortable."
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Worrying new research finds that the ocean is cutting through a key Antarctic ice shelf.
The Dotson ice shelf holds back two large glaciers and connects to the larger West Antarctic ice sheet.
A new scientific study published Tuesday has found that warm ocean water is carving an enormous channel into the underside of one of the key floating ice shelves of West Antarctica, the most vulnerable sector of the enormous ice continent.
The Dotson ice shelf, which holds back two separate large glaciers, is about 1,350 square miles in area and between 1,000 and 1,600 feet thick. But on its western side, it is now only about half that thickness, said Noel Gourmelen, a researcher at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and the lead author of the research, which was just published in Geophysical Research Letters.
The reason is the same one that is believed to be shrinking glaciers and pouring ice into the ocean across West Antarctica — warm ocean water located offshore is now reaching the ice from below.
In Dotson’s case, it appears the water is first flowing into the deep cavity beneath the shelf far below it, but then being turned by the Earth’s rotation and streaming upward toward the floating ice as it mixes with buoyant meltwater. The result is that the warm water continually melts one part of the shelf in particular, creating the channel.
“We think that this channel is actually being carved for the last 25 years,” said Gourmelen, whose research team detected the channel using satellite observations. “It’s been thinning and melting at the base for at least 25 years, and that’s where we are now.”
The work was conducted by researchers at the University of Edinburgh along with colleagues at other institutions in France, Norway, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
The newly discovered channel is three miles wide and 37 miles long, and the scalloped region at the base of the floating ice shelf is mirrored by a long depression on its surface.
Dotson ice shelf as a whole has been thinning at an average rate of more than eight feet per year since 1994, even as the speed of ice flowing outward through the shelf has increased by 180 percent. But the thinning in the channel has been far greater. The research calculates that 45 feet of ice thickness is being subtracted annually from the channel.
The new study calculates that as a result of this highly uneven melting, the Dotson ice shelf could be melted all the way through in 40 years, rather than 170 years, which would be the time it would take if the melt were occurring evenly. And it speculates that as the thinning continues, the shelf may not go quietly or steadily any longer — something dramatic could occur, such as a breakup.
“Any carpenter knows: you’re going to cut through a block of wood a lot faster with a saw than with a sander,” said Ted Scambos, an Antarctic expert with the National Snow and Ice Data Center, who commented on the study by email (he was not involved in the research). “What they’ve shown is that warm ocean water reaching the Antarctic coastline beneath the ice does not just remove the ice uniformly, it cuts deep gouges in the ice from below. The channels are weak spots in the floating ice (ice shelves).”
Meltwater from this process streams outward into the Amundsen Sea in front of the Dotson ice shelf and the channel, which has large downstream consequences. The water carries nutrients, such as iron, that have also spurred sharp growth of marine microorganisms in the region — another sign of the major changes in the region.
“This study reveals the complexity with which the ocean interacts with Antarctic ice shelves, and will be of value in assessing the future of the ice-ocean-biology system of the Antarctic coastline, and its sensitivity to changes in climate,” said Dan Goldberg of the University of Edinburgh, another of the study’s authors.
Helen Fricker, a glaciologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said the new research highlights the importance of a European Space Agency satellite called CryoSat-2, which she said is “currently the only satellite monitoring Antarctica’s ice shelf thickness.”
“It gives us data at incredibly dense coverage, which is allowing us to map small-scale features like basal channels,” Fricker said. “These are regions of higher basal melt, and could cause the ice shelf to weaken much sooner than the average melt rates imply. It is vital that we keep monitoring these ice shelves.”
There could be numerous other such channels across the Antarctic continent, Gourmelen said.
In the particular case of Dotson, the ultimate fear is that the undermining of the shelf will increase the flow of ice outward from the glaciers behind it, named Smith and Kohler, which contributes to sea level rise. If the ice shelf collapsed, that would speed up even further.
To see why that matters, consider this map of what the overall region looks like, where “DIS” refers to Dotson ice shelf:
In the long term, the greatest fear perhaps is that Smith glacier ultimately connects to Thwaites glacier, the largest in West Antarctica, as you can see above. Thwaites runs backward all the way into the heart of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which contains about 10 feet of potential sea level rise.
“The nature of the impact is not really known” if Dotson is lost, Gourmelen said. “But they are essentially part of the same large basin.”
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Beyond biodiversity: A new way of looking at how species interconnect.
In a development that has important implications for conservation, scientists are increasingly focusing not just on what species are present in an ecosystem, but on the roles that certain key species play in shaping their environment.
In 1966, an ecologist at the University of Washington named Robert Paine removed all the ochre starfish from a short stretch of Pacific shoreline on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. The absence of the predator had a dramatic effect on its ecosystem. In less than a year, a diverse tidal environment collapsed into a monoculture of mussels because the starfish was no longer around to eat them.
By keeping mussel numbers down, the starfish had allowed many other species to thrive, from seaweed to sponges. Paine’s research led to the well-known concept of keystone species: The idea that some species in an ecosystem have prevailing traits — in this case preying on mussels — whose importance is far greater than the dominant traits of other species in that ecosystem.
Now, a half-century later, researchers are taking the study of traits much farther, with some scientists concluding that understanding the function of species can tell us more about ecosystems than knowing which species are present — a concept known as functional diversity. This idea is not merely academic, as scientists say that understanding functional diversity can play an important role in shaping conservation programs to enhance biodiversity and preserve or restore ecosystems.
“The trait perspective is very powerful,” says Jonathan Lefcheck, a researcher at the Bigelow Marine Lab in East Boothbay, Maine who studies functional diversity in marine environments. “Some species in an ecosystem are redundant, and some species are very powerful.”
Much about the concept is also unknown. One case study is taking place along the Mekong River, a 2,700-mile waterway that serves as a vital fishery for millions of people in Southeast Asia. While the fishery is healthy now, widespread changes in the ecosystem — including the proposed construction of numerous dams and the development of riparian forests and wetlands — could mean that key fish species might not be around to carry out important functions, such as keeping prey numbers in check or recycling nutrients.
“There is simply no understanding of how the construction of a dam today, and another five years from now, and another in 10 years — all in the same river basin — will impact the biodiversity and push it past a point of no return, where large scale species extinctions are imminent,” said Leo Saenz, director of eco-hydrology for Conservation International.
So a team of ecologists from Conservation International is trying to determine which roles various species in the Mekong fill that are critical to perpetuating a healthy ecosystem. Those species might be predators like the giant snakehead, which helps control other fish populations so they don’t become too numerous, or thick groves of mangrove forests in shallow areas that provide a nursery for a wide variety of fish species. Models can then predict the best way to protect these key species and ensure a healthy river over the long term.
“Ecosystem resilience is an important part of what we aim to maintain, both for the interest of biodiversity conservation and for the maintenance of the ecosystem services that nature provides,” says Trond Larsen, a biologist who heads Conservation International’s Rapid Assessment Program for biodiversity.
Some scientists now compare knowing which species are present in an ecosystem to knowing only which parts of a car are present. Functional trait ecology is a deeper dive into ecosystem dynamics to help understand how the parts come together to create a natural environment that runs smoothly, like a well-tuned automobile, thus enabling a more focused protection of the vital parts that keep it going.
“Say you have two habitats with 10 different species in each,” explains Marc Cadotte, a professor of Urban Forest Conservation and Biology at the University of Toronto. “Yet, they might not be comparable at all if in one of those habitats eight of those 10 species are similar and redundant, while in the other habitat, all 10 species are unique from one other. We need alternative measures for biodiversity that tell us something about the niche differences, trait differences, how species are interacting, and how they are using resources. Functional diversity and phylogenetic diversity are meant to capture that.”
Phylogenetic diversity refers to species that have few or no close relatives and that are very different from other species, which may mean that they can contribute in very different ways to an ecosystem. Protecting phylogenetic diversity, then, is part of protecting important functions. The distinctive pearl bubble coral is one example, as it provides shelter to shrimp, an important food for the highly endangered hawksbill turtle.
Better understanding these aspects of ecosystems is a game-changer for the conservation of biodiversity. The Indo-West Pacific region, between the east coast of Africa and South Asia, has the highest diversity of life in the world’s oceans. But many species there, such as damselfishes and butterfly fishes, have a lot of overlap with other species in terms of traits — somewhat similar body sizes, similar habitats and habits, how and where they school, etc. That means they may have a narrower range of traits that may be important for ecosystem function.
“In the Galapagos, on the other hand, there are fewer species, but each of those species is doing something much different than the others,” says Lefcheck, who worked on research looking at functional diversity there. “If you were prioritizing your conservation efforts, you might focus on the Galapagos. Even though it doesn’t have as much biodiversity in the traditional sense, it has a much greater diversity of form and function.”
“Functional diversity is incredibly difficult to determine,” says Larsen of Conservation International, “but generating an improved understanding of the relationship between species and their functional diversity is key to understanding and mitigating impacts or threats from development.” His organization works to protect tuna and sharks, for example, because these predators help maintain a healthy and balanced ecosystem by keeping numbers of prey from growing too large and by culling the sick and the weak.
In a recent study in the journal Nature, researchers say that focusing on species function and evolutionary heritage can narrow the focus on what needs to be protected most urgently. “Biodiversity conservation has mostly focused on species, but some species may offer much more critical or unique functions or evolutionary heritage than others — something current conservation planning does not readily address,” says Walter Jetz, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University.
The researchers noted that 26 percent of the world’s bird and mammal species are not included in protected reserves. Focusing on the most important traits and evolutionary heritage of those species would allow conservationists to narrow their protection of critical biodiversity with just a 5 percent increase in protected areas, and would be far less costly than trying to protect them all, the Nature study shows.
As traits are better understood in ecosystems, Lefcheck says, it allows tweaking and management of ecosystems for certain outcomes. “You could choose to conserve the species that are very different than others that might lead to changes in the ecosystem that could be considered beneficial,” he says. That has potential for fisheries management, for example. “When I tell someone, ‘This species has been around for 2.6 million years,’ that’s very esoteric in a way,” says Lefcheck. “But if I can say, ‘This large-bodied species produces a lot of biomass, and it can crop down invasive algae, and it plays a high-functioning and critical role in the ecosystem,’ you might want to protect species that have that trait.”
Such is the case with parrotfish and surgeonfish — “reef-grazers” that eat algae and keep coral reefs healthy. Because of these key traits, the government of Belize has enacted a law to protect these two species.
Understanding traits also can enhance ecosystem restoration projects. While building a new oyster aquaculture fishery can provide a commercial harvest, “we also know that oysters provide a lot of other services,” says Lefcheck. “They filter the water. They provide nooks and crannies for small fish and invertebrates to live in, and they are fish food for the tasty things we like to catch and to put on the dinner table. Where is the optimum placement of this restoration to enhance the variety of services we get from the oysters beyond just having the reefs there?”
The benefits of understanding functional diversity can go well beyond ecosystem restoration. In Toronto, for example, green (plant-covered) roofs are required on most new commercial buildings to help cool the city and reduce storm water runoff. A monoculture of grass called sedum is used. In studies, though, Cadotte and colleagues have found that if grass species that are distantly related and dissimilar are used in the mix, they have different traits that provide more shade for the soil and help the roof keep the building cooler. This mix also reduces stormwater runoff by about 20 percent.
The formal study of functional traits can be traced back to the 1990s, when ecologist David Tilman at the University of Minnesota did research on grasslands. He found that those regions with more species diversity did better during a drought, and only a few of the grasses resistant to drought were needed. Later, he and his colleagues discovered that the presence of some grasses with certain traits, such as an ability to fix nitrogen, was more important than overall species diversity.
Researchers in Jena, Germany established the Jena Experiment to follow up on this work. They found that there are plants, such as wild tobacco, that emit “messenger molecules” when they are under assault by herbivores to attract predators from miles away that eat their enemies. This trait not only benefits the tobacco, but other species in the neighboring plant community.
Experts say these findings could also help agriculture rely less on pesticides by understanding the right mix of plants to maximize predator defenses. “Varying the expression of just a few genes in a few individuals can have large protective effects for the whole field,” says Meredith Schuman, a researcher on the Jena Experiment at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology. “It’s an economically tenable way to recover the lost benefits of biodiversity for the vast expanses of land that have already been converted from natural, biodiverse habitats into agricultural monocultures.”
These new approaches to ecology show how limited the science has been. Many researchers welcome the change. “Ecology has moved from counting species to accounting for species,” says Cadotte.
Jim Robbins is a veteran journalist based in Helena, Montana. He has written for the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, and numerous other publications. His latest book, The Wonder of Birds: What they Tell Us about the World, Ourselves and a Better Future, is due out in May.
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Fall armyworm arrives in Africa on the heels of climate change.
A rapidly spreading invasive pest now threatens crops across the continent.
Tobias Okwara is a farmer in Kayoro Parish in southeastern Uganda. In the midst of a long drought that began in May 2016, he and his neighbors got together to discuss what to do. Food was becoming scarce, and they hoped to recover quickly once the rains started again. They decided they would pool their meagre resources and plant a large communal field of maize. By spring 2017, the rains had finally returned, and their maize was thriving.
Then the fall armyworm appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Larvae of the nondescript gray moths hatched and ate their way through the field of young corn.
Endemic to North and South America, the fall armyworm was first spotted in January 2016 in Nigeria. No one knows for certain how it arrived on the African continent, but since its initial appearance the pest has spread to more than 28 countries, including South Africa, Burundi, Rwanda, Kenya, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and most recently, Sudan and Mali. As it has spread, it has destroyed more than 740,000 acres of maize, the staple food for more than 200 million Africans.
The fall armyworm is closely related to the African armyworm, which is native to the continent. Both pests feed not just on corn, but also on other cereal crops like rice, sorghum, and wheat. Kenneth Wilson of Lancaster University has studied the African armyworm for 25 years and is now part of a working group with the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization that is examining how to deal with the newly arrived pest.
Wilson says that while the African armyworm has long been a problem, it typically attacks one area and then moves on to another, making it only a sporadic threat to crop production in any given location. Not so with the fall armyworm. Once it has eaten its way through the cereal crops in a particular area, it sticks around to see what else it can eat. “If you’re a smallholder farmer who plants a little bit of maize, some sorghum, some beans, some tomatoes,” Wilson says, “all of those crops are potentially at risk from the fall armyworm.” It’s been known to feed on at least 80 plant species. In Uganda, over 40 percent of the crops are infested.
Uganda, like much of the rest of Africa, is already reeling from the effects of climate change.
Erratic weather patterns and intensifying cycles of drought and rain have taken a heavy toll on subsistence farmers like Okwara, who have no alternate food supply when it rains too much or too little and crops fail. The fall armyworm comes at a time when farmers throughout rural Africa are grappling with rising food insecurity because of climatic changes.
Climate change may also be a factor in the fall armyworm’s rapid spread across the continent. Wilson says that while it’s too early to know for sure about the new pest, 50 plus years of data on the native African armyworm show that the population explodes after periods of drought. He thinks it’s possible that the intensifying droughts brought on by climate change may favor both varieties of armyworm.
In South America, where the fall armyworm has plagued crops for decades, farmers have used a combination of genetically modified crops and pesticides to keep it mostly in check. But this is an expensive and ecologically damaging approach that Wilson does not think is viable for the majority of farmers in Africa. For one thing, he says, “we know that resistance is developing already both to GM crops and pesticides.”
Wilson specializes in biological pesticides, which are developed from bacteria, baculoviruses, and fungi that naturally prey on pests. He has already identified a virus that kills the African armyworm, but to his frustration it doesn’t kill the fall armyworm. Wilson is currently testing a range of biopesticides to see if there are any commercially available products that could work as a short term alternative to the chemical pesticides that African governments are relying on to address infestations.
As for the long term? Wilson points to parts of Central America, where the fall armyworm hasn’t been as big of a problem. “Farmers there say that it’s because they’ve got good integrated pest management practices. They fertilize the soil with organic fertilizer, they painstakingly search their crops for eggs, they’ve got mixed vegetation, like flowering plants that help to foster natural enemies.”
Such an effort will take time and significant outside investment. Fortunately, Wilson thinks countries outside of Africa are taking the threat seriously. It’s only a matter of time, he says, before the fall armyworm makes its way to Yemen and southern Europe. “For Europe and Asia, there should be an element of self-interest. It’s a global problem. It’s going to be everywhere.”
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Why Southern Nevada is fighting to build a 250-mile water pipeline.
Decades after it was first proposed, Southern Nevada Water Authority is still pushing for a pipeline to send rural groundwater to the Las Vegas area. But others are questioning whether the project is really needed.
Why Southern Nevada Is Fighting to Build a 250-Mile Water Pipeline
Decades after it was first proposed, Southern Nevada Water Authority is still pushing for a pipeline to send rural groundwater to the Las Vegas area. But others are questioning whether the project is really needed.
WRITTEN BY
Daniel Rothberg
PUBLISHED ON
Oct. 12, 2017
READ TIME
Approx. 7 minutes
A 'bathtub ring' in 2016 surrounds Lake Mead near Hoover Dam, which impounds the Colorado River at the Arizona-Nevada border. The white ring shows the effects of a drought which has caused the level of the lake to drop to an historic low.Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images
IN 2015, ALBUQUERQUE delivered as much water as it had in 1983, despite its population growing by 70 percent. In 2016, Tucson delivered as much water as it had in 1984, despite a 67 percent increase in customer hook-ups. The trend is the same for Phoenix, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, said longtime water policy researcher Gary Woodard, who rattled off these statistics in a recent phone interview. Southwestern cities boomed during these decades, yet water demand fell far below projections. Efficiency and conservation worked better than water managers could have hoped.
“Everyone assumed that water demand was proportional to population,” said Woodard, a former University of Arizona professor who works for the water resource consultants Montgomery & Associates.
In the 1980s, before increased efficiency and conservation efforts, cities across the West saw an immediate need to secure reliable water resources for future growth. This thinking in part was what drove the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which serves the Las Vegas area, to propose in 1989, a 250-mile pipeline that would pump billions of gallons of rural groundwater to Las Vegas. Farmers, ranchers and local officials near the targeted groundwater basins in rural northern Nevada called it a “water grab.”
The pipeline was never built, and Las Vegas, which gets 90 percent of its drinking water from the Colorado River, never experienced a water shortage. The opposite happened. As population boomed in the early 2000s, Southern Nevada pulled less and less Colorado River water from Lake Mead.
Decades later, Southern Nevada Water Authority is still actively pursuing the pipeline, despite legal challenges from a diverse coalition of ranchers, tribes and environmental groups. In a new round of state engineer hearings last week, opponents are again pushing to limit the scope of the water authority’s groundwater rights.
They believe that the project would undermine the area’s environment. And they often find themselves asking the same question: Las Vegas grew, and its per capita demand decreased without the $15 billion pipeline, first proposed decades ago. So how necessary is it?
The Falling Reservoir
“At some point, it is the only choice,” said Pat Mulroy, a legendary Colorado River deal maker and a forceful advocate for the project as the water authority’s first general manager until 2014.
Most of Southern Nevada’s drinking water comes from Lake Mead, the shrinking manmade reservoir that stores Colorado River water for the southwest. Compared to its neighboring states, Nevada is entitled to only a sliver of the river’s allocation. The Colorado River Compact, a treaty inked long before Las Vegas sprouted resorts, casinos, golf courses and vast master-planned communities, gives Nevada about 2 percent of the water.
This leaves the Southern Nevada Water Authority at a constrained starting point. Where many water agencies have a diversified portfolio – groundwater, Colorado River water, maybe in-state surface water – Southern Nevada is almost entirely reliant on one source, Mulroy argues.
And a changing climate is only expected to place additional stress on the Colorado River, according to recent academic studies. Thanks to higher temperatures, more water is expected to evaporate off the surface of Lake Mead while projections suggest that a shrinking snowpack will decrease supplies – all this, before the backdrop of further population growth not only in Las Vegas, but also across much of the southwest. Under those situations, having one source “is a very risky proposition,” Mulroy said.
But there is still a big economic incentive driving the push to build the pipeline. Las Vegas is projected to grow, and builders might be unwilling to back new developments if they don’t know that there will be a secure supply of water. The project’s backers point out that the state’s economy depends on Southern Nevada, which in turn depends on water. The 2.1 million people who populate Southern Nevada comprise most of Nevada’s population, about 70 percent.
Las Vegas officials see the pipeline as a form of hedging, to prepare for a time when getting 90 percent of its water from Lake Mead might not be sustainable. “When you live in the driest state in the union, you don’t take options off the table,” said John Entsminger, the water authority’s current general manager. “Whether something really is necessary is a question of time.”
Conserving What You Have
Joined by a coalition of farmers, ranchers and local officials, the Center of Biological Diversity has sued over the Southern Nevada pipeline twice, and the organization has had some success in delaying the project. Judges have ordered federal and state officials to consider narrow revisions to environmental impact statements and limiting the water authority’s groundwater rights.
Southern Nevada Water Authority hopes to build a 250-mile water pipeline to send groundwater from rural Nevada, near Great Basin National Park, to the Las Vegas area. (Photo by Visions of America/UIG via Getty Images)
Patrick Donnelly, the center’s Nevada representative, said the project and desert pipelines like it could dry ecosystems critical to sustaining wildlife in the deserts scattered across the southwest.
“These projects propose the wholesale dewatering of entire landscapes,” he said of groundwater pumping. “Before we start having the discussion about whether we sacrifice millions of acres of habitat [to adapt to growth and climate change], we need to reduce our consumption.”
With more efficient homes and conservation programs, most Western cities have reduced their consumption, but researchers and water managers agree that, in many cases, people are still using more water than they need. Since 2002, Las Vegas cut its per capita water consumption by about 40 percent, according to Bronson Mack, a water authority spokesman. In the mid-1990s, Las Vegans were consuming more than 200 gallons per capita, higher than many other cities.
That number is now at about 123 gallons per capita. The drop is not unique to Las Vegas. Most cities in the region have seen their per capita daily consumption drop as a result of efficient appliances, homebuilders placing a new emphasis on sustainability and conservation efforts. The Southern Nevada Water Authority, for its part, runs a cash-for-grass program that pays its customers to replace turf with desert landscaping. It credits the rebate program with saving billions of gallons of water.
Donnelly at the Center for Biological Diversity said such statistics can be misleading.
“They have cut their water consumption a lot, but they are still using water like crazy,” he said.
Las Vegas is lagging behind other cities, he argued. In July, Los Angeles’ average residents’ daily water consumption was at 59 gallons, according to KPCC. And San Francisco residents use about 50 gallons per day, according to its water agency. Howard Watts, a spokesman for the Great Basin Water Network, a coalition opposing the pipeline, said his organization has sparred with the water agency over whether its efforts are stringent enough. He said the agency should consider requiring customers to phase out front lawns or retrofit homes with more efficient appliances.
“They have been really hesitant to force requirement on older homes,” Watts said.
The uncertainty for water managers is how far they can push it.
“For any particular case, it’s different,” said John Fleck, who directs the Water Resources Program at the University of New Mexico. But he added that “conservation has continually outpaced water managers’ projections of what their customer’s conservation would be.”
The incentive for water managers, Fleck said, is to plan for the worst and hope for the best.
Politics on the Colorado River
There are also larger forces at play.
Arizona, California and Nevada are in the late stages of negotiating a drought contingency plan to voluntarily cut the amount of water they take from Lake Mead during shortages. In the past, Colorado River negotiations have played into Southern Nevada’s calculation that it needs to continue pushing for the pipeline. For years, Arizona, which banked a portion of Nevada’s Colorado River water, was “extremely adamant” that Las Vegas find a long-term water source.
“It doesn’t really matter that growth isn’t there,” Mulroy said. “The other states are not going to let Southern Nevada [Water Authority] draw its full allocation out of a reservoir that is crashing to zero.” Falling water levels in Lake Mead have come close to triggering a federal shortage declaration. Under such a designation, the basin states would be required to cut their usage.
Watts, with the Great Basin Water Network, said that underestimates the leverage Nevada has on the river. In 2015, the water authority uncapped a third intake in Lake Mead that would ensure deliveries for Southern Nevada even if the reservoir fell so low that water stopped flowing to California and Arizona.
California and Arizona would want to keep that from happening, Watts said. As a result, their incentive is to conserve the Colorado River and keep more water in Lake Mead. There are ways to mitigate dropping lake elevations: water banking, conservation or investing in desalinization.
“The only new source of water that we’re going to get that is going to have the most minimal amount of conflict is going to be from the ocean,” he said, noting that costs have come down for desalination. And even though Nevada is a long way from the ocean, more desalination could reduce California’s reliance on the Colorado River and leave more water in the lake.
Among water managers along the river, there is an increasing recognition that infrastructure in one state can affect water planning in another state. They are watching the Southern Nevada pipeline project, along with another large infrastructure project in California. Gov. Jerry Brown and Southern California’s wholesale water agency, Metropolitan Water District, is pushing to approve a $17.1 billion plan to build two tunnels through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The tunnels, meant to create more reliability in California’s water supply, play into how the state will position itself in the final negotiations of the drought contingency plan. If California can’t rely on water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, it might be less inclined to accept cuts in Lake Mead deliveries.
“In general, projects that increase the water supplies … are good for the potential management of the [Colorado River],” said Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources. “It would create another water supply for them that they could use in a conjunctive and flexible way that could potentially conserve water and keep water in Lake Mead.”
Groundwater Nevada Southern Nevada Water Authority
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Texas company seeks to renew permit to look for Big Cypress oil.
The NRDC, the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, the National Parks Conservation Association and the Center for Biological Diversity have asked the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to not renew the Burnett Oil Co.'s state permit.
By Eric Staats, eric.staats@naplesnews.com; 239-263-4780
A Texas company has asked state environmental regulators to allow crews to resume their hunt for oil beneath Big Cypress National Preserve despite deep muddy ruts and damaged trees left behind by the company's earlier work in the spring.
"It was a mess, as we suspected," said Allison Kelly, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The NRDC, the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, the National Parks Conservation Association and the Center for Biological Diversity have asked the Florida Department of Environmental Protection to not renew the Burnett Oil Co.'s state permit.
Burnett was unable to finish the survey in the spring before the start of the rainy season, and the company's permit expired July 15.
"These groups are recycling the same kinds of claims that have been rejected by the National Park Service and the federal court," Burnett spokeswoman Alia Faraj-Johnson said, referring to the groups' failed 2016 lawsuit to try to stop the work.
DEP spokeswoman Dee Ann Miller said the agency's deadline for making a decision on the company's permit renewal is Oct. 24.
The DEP plans to send inspectors along with the National Park Service when work to repair the damaged wet prairies is underway, but that won't happen until the landscape flooded by Hurricane Irma dries out, Miller said.
In letters to the DEP, environmental groups contend Burnett violated its earlier permit by working into the rainy season and not repairing damage.
A lawyer for Burnett, in his own letter to the DEP, said the groups have their facts wrong and don't understand the law.
The company blamed unusually heavy rains for it having to work into the wet season to remove equipment, something the groups contend violated the first permit.
Ruts have not been repaired, as the permit requires, because the National Park Service told crews to wait for drier conditions, Burnett's letter says.
In the letter, Burnett says it "made major efforts to minimize potential damage," including having ecologists with each survey truck to steer them clear of wetter areas and wildlife.
However, National Park Service employees raised concerns that the work was progressing too quickly for ecologists to do proper monitoring.
The problem was serious enough that the National Park Service put out a call for monitoring help from other preserve staff and even from other regional public land managers.
In its approval of the survey work, the Park Service found that any environmental harm from the oil surveys would be minimal and required crews to follow a list of 47 conditions.
Those included avoiding wading bird colonies, using existing trails when possible, repairing ruts and limiting the size of trees that could be cut down.
Burnett used special trucks with large steel plates to vibrate against the ground and send out seismic signals that would indicate whether underground formations might hold oil or gas.
The seismic surveys are being used to study a geologic formation called the Sunniland Trend. That formation already has proved to hold oil and has been tapped in the preserve since the 1970s.
Burnett plans to cover 70,000 acres of the preserve with its current survey but has indicated future surveys could cover more than 200,000 acres.
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