Calexico, alt-country group from Arizona, sang about their artificial urban landscape set amidst a desert in ‘Man Made Lake’:

“I’m gonna walk these streets
Of cold concrete
Like I’m a ghost
Searching for its grave

Then I’ll dwell by the edge of this man made lake
And descend into the city
That holds no place for me”

The chorus of Scottish folk musician Eddi Reader’s ‘Follow My Tears’ puts tears in their place within the hydrological cycle:

“From my eyes to the river
From the river to the sea
From the sea to the drkening clouds
From the sky back down to me
Follow my tears….”

During some down time, I also dropped in to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery to check out their Len Lye collection. I’ve admired his films and kinetic art since I was exposed to them in high school, but I was amazed to find another side of the artist. He regularly collected NYT and Time articles on science discoveries of the day, whose themes he wove into his paintings. I will be sure to dig into this art-meets-science ecotone when I get the chance.

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• Robert Manning – Origin of the Manning Equation for describing water flow in channels.
• Robert Boyle – Father of chemistry. So, who was the mother?
• Francis Beaufort – Beaufort scale for indicating wind force.
• George Boole – Boolean algebra. You either love it or you hate it.
• George Stoney – Introduced the idea of the electron.
• John Tyndall – Why is the sky blue?
• Lord Kelvin – Set “infinite cold” to zero.

Let us also wonder how much green dye is used to turn the Chicago River green, or whether phosphorus runoff would achieve the same effect.

“…diverse strategies for innovative water planning, use of technology, institutional management, economic incentives, and environmental protection and restoration.”

And they serve as lessons for other farmers in CA, but also in other water-challenged regions of similar socioeconomic and technical standing – New Zealand included.

The crops included in the stories number more than just seven: corn, rice, pasture, tomatoes, artichokes, lettuce, almonds, grapes, etc etc.

The approaches used to improve water management are also varied. Peter Gleick summarises several of the conclusions thus:

“Managing for multiple benefits. Each of the case studies offers multiple benefits and collaborations among diverse sectors of the economy.
Accurately measuring and monitoring water use. The most significant improvements in efficiency require good information on water use, climate and weather conditions, and more.
Capturing the untapped potential of existing technologies. In recent years, California farmers have made progress switching to water-efficient systems for distributing and using water but much more potential remains untapped. No new magic technology needs to be developed.
Setting targets and providing economic incentives to accelerate progress. Several of the case studies show how quantitative targets and economic incentives can be effective tools to accelerate water management improvements.”

The second point is the very same that won Fruition Science its Imagine H2O prize: monitoring transpiration of grape vines and irrigating when necessary.

Given the similarities I think exist between California and New Zealand, Canterbury and Hawkes Bay in particular, I expect to delve deeper into this report in the future.

To Venezeulans, El Nino means a little more: drought. But this year’s drought brought a blast from the past – bitter-sweet memories. Water levels in the Uribante-Caparo reservoir have dropped so low, people can visit the Andean town of Potosi that was flooded in 1985 when the reservoir was first filled.

“Former town resident Josefa Garcia, 74, is grateful for the drought, even though it has triggered Venezuela’s worst-ever electricity crisis.

Standing in the shadow of a usually submerged 85-foot-high (26-meter-high) high church here, Garcia vividly recalls when then-President Carlos Andres Perez swooped in by helicopter to tell residents the town would soon be flooded.”

“He said we’d all be expropriated and we had to leave,” Garcia said, standing in the old village square. “It took our hope away.”
Before its flooding, this Andean town of around 1,200 in the western state of Tachira was evacuated and its residents dispersed around the country. Garcia moved to a nearby region, and had never revisited her former town until now.

National Geographic has some before-after photos of the church.

The history of reservoir development is studded with forced relocations. The government decides that the country needs irrigation or hydropower, and the residents of the valley are moved. Sometimes compensated, sometimes not, or not enough. This story rings true around the globe, West and East, North and South. Increasingly, the liberal democracies have phased out the practice, finding too much resistance or alternative options. Elsewhere, the forced migrations continue and we’ll visit some over the coming weeks. I wonder what John Rawls would have thought…

It was the Feb 6 2010 edition of New Scientist, which I spied when buying the Jan-Fen 2010 edition of New Zealand Geographic. I had that consumeristic impulse. I bought it. A month later, when I got round to reading the article, I was not disappointed.

The article told the story of Anders Nilsson of Stanford University and Lars Pettersson of Stockholm University in their efforts to explain why water is indeed so weird.

What is common knowledge is that ice floats and water freezes first at the top. This is because water is the densest at 4°C. Very few other liquids behave this way – molten silica seems to be another. But wait, there’s more! Unlike most other liquids water becomes less viscous at higher temperatures, not more. Water has an uncannily high specific heat capacity, which rises both above and below 35°C whereas others have a single trend.

But, the child in us all asks, why?

Well, our heroes of the story, Nilsson and Pettersson, were using X-ray absorption spectroscopy to study the structure of an amino acid, way back 10 years ago. They realised that the water containing the amino acid was more interesting (quelle surprise!), and shifted their gaze to H2O.

Over the course of many more x-rays and several papers, they arrived at a theory to explain all of water’s weirdness: water molecules are capable of stacking themselves in not one but two configurations. One an ordered tetrahedral lattice and one a mixed up hodge-podge. It is the building and breaking of these configurations that ultimately leads, so the heroes say, to water’s wonderful properties.

This being science, though, more research is needed. There are sceptics. There are nay-sayers. There are applications like cheaper desalinisation. And there are children in us all who will continue to ask: But why?

See how radial symmetry makes measuring stuff easier.

And don’t get depressed when things start to suck.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

The design sure looks cool. And if it wasn’t for creative thinking we’d be stuck back in the 1980s. But the commenters at BoingBoing are roundly panning the design, myself included. The designers really don’t understand botany or engineering.

“And it is in this shape, because??? Because it looks neato in the illustration and the designer has no intention of ever building or, heaven forfend, maintaining such a thing?”

“What’s the purpose of the mangrove trees? How much more filtering is needed beyond the evaporation?”

Indeed. Plant transpiration is typically slower than evaporation from a saturated surface. It can be faster only if the canopy is elevated into air with much greater wind speed or solar exposure, neither of which apply here.

This is just art, not design.

Back in January heavy rains flooded a private zoo in Plavinca, Montenegro. 2-ton and 11-year old hippopotamus Nikica flew the coop by swimming over her submerged cage. The natural disasters commission wasn’t happy, and thought they might be able to shoot her. The state veterinary authorities thought otherwise, saying she wasn’t threatening. Apparently when Nikica escapes, she wanders over to the folks in the nearby village but would return of her own accord:

“When the water warms up and does not seem so threatening, she will return of her own free will,”… “She loves mud more than life itself.”

Nonetheless, zoo security were on the case. Food was left out for her. And when flood waters receded, she apparently [was] returned to her enclosure.

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