From this morning’s Albuquerque Journal, a story (sub/ad req.) about new research suggesting that, in the past, the jet stream moved north and what is now the southwestern U.S. dried out when the world was warmer: For 45,000 years, the drips built stalactites and stalagmites in Fort Stanton Cave. The minerals in the rocky deposits …
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From today’s newspaper, the U.S. House has approved legislation ratifying the settlement of two longstanding northern New Mexico water rights cases (sub/ad req.): The U.S. House of Representatives approved two northern New Mexico water agreements Thursday, a step toward allocating the region’s water rights and providing nearly $300 million in federal funding for water projects …
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Rio Grande, Alameda New Mexico, Jan. 17, 2010 Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Like much about New Mexico, the Rio Grande is modest, but it has its charms. The bike is a great tool for the study of geography, because it allows you to cover sufficient ground to make generalizations, but at a sufficiently slow speed …
Green Gold? (more in Sunday’s paper)
James Rickman has launched a new photoblog to document the wonder that is his home town.
Here in the Albuquerque metro area, there’s been a great deal of discussion about desalination of waster from deep brackish aquifers to provide new sources of supply. A lot of talk. But not much action, other than an interesting pilot-scale project now underway west of the community of Rio Rancho. The area is growing rapidly, …
I have to commend Bill Hume for his op-ed in yesterday’s Albuquerque Journal. (Really, I do have to. He agrees with me!) Clearly, municipal and state growth planning that includes a hard-nosed recognition of water realities is the only strategy for confronting the offset water tap-out. And, new sources of water or new technologies for …
From the morning paper (sub/ad req.): Los Alamos National Laboratory could expose its workers and neighbors to a massive and potentially deadly radiation leak in a major earthquake, independent federal safety auditors concluded in a report released Tuesday. Such earthquakes are rare — one every few thousand years in the Los Alamos area, according to …
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Also from this morning’s paper, a brief report (business model, ad/sub yada) on yesterday’s Middle Rio Grande Water Assembly meeting. I tried to balance the progress made on water conservation with the grim message I’ve been pushing in my recent work on this regarding the supply-demand deficit in New Mexico’s heavily populated middle valley: Water …
Cally Carswell has a story in the latest High Country News about domestic groundwater wells in Washington state that nicely illustrates a common problem throughout the western U.S., including here in New Mexico. In Washington (like in New Mexico), you can legally drill a well to serve domestic needs – essentially a single house. Individually, …