How Much Water Should A Person Drink?

Water Canada

Live Science: How Much Water Do You Really Need To Drink?

You are what you eat — but if you want to get literal about it, you are mostly what you drink. So, how much of that should be water?

About 60 percent of the average adult human body is made of water, according to a National Institutes of Health report. This includes most of your brain, heart, lungs, muscles and skin, and even about 30 percent of your bones. Besides being one of the main ingredients in the recipe for humankind, water helps us regulate our internal temperature, transports nutrients throughout our bodies, flushes waste, forms saliva, lubricates joints and even serves as a protective shock absorber for vital organs and growing fetuses.

Read more ....

CSN Editor: The answer is .... Drink up when you're thirsty, and drink more when you sweat more. Your body will take it from there.

How Much Water Is On Planet Earth?

If You Collected All Of Earth’s Water Into A Sphere, How Big Would It Be? -- io9

Imagine the Earth in your mind's eye. Now round up all the water on the planet into a sphere (we're talking oceans, icecaps, atmosphere, everything — even the water bound up in you and me). How big do you think that sphere would be compared to the Earth?

Got your answer? Our water sphere would have a diameter of 1,385 kilometers (about 860 miles), and span the distance from Salt Lake City, Utah to Topeka, Kansas. A sphere this far across would have a volume equal to about 1,386 million cubic kilometers (roughly 332,500,000 cubic miles). Those might sound like big numbers (and they certainly are big numbers) but wait until you see this sphere beside the Earth.

Read more ....

My Comment: What a surprise .... that is not a lot of water.

'Huge' Water Resource Exists Under Africa

'Huge' Water Resource Exists Under Africa -- BBC

Scientists say the notoriously dry continent of Africa is sitting on a vast reservoir of groundwater.

They argue that the total volume of water in aquifers underground is 100 times the amount found on the surface.

The team have produced the most detailed map yet of the scale and potential of this hidden resource.

Writing in the journal Environmental Research Letters, they stress that large scale drilling might not be the best way of increasing water supplies.

Read more ....

Here Come The Water Wars

(Click on Image to Enlarge)

Water Wars Between Countries Could Be Just Around The Corner, Davey Warns -- The Guardian

Energy secretary tells conference that growing pressure on water resources could worsen existing war and lead to new ones

Water wars could be a real prospect in coming years as states struggle with the effects of climate change, growing demand for water and declining resources, the secretary of state for energy and climate change warned on Thursday.

Ed Davey told a conference of high-ranking politicians and diplomats from around the world that although water had not been a direct cause of wars in the past, growing pressure on the resource if climate change is allowed to take hold, together with the pressure on food and other resources, could lead to new sources of conflict and the worsening of existing conflicts.

Read more ....

My Comment: Conflicts and wars over water is nothing new in human history. All empires and great powers have always had their main cities near sources of water .... whether by the sea and/or by a major river. Cutting off these sources of water will guarantee conflict and war, and with water becoming a precious resource in the 21rst century .... wars over fresh water will probably be the eventual outcome.

Special Note: The above image (click on the image to expand it) sums up the world's water situation perfectly.

Update: U.S. intelligence: Looming water woes will add to global instability -- McClatchy News

Has Earth Always Had The Same Amount Of Water?

Researchers have examined 3.8 billion year old minerals from Greenland which are derived from the Earth’s primordial oceans in order to approximate the ancient water budget. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Copenhagen)

The Blue Planet's New Water Budget: Do We Have Enough? -- Science Daily

ScienceDaily (Mar. 5, 2012) — Investigating the history of water on Earth is critical to understanding the planet's climate. One central question is whether Earth has always had the same amount of water on and surrounding it, the same so-called "water budget." Has Earth gained or lost water from comets and meteorites? Has water been lost into space? New research into Earth's primordial oceans conducted by researchers at the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen and Stanford University revisits Earth's historical water budget.

Read more ....

Rivers Threatened Around The World

From New Scientist:

The water supplying 80 per cent of the world's population is exposed to "high levels of threat". That's the conclusion of a study that surveys the status of rivers throughout the world, and looks at their effects on both humans and the ecosystem at large.

Writing in this week's Nature (vol 467, p 555), Charles Vorosmarty of the City College of New York and colleagues pull together a swathe of data on factors affecting water security, from dams that reduce river flow to the pollution and destruction of wetlands.

Read more ....

Water Map Shows Billions At Risk Of 'Water Insecurity'

From The BBC:

About 80% of the world's population lives in areas where the fresh water supply is not secure, according to a new global analysis.

Researchers compiled a composite index of "water threats" that includes issues such as scarcity and pollution.

The most severe threat category encompasses 3.4 billion people.

Writing in the journal Nature, they say that in western countries, conserving water for people through reservoirs and dams works for people, but not nature.

They urge developing countries not to follow the same path.

Read more ....

Groundwater Depletion Rate Accelerating Worldwide

Global map of groundwater depletion, measured in cubic meters of water per year. (Credit: Image courtesy of American Geophysical Union)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Sep. 23, 2010) — In recent decades, the rate at which humans worldwide are pumping dry the vast underground stores of water that billions depend on has more than doubled, say scientists who have conducted an unusual, global assessment of groundwater use.

Read more ....

Are Water Filters Worth It?

From Discovery News:

As clean as the drinking water is in the United States compared to other countries, it still contains trace amounts of cancer-causing contaminants.

But this past March, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that advances in science and technology were allowing them to define stricter regulations on four chemicals: tetrachloroethylene and trichloroethylene, which are used in industrial and textile processing, and epichlorohydrin and acrylamide, which ironically can be introduced into drinking water during the water treatment process.

Read more ....

Revealed: Why Hot Water Freezes Faster Than Cold

Freezing depends on impurities (Vilhjalmur Ingi Vilhjalmsson/Getty)

From New Scientist:

HOT water sometimes freezes faster than cold water - but why? This peculiar phenomenon has baffled scientists for generations, but now there is evidence that the effect may depend on random impurities in the water.

Fast-freezing of hot water is known as the Mpemba effect, after a Tanzanian schoolboy called Erasto Mpemba (see "How the Mpemba effect got its name"). Physicists have come up with several possible explanations, including faster evaporation reducing the volume of hot water, a layer of frost insulating the cooler water, and differing concentration of solutes. But the answer has been very hard to pin down because the effect is unreliable - cold water is just as likely to freeze faster.

Read more ....

Much Of U.S. Water Safe, But Problems Remain

A recent study suggests that fixtures could leach lead into drinking water, even if the devices received passing grades from standard testing protocols. Credit: Josh Chamot, National Science Foundation.

From Live Science:

The United States has benefitted from centuries of improvements in drinking water safety, and most Americans can trust that clean water comes from their tap. Yet, closer inspection is showing that on a house-by-house basis, water quality is not guaranteed — even in communities with high marks for water safety.

Marc Edwards, of Virginia Tech University, has been part of a growing contingent of engineers and scientists looking more carefully at the water we drink, and finding that in some cases harmful sources are overlooked.

Read more ....

The Coming Water Wars?

"Water: The Epic Struggle For Wealth, Power, And Civilization:" Water As The New Oil -- Seattle Times

Author Steven Solomon's "Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization" documents the hunt throughout history to find sources of clean water, a task likely to become more fraught with conflict in the coming age of water scarcity.

There's a slick catchphrase in the air these days — "Water is the new oil" — that author Steven Solomon and others use when referencing water's newfound significance on today's geopolitical stage.

But if Solomon's outstanding survey, "Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization," reveals anything, it is that oil, for maybe a century or so, was actually the new water, and now water has simply returned to the primacy it has always held throughout history.

In detailed but highly readable fashion, economics journalist Solomon ("Confidence Game," 1995) works through each major civilization — the Mesopotamians, the Egyptians, the early Romans, China, India, Islam, northern Europe, the New World — and shows the profound water challenges each faced and overcame in advancing human aspirations.

Read more ....

My Comment: This book is on my "to read" list. For the past few years I have been commenting in this blog on the history of wars over water, and on how future wars may revolve on the scarcity of clean water. From what I have read in the preamble to this book .... author Steven Solomon is hitting all the bases.

Water Mission Returns First Data

Smos builds up its map data in strips as it sweeps around the Earth

From BBC:

Europe's latest Earth observation satellite has returned its first data.

Smos was launched earlier this month on a quest to help scientists understand better how water is cycled around the Earth.

The spacecraft will make the first global maps of the amount of moisture held in soils and of the quantity of salts dissolved in the oceans.

The data will have wide uses but should improve weather forecasts and warnings of extreme events, such as floods.

Read more ....

United States Using Less Water Than 35 Years Ago

Crop irrigation. The largest uses of fresh surface water were power generation and irrigation. (Credit: USDA - Natural Resources Conservation Service)

From Science Daily:

Science Daily (Nov. 16, 2009) — The United States is using less water than during the peak years of 1975 and 1980, according to water use estimates for 2005. Despite a 30 percent population increase during the past 25 years, overall water use has remained fairly stable according to a new U.S. Geological Survey report.

Assistant Secretary of the Interior Anne Castle announced the report, Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2005, as part of her keynote speech on October 29 at the Atlantic Water Summit in the National Press Club.

Read more ....

European Water Mission Lifts Off

From The BBC:

A European satellite is set to provide major new insights into how water is cycled around the Earth.

The Smos spacecraft will make the first global maps of the amount of moisture held in soils and of the quantity of salts dissolved in the oceans.

The data will have wide uses but should improve weather forecasts and warnings of extreme events, such as floods.

A Russian Rokot launcher carrying Smos lifted off from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia at 0450 (0150 GMT) on Monday.

Read more ....

How California's New Water Laws Inform the Coming National Crisis

An old tire lies on a dry stretch of the San Joaquin River below Gravelly Ford, near Mendota in Fresno County. (Photograph by Michael Macor/The Chronicle)

From Popular Mechanics:

California has its share of problems these days; the state carries billions of dollars in debt, drug cartels have made their way in from Mexico and the wild fire season came and went with great force. As if the governor didn't have enough on his plate, California is also in the midst of one of the biggest water crises this nation has ever seen. Farmers and fishing communities, businesses and a growing population are locked in a battle over water rights—scrambling for what has become a dwindling resource. To stop the problem, a task force has studied the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta for two years and came up with dozens of proposals to alleviate the water crisis. Here are six of the most prescient proposed items—problems and solutions that may be coming to a local assembly (or a courthouse) near you.

Read more ....

Water Lust: Why All The Excitement When H2O Is Found In Space?

ELIXIR OF LIFE: Finding evidence of water in the solar system and beyond is an important signpost for the presence of life. Liquid water is a solvent, a medium and a catalyst for certain types of proteins, and essential to biological processes. © ISTOCKPHOTO.COM

From Scientific American:

Mars, Europa, interstellar nebulae, and now even the moon all seem to be getting wetter with every observation. But what is it about this simple hydrogen-oxygen combo that makes it the sine qua non of finding extraterrestrial life?

When NASA announced last month the finding of water ice in several impact craters on Mars, and either water or hydroxyl widely dispersed on the moon's surface, the solar system became a little more familiar because it seemed a tad more hospitable to life as we know it on Earth.

Read more ....

The Coming Battle Over Fresh Water

Hustle and Flow -- Audubon Magazine

As water becomes increasingly scarce, we may have to charge for every drop.

In a now-famous interview with The New York Times in 1995, Ismail Serageldin, the World Bank’s vice president for environmentally sustainable development, said, “Many of the wars in this century were about oil, but wars of the next century will be over water.” While the situation is currently considerably less dire in the United States than in many other places around the world, an escalating fight over water in the coming years is in the making. We are “entering an era of water reallocation, when water for new uses will come from existing users who have incentives to use less,” says Robert Glennon, the Morris K. Udall professor of law and public policy at the University of Arizona, in his new book Unquenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What to Do About It. Those reallocations can take place through contentious politicking and in the courts, or, Glennon argues, more peaceably, through market forces.

Read more ....

India's Water Use 'Unsustainable'

Much of the water used in paddy fields is pumped from underground.

From The BBC:

Parts of India are on track for severe water shortages, according to results from Nasa's gravity satellites.

The Grace mission discovered that in the country's north-west - including Delhi - the water table is falling by about 4cm (1.6 inches) per year.

Writing in the journal Nature, they say rainfall has not changed, and water use is too high, mainly for farming.

The finding is published two days after an Indian government report warning of a potential water crisis.

That report noted that access to water was one of the main factors governing the pace of development in the world's second most populous nation.

Read more ....

California Gives Desalination Plants a Fresh Look

From The Wall Street Journal:

Process to Make Seawater Drinkable Gains Traction, but Environmentalists Object to Heavy Energy Use, Harm to Marine Life.

Early next year, the Southern California town of Carlsbad will break ground on a plant that each day will turn 50 million gallons of seawater into fresh drinking water.

The $320 million project, which would be the largest desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere, was held up in the planning stages for years. But a protracted drought helped propel the project to its approval in May -- a sign of how worried local authorities are about water supplies.

Read more ....