Dams + Sand Supply Reduction
January 27, 2023
Grains of Sand: Too Much and Never Enough – EOS Magazine
Sand is a foundational element of our cities, our homes, our landscapes and seascapes. How we will interact with the material in the future, however, is less certain.
Smartphone screens, wine bottles, and porcelain toilets share a surprising ingredient: sand. In fact, the ubiquitous material is the second most exploited natural resource on Earth, after water.
Most sand pours into the construction industry, which in turn pours much of it into concrete. “Sand is the most mined solid material on Earth, and we’re using more and more sand as we’re becoming more and more people,” said Mette Bendixen, a physical geographer at McGill University in Montreal.
“The use of sand is now faced with two major challenges,” said Xiaoyang Zhong, a doctoral student in environmental science at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “One is that it has caused enormous consequences in the environment,” he explained. “The second challenge is that easily usable sand resources are running out in many regions…”
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More on Dams and Sand Supply Reduction . . .
Starving the Mekong – Reuters
Lives are remade as dams built by China upstream deprive the Mekong River Delta of precious sediment
Standing on the bank of the Mekong River, Tran Van Cung can see his rice farm wash away before his very eyes. The paddy’s edge is crumbling into the delta.
Just 15 years ago, Southeast Asia’s longest river carried some 143 million tonnes of sediment – as heavy as about 430 Empire State Buildings – through to the Mekong River Delta every year, dumping nutrients along riverbanks essential to keeping tens of thousands of farms like Cung’s intact and productive…
Florida beaches were already running low on sand. Then Ian and Nicole hit – the Washington Post
“I think we’re starting to discover that, despite our best efforts and wanting to throw as much money at this as possible, it has become very difficult to keep these beaches as wide as we would like to keep them,” Robert S. Young, a geology professor at Western Carolina University and director of the Program for Developed Shorelines… “We simply don’t have the capacity to hold all of these beaches in place.”
Half of the beaches on the Costa del Sol are at serious risk of sand loss – SUR
The loss of sand is a “serious risk” for half of the beaches in Malaga province, while another 40% are at “moderate risk” and 5% at slight risk, according to a report on the Strategy for the Protection of the Malaga Coast which the Secretary of State for the Environment, Hugo Morán, presented to mayors and councilors in Malaga on Tuesday morning…
Huge dam demolition could save salmon on the edge of extinction
Dams, climate change, and other issues have wreaked havoc on salmon along the U.S. West Coast, and the declines have been particularly acute for the spring-run fish…
Environmentalists and dam operators, at war for years, start making peace
The industry that operates America’s hydroelectric dams and several environmental groups announced an unusual agreement Tuesday to work together to get more clean energy from hydropower while reducing the environmental harm from dams, in a sign that the threat of climate change is spurring both sides to rethink their decadeslong battle over a large but contentious source of renewable power.
Trust nature: The best way to defend deltas against rising seas is with sand and mud
Sediment constantly and naturally replenishes deltas, keeping them — and all the people, fields, industries, cities and wildlife that rely on them — above the water. While scientifically proven, this surprising fact has struggled to gain much traction outside the small world of geomorphologists
More Than 500 Dams Planned in Protected Areas Around the Globe, Study Finds
More than 500 dams are planned or already under construction within protected areas around the world, according to a new study published in the journal Conservation Letters. The study is the first of its kind to quantify the global extent of dams constructed in protected areas, which can include indigenous areas, nature reserves, and national parks.
China’s Three Gorges Dam is one of the largest ever created. Was it worth it?
The Three Gorges Dam was designed to tame China’s longest river. But this summer’s record rains reveal its limited ability to control floods.
Global warming and illegal land reclamation add to severe floods in China
China has perennial flooding in summer but a combination of climate reasons and human behavior over decades of land reclamation and dam-building on nearby rivers, have contributed to a longer-than-usual duration and incessant rainfall in some regions.