Impacts of lawns in the United States.

This month's New Yorker has a fascinating article on lawns. The impacts on waterways, ecosystems, and even the climate are huge.

Here's a nice summary of research done by NASA's Cristina Milesi. This is a mind-blower:

“Even conservatively,” Milesi says, “I estimate there are three times more acres of lawns in the U.S. than irrigated corn.” This means lawns—including residential and commercial lawns, golf courses, etc—could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America in terms of surface area, covering about 128,000 square kilometers in all.

And it seems an awful lot of gasoline is expended on mowing. I don't see how this can be sustainable. What's the contribution to the Gulf's dead zone?

From the New Yorker article:

In “American Green” (2006), Ted Steinberg, a professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, compares the lawn to “a nationwide chemical experiment with homeowners as the guinea pigs.”

And this:

The essential trouble with the American lawn is its estrangement from place: it is not a response to the landscape so much as an idea imposed upon it—all green, all the time, everywhere. Recently, a NASA-funded study, which used satellite data collected by the Department of Defense, determined that, including golf courses, lawns in the United States cover nearly fifty thousand square miles—an area roughly the size of New York State. The same study concluded that most of this New York State-size lawn was growing in places where turfgrass should never have been planted. In order to keep all the lawns in the country well irrigated, the author of the study calculated, it would take an astonishing two hundred gallons of water per person, per day. According to a separate estimate, by the Environmental Protection Agency, nearly a third of all residential water use in the United States currently goes toward landscaping.''

The map is from Malesi's article, and shows fractional area covered by lawns (1.0 = 100%).

Gulf dead zone may be here for good.

Lots of press buzz today, articles here, and here. This article talks about the role of Midwestern agriculture in all this.

Researchers think the zone may be with us for good now. Here's a NOAA summary of what led up to this, with historical data and nice graphics, and discussion of the destruction of the coast's ecosystem and fishery.

I'm amazed that, as a nation, we're so unaware of the magnitude and importance of these ongoing environmental disasters.

And we have a huge Mississippi River oil spill near New Orleans. McCain had planned a trip out to an offshore rig to highlight the benefits and safety of offshore production, but canceled it. Go figure.

Nasa/Goddard graphic.

Corps of Engineers big river photos online.

Big river scientists and teachers will like this new COE gallery of high-resolution photos on the St. Louis District's website. The collection is all about boats and the built-environment, but says it'll be expanded, and many of the images are beautiful aerials like this one of a barge tow heading downstream into St. Louis.

This appears to be Lock 27 at the southern end of the Chain of Rocks Canal on the Mississippi River, one of those COE projects you might be able to see from the Moon.

Update: The COE website is a little disorganized. Here's one of the galleries in case you have trouble with the link above.

Update on Steve's heart.

No geomorphology today, but for those of you following along, an update on my heart.

Had a great visit with my cardiologist in Carbondale last week (Dr. Al-Dallow, a wonderful physician) and got some good news. My atrial fibrillation was likely brought about by stress and things I put into my system. It's very unlikely to return if I clean up my act.

Here's a very nice NIH animation, complete with links and an audio description, of how the heart works and how to read an EKG.



My A-fib came on a Monday after the first whole weekend I'd taken off in nearly a year. That weekend, making up for lost time, I'd exercised heavily, and drank too much. Monday was very stressful (as usual) and I managed to drink a lot of coffee and threw in some pseudoephedrine for good measure. The cold lake water I plunged into after work was the straw that broke the camel's back, and I my heart's electical system went haywire.

The good news is that, if I stay off alcohol and caffeine for a while, I'll be fine. Bad news is this will be Steve's Summer of No Beer or Coffee.



As Dr. Al-Dallow very ably put it, stimulating your heart from the sinoatrial nerve that is supposed to command it (exercise) is good, but bathing it in chemicals that are also telling it to beat faster can confuse things and lead to a mis-coordination of its nervous system.

Other good news is that exercise, besides being generally good for me, cannot induce this sort of fibrillation, so I can work out as much and as hard as I want. A heart beating rapidly from hard exercise cannot go into A-fib because it is dominated by the correct nerve stimulus. Interesting.

I've put an average of twenty miles a day on my bike in the four weeks since the event, for nearly 350 total, and that feels good. Now I have an excuse, besides some vague future benefit, to make time for that exercise.

A little irony. Last year, before I made the decision to expand my business, I promised myself this would be the year, before I turn 50 in October, I'd clean up my act and focus on fitness and getting some weight off. Work be damned. All that went out the window last summer when we expanded. Now that I've had a stern warning, my priorities are back in their proper place.

Emriver production and improvements.

Jesse has been working hard in the shop to build our stock of Emriver parts, as complete models head out the front door. Our shipping area has no less than four ready to be shipped just this week.

Here he works on notch gage tubes as Cara watches.

We're constantly looking for ways to make the models better. This is no simple task when you consider that, unlike Bill Gates, we want to maintain compatibility with existing units, and keep things safe, simple, and cost effective.

We got our first set of supports from a machine shop in a neighboring county and they look fantastic. We made some minor mechanical changes to make them lighter and sleeker, and the shop did a great job of finishing them and putting on nice touches like the radius on the end of the brace shown here. Jesse oversaw most of this, and did a great job.

Martian geomorphology and "sapping canyons."

The European Space Agency has just released some stunning images of water-formed canyons on Mars. Here the canyon is about 4km deep.

Lots of interesting information at ESA's website here. This agency has a very friendly web presence with many beautiful images.

A long time ago a wonderful geomorphologist named Marie Morisawa taught me that round-headed gullies like this were groundwater driven, and apparently these were formed that way. These are called "sapping canyons," a new term for me.

But these guys have other ideas, and think megafloods could carve such features. For possible Martian life, groundwater would probably be better than infrequent megafloods.

Photo credit: ESA/ DLR/ FU Berlin (G. Neukum)

Grand Canyon flooding and geomorphology.

Here's an excellent article on management of the Grand Canyon's geomorphology from the Christian Science Monitor.

I've had the pleasure of hearing Jack Schmidt (a key researcher in this effort). He's a dynamic and fascinating speaker on river management and geomorphology, catch him if you get the chance. He regularly teaches at workshops, including this one (where I've taught, and where I met him).

A quote from the article:

“Artifacts of the existence of the dam are the clear water, the cold water, and steady low flows,” says Jack Schmidt, a watershed sciences professor from Utah State University. The tamed river, devoid of sand (close to 98 percent is stopped by the dam), now erodes through the sandbars and carries the sediment into Lake Mead, where it’s trapped behind Hoover Dam. According to researchers, the new behavior of the river has led to narrower rapids, eroded beach­­es, invasion of nonnative vegetation, and the loss of native fish. The Colorado River now has nearly twice as many nonnative fish species (60) as native ones (32), with the humpback chub population declining from 10,000 in 1989 to 6,000 in 2006.

More on this topic, and lots of links, from the USGS here.

(BLM photo from the CSM article.)