The Stream, November 6, 2024: Cleanup of Mexico’s Atoyac River, Stained Purple From Pollution, Focus of New Administration

A lone man watches a hawk fly over Delhi’s crowded skyline, which is shrouded with smog in this 2012 file photo. Photo © J. Carl Ganter/Circle of Blue

YOUR GLOBAL RUNDOWN

In western South Africa, a 34,000 year-old termite colony has been found to have a surprising impact on the chemistry of the area’s groundwater.
The Atoyac River, one of Mexico’s most polluted waterways, is receiving renewed attention from the country’s new administration.
Facing unprecedentedly hazardous air pollution, environmental officials in India are urging the government to consider using artificial rain to clear urban smog.
A year of rain fell on eastern Spain in less than a day, decimating Valencia and killing more than 200 people.

Every U.S. state except Alaska and Kentucky experienced at least moderate drought conditions during the last week of October.

“Oftentimes we get regional droughts concentrated in the Southwest or Texas, but to have nearly the entire country dry or experiencing drought conditions is pretty rare.” — Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Rain has been scarce nationwide following the landfall of hurricanes Helene and Milton in the American southeast, the New York Times reports. Prolonged and widespread dry conditions throughout late October intrigued climate scientists and set an alarming record with the U.S. Drought Monitor, which as of Tuesday morning estimates that 318.6 million acres of crops and 150.3 million people throughout the country are experiencing drought.

According to the monitor, 48 states currently experiencing Moderate Drought (D1) or worse is the greatest concurrent number ever recorded. The only exceptions are Kentucky — where much of the state is in the D0 “Abnormally Dry” range — and Alaska, where weather has been predictably snowy and wet.

The worst-hit parts of the U.S. include eastern Ohio, West Virginia, and southwestern Texas. These areas have also experienced high temperature anomalies, which help to drive drought conditions by “sucking moisture from the atmosphere and the ground,” according to the Times.

— Christian Thorsberg, Interim Stream Editor

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The Lead

Mexico’s newly sworn-in President Claudia Sheinbaum has made cleaning up the Atoyac River — “identified as being in a state of socio-environmental and health emergency,” the Guardian reports — one of her administration’s 100 top priorities. For the communities along its banks, an effort to reverse the river’s historic state of pollution is welcomed news, albeit a lofty goal.

The Atoyac flows through Nueva Alemania (“New Germany”), an industrial region which spans the states of Tlaxcala and Puebla and is home to just over one million people. The river’s once crystal clear waters have gradually worsened in quality since the 1960s, when factories — mainly German-owned — began cropping up along its banks. According to an inventory conducted in 2022, “219 companies discharged wastewater into the Atoyac River basin every day.” The consequences of this pollution, which environmental activists say has occurred without proper governmental oversight, has devastated public health.

A year ago, a report released by the Mexican government revealed that people in the basin aged 15 to 49 experienced mortality rates from chronic kidney diseases at five times the national average. Higher local mortality rates from leukemia in those under 19 were also measured above national averages “where the levels of metals and arsenic in the river are significantly higher.”

The river today flows purple, stained by the chemicals, metals, pesticides, and other pollutants running through it. Legal efforts over the past decade to implement waste-handling regulations have led to hundreds of inspections and dozens of closures, but activists say economics — not environmental consideration — have driven decision-making in the Atoyac’s upper basin.

This Week’s Top Water Stories, Told In Numbers

Inches of rain which fell in eight hours in the Spanish town of Chiva, located just west of Valencia near the country’s eastern coast, the New York Times reports. Usually, Chiva receives that amount of rain in a year. But a rapidly moving “cutoff low” — a low-pressure system of warm and moist air that deviates from the jet stream, lingering in a single area for a longer-than-normal amount of time — formed just south of Spain, bringing catastrophic rains. The sudden deluge precipitated what many are calling Spain’s most devastating climate disaster in recent history. At least 205 people died in flooding that inundated homes, streets, grocery stores, and businesses. Photographs and footage depict the surreal strength of rising floodwaters sweeping through communities. According to climate scientists, while cutoff lows are not a rarity in Spain, the storm’s strength was heightened by the effects of global warming.

400

The air quality index (AQI) score — considered “hazardous,” as high as the scale goes — measured this week at one-third of India’s weather stations, Reuters reports. Amidst this spike in air pollution, doctors in Delhi have seen a 20 to 30 percent increase in patients being treated for respiratory illnesses. Gopal Rai, India’s environment minister, appealed to fellow government officials this week to employ artificial rain, triggered through cloud-seeding, to help clear the haze over the capital district. In Lahore, Pakistan, the AQI spiked at 1,067, France24 reports.

On the Radar

In September, soil scientists working in Namaqualand, South Africa, used a giant excavator to dig through an arid heuweltjie — “little hill” — as part of their research into why the area’s groundwater was abnormally salty, Al Jazeera reports. They were surprised to unearth a 34,000 year-old colony of southern harvester termites, and even more intrigued by their long-standing impacts on water and biodiversity. Over thousands of years, salts and other minerals that comprised the colony’s mounds flushed into groundwater reserves via termite tunnels. At the same time, the “biological breakdown of termite excrement (known as frass) triggers a cascade of biological reactions, which results in the formation of calcium carbonate.” This chemical reaction not only kept soils healthy — upkeeping plant diversity in the area — but is an ancient precursor to what many carbon sequestration companies are pursuing today. Further research may reveal more ways in which termite colonies around the world preserve carbon sinks and water reserves, scientists involved in the research told Al Jazeera.

More Water News

Itaquai River Indictment: Brazilian police have indicted Ruben Dario da Silva Villar, a fish trader, in the 2022 murders of Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips, AP reports. Pereira and Phillips were traveling by boat through the Amazon conducting conservation work and “upholding Indigenous rights,” the details of which will later be published in Phillips’ posthumous book. The murders are said to have been motivated by their pro-environmental efforts.

Typhoon Kong-rey: Thirty-four mudslides were recorded in Taiwan as Typhoon Kong-rey made landfall last week, dropping more than three feet of rain on the island’s hard-hit eastern coast, France 24 reports. Nearly 12,000 people were evacuated from their homes; more than 500 people were injured in the deluge, and two casualties have been reported.

Christian Thorsberg

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer from Chicago. He is passionate about climate and cultural phenomena that often appear slow or invisible, and he examines these themes in his journalism, poetry, and fiction.