DailyDirt: Fresh Water On Demand

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Fri, Mar 9th 2012 5:00pm — Michael Ho

The Earth is literally covered in water, but 97% of that water is in salty oceans and not useful for drinking. In fact, only about 1% of the world's water is really usable by humans (because a lot of fresh water is frozen in glaciers or otherwise inconveniently located). Here are just a few links on the lengths people could go to in order to get drinkable water.

The United Nations held a design competition to create ads that help raise awareness of water conservation efforts. The winners will be picked in June. [url]
A team of software engineers created a simulation that concludes it's possible to tow an iceberg from the waters around Newfoundland to the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa. The expense of actually doing this, however, has not been shown to be worthwhile by anyone yet. [url]
IBM's Almaden Research Center is developing new water filtration membranes for purification processes -- which could be useful for desalination and other water reclamation. The trick is getting water purified without using a lot of energy to do so.... [url]
A guy from Chile was arrested for stealing a 5-ton piece of a glacier -- that he was going to sell on the black market for making designer ice cubes. Glacier ice just tastes way better than the ice that comes out of a plastic tray because it's been aged for millions of years. [url]
To discover more food-related links, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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Filed Under: conservation, filtration, food, glacier, ice, iceberg, water
Companies: ibm, un

6 Comments

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Pixelation, 9 Mar 2012 @ 7:06pm

"The United Nations held a design competition to create ads that help raise awareness of water conservation efforts."

This will be especially important if Fracking is allowed to continue.
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Pixelation, 9 Mar 2012 @ 7:08pm

"A team of software engineers created a simulation that concludes it's possible to tow an iceberg from the waters around Newfoundland to the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa. The expense of actually doing this, however, has not been shown to be worthwhile by anyone yet."

The biggest problem being that the iceberg is the size of a peanut by the time it gets to the Canary islands.
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Mar 2012 @ 9:11am

Re:
Why does that iceberg towing plan sound so familiar?

I'm sure I've heard it somewhere before...
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Max, 10 Mar 2012 @ 7:00pm

Water
Pipe the Mississippi river across the great plains to the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Tap it in the plains for towns, cities and forestation of the plains.

Pipe the North Pole melting ice to the desert southwest arrid region. This water is among the healthiest on earth as it contains trace minerals for improved health. Terrestrial trace elements have by way of the hydrologic cycle been moved back to the sea.
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro, 11 Mar 2012 @ 2:48pm

�Aged For Millions Of Years� Nonsense
How old is the water that comes from your tap?
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Michael Ho (profile), 12 Mar 2012 @ 12:16pm

Re: �Aged For Millions Of Years� Nonsense
It's a stupid gimmick, but you almost have to respect that the guy would actually use a real glacier -- instead of just freezing tap water and just telling people it came from a glacier.
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