Environment

Newsweek - The residents of a city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area in Texas have been warned not to use water from the faucet after a foaming agent was detected in the water supply.  Grand Prairie citizens queued up on Tuesday night to collect water from a distribution center set up in the city hall, after being told not to use their usual water supply, according to Fox 4.

In a post on Facebook by the city's Municipal Government at 9 p.m., authorities said, "Crews are currently investigating the issue and working to isolate the affected area. If you live north of I20 in Grand Prairie, please avoid using water other than for flushing until further notice. The City will have bottled water distribution stations." The account added an update around an hour later that the bottled water was available in the front parking lot of the city hall on Main Street Grand Prairie.

Yale Environment 360 - Glaciologists have discussed scary prognoses for the rapid collapse of giant Antarctic glaciers for almost half a century. Glaciers in West Antarctica are particularly vulnerable because they are not sitting on solid land; they are surrounded by ocean and pinned precariously to the peaks of submarine mountains, between which the circumpolar current swirls.

Back in 1978, glaciologist John Mercer, of Ohio State University, warned of a “major disaster – a rapid five-meter rise in sea level, caused by deglaciation of West Antarctica” — should atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide continue to rise. Three years later, glaciologist Terry Hughes, of the University of Maine, identified a “weak underbelly” to the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, where the Thwaites and Pine Island glaciers drain into the Amundsen Sea, an arm of the Southern Ocean.

These glaciers are two of the ice continent’s five largest and are the gateway to the ocean for nearly half of the ice sheet. Hughes warned that the glaciers could easily lose their grip on the submarine mountains as warmer water melts ice directly beneath them, leading to their disintegration within a few decades. Their meltwater would raise sea levels globally by as much as seven feet. That would rise to more than 12 feet if, as the pair suspected, the glaciers’ demise dragged down the rest of the ice sheet with it.