Water & Oceans

"CAMBRIA COUNTY, Pa. -- A pipe is spewing toxic water into Topper Run from the old Maryland No. 1 coal mine here."

"Something awful is happening in the waters off Peru's northern coast, where some 3,000 dolphins have died and washed ashore since January. This rates as one of the worst, if not the worst, Unusual Mortality Event (UME) ever recorded. ...

"PORTLAND, Maine -- On April 23, heavy rains pounded Portland. The next day, many of the city’s most recognizable water bodies were the color of sewage."

"Soccer balls, motorcycles and a million other reminders of the massive tsunami in Japan a year ago are appearing along Alaska's coastlines."

"A trial to assign blame and damages that could total tens of billions of dollars for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill has been put off until January, in a setback for the U.S. government, which wanted to try its case this summer."

"If the Potomac River has gotten more attention than the Anacostia in the past 50 years, it’s partly because the Potomac supplies 90 percent of the region’s drinking water. That amounts to an average of 486 million gallons a day, according to the Potomac Conservancy. The Potomac watershed, which includes 14,670 miles of land that drains to the river, covers parts of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, the District, Maryland and Virginia. In the 1950s, reports of stench and dangerous levels of pollution clouded the Potomac’s reputation. But the 383-mile river wasn’t always in such bad shape."

"Polar bears are capable of swimming vast distances, a potential survival skill needed in an Arctic environment where summer sea ice is vanishing, a study led by the U.S. Geological Survey showed on Tuesday."

"Some of the main proposals in a draft text for negotiation at a U.N. sustainable development conference next month are being watered down at informal talks in New York, observers said on Tuesday, heightening fears the summit will fail to deliver."

"The cause célèbre of plastic litter in the ocean is the Texas-sized, swirling island of plastic debris thousands of miles off the coast of California in the Pacific Ocean. But researchers from the Universities of Washington and Delaware and the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Mass., say the story is much bigger, and scarier, than that."

"A federal judge has ruled that NCR Corp. is responsible for paying for environmental damage to the Fox River in northeastern Wisconsin -- a decision that is expected to jump-start stalled cleanup work on the massive pollution project."