Increasing salt production and use is shifting the natural balances of salt ions across Earth systems, causing interrelated effects across biophysical systems collectively known as freshwater salinization syndrome. In this Review, we conceptualize the natural salt cycle and synthesize increasing global trends of salt production and riverine salt concentrations and fluxes. The natural salt cycle is primarily driven by relatively slow geologic and hydrologic processes that bring different salts to the surface of the Earth. Anthropogenic activities have accelerated the processes, timescales and magnitudes of salt fluxes and altered their directionality, creating an anthropogenic salt cycle. Global salt production has increased rapidly over the past century for different salts, with approximately 300 Mt of NaCl produced per year. A salt budget for the USA suggests that salt fluxes in rivers can be within similar orders of magnitude as anthropogenic salt fluxes, and there can
Human activities greatly impact surface water quality, while being reliant upon it for water supply. Surface water quality is expected to change in the future as a result of alterations to pollutant loadings, surface water withdrawals and hydrological regimes, driven by both climate change and socio-economic developments. Here we use a high-resolution global surface water quality model to project water temperature and indicators of salinity (total dissolved solids), organic (biological oxygen demand) and pathogen (fecal coliform) pollution until 2100. The results show that while surface water quality, as indicated by these pollutants, will improve in most advanced economies, the outlook for poorer nations is bleak. The proportion of the global population exposed to salinity, organic and pathogen pollution by the end of the century ranges from 17 to 27%, 20 to 37% and 22 to 44%, respectively, with poor surface water quality disproportionately affecting people living in developing countr
In response to the second Call for Decade Actions, the Global Environment Monitoring System for the Ocean and Coasts (GEMS Ocean) Programme was officially endorsed in September 2022 by the UN Ocean Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030).
Come advance the development of the WaterML 2.0 suite of standards in the area of water quality data, and help increase the effectiveness of related global development activities. Contact: info@ogc.org 20 July 2022: The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has released a Call for Participation (CFP) to solicit proposals for the OGC Water Quality Interoperability Experiment (WQ