Time (July 1) -- CEE professors Ximing Cai and Megan Konar, along with graduate student Landon Marston and Lehigh University professor Tara Troy, studied groundwater consumption from three main aquifer systems. Reliance on these aquifers intensified so much from 2000 to 2008 that it accounted for 93 percent of groundwater depletion in the U.S. Also: Los Angeles Times (July 3), Public News Service (July 20).
Related stories: AgWeek (Grand Forks, N.D., July 23) -- Illinois might be hundreds of miles from the Gulf of Mexico, but it’s a key contributor to the “dead zone,” a section of water the size of Connecticut devoid of oxygen that forms every summer. The culprit is millions of pounds of nutrients from farm fields, city streets, and wastewater treatment plants entering the Gulf each year through the Mississippi River system. Led by researchers at Illinois, a study uncovered numerous cost-effective practices for reducing nutrient losses.
WCBU-89.9 FM (Peoria, Ill., July 30) -- Don Fullerton, Megan Konar and Julian Reif, faculty at Illinois, experts in the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at Illinois, and participants in the IGPA’s Climate Policy Initiative, write that Illinois' future summers could be as hot as Texas.