PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Road salts and other human sources are threatening world's freshwater supplies

UMD-led study warns cascading effects of salts require coordinated management and regulation to avoid contaminating natural resources

Road salts and other human sources are threatening world's freshwater supplies
2021-04-12
(Press-News.org) When winter storms threaten to make travel dangerous, people often turn to salt, spreading it liberally over highways, streets and sidewalks to melt snow and ice. Road salt is an important tool for safety, because many thousands of people die or are injured every year due to weather related accidents. But a new study led by Sujay Kaushal of the University of Maryland warns that introducing salt into the environment--whether it's for de-icing roads, fertilizing farmland or other purposes--releases toxic chemical cocktails that create a serious and growing global threat to our freshwater supply and human health.

Previous studies by Kaushal and his team showed that added salts in the environment can interact with soils and infrastructure to release a cocktail of metals, dissolved solids and radioactive particles. Kaushal and his team named these cascading effects of introduced salts Freshwater Salinization Syndrome, and it can poison drinking water and cause negative effects on human health, agriculture, infrastructure, wildlife and the stability of ecosystems.

Kaushal's new study is the first comprehensive analysis of the complicated and interconnected effects caused by Freshwater Salinization Syndrome and their impact on human health. This work suggests that the world's freshwater supplies could face serious threats at local, regional and global levels if a coordinated management and regulation approach is not applied to human sources of salt. The study, which calls on regulators to approach salts with the same level of concern as acid rain, loss of biodiversity and other high-profile environmental problems, was published April 12, 2021, in the journal Biogeochemistry.

"We used to think about adding salts as not much of a problem," said Kaushal, a professor in UMD's Department of Geology and Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center. "We thought we put it on the roads in winter and it gets washed away, but we realized that it stuck around and accumulated. Now we're looking into both the acute exposure risks and the long-term health, environmental, and infrastructure risks of all these chemical cocktails that result from adding salts to the environment, and we're saying, 'This is becoming one of the most serious threats to our freshwater supply.' And it's happening in many places we look in the United States and around the world."

When Kaushal and his team compared data and reviewed studies from freshwater monitoring stations throughout the world, they found a general increase in chloride concentrations on a global scale. Chloride is the common element in many different types of salts like sodium chloride (table salt) and calcium chloride (commonly used for road salt). Drilling down into data from targeted regions, they also uncovered a 30-year trend of increasing salinity in places like the Passaic River in northern New Jersey and a 100-mile-plus stretch of the Potomac River that supplies drinking water to Washington, D.C.

The major human-related salt source in areas such the Northeastern U.S. is road salts, but other sources include sewage leaks and discharges, water softeners, agricultural fertilizers and fracking brines enriched with salts. In addition, indirect sources of salts in freshwater include weathering roads, bridges and buildings, which often contain limestone, concrete or gypsum, all of which release salt as they break down. Ammonium-based fertilizers can also lead to the release of salts in urban lawns and agricultural fields. In some coastal environments, sea-level rise can be another source of saltwater intrusion.

The study points to a growing body of research from around the world that shows how chemical cocktails released by all of these salt sources harm both natural and built environments. For example, changes in salt levels can allow invasive, more salt-tolerant species to take over a stream. Chemical cocktails released by salts can change the microbes in soil and water, and because microbes are responsible for decay and replenishment of nutrients in an ecosystem, that shift can lead to even more changes in the release of salts, nutrients and heavy metals into the environment.

In the built environment, salts can degrade roadways and infrastructure. They can also corrode water pipes causing the release of heavy metals into drinking water supplies as they did in Flint, Michigan.

"I am greatly surprised by the increasing scope and intensity of these problems as highlighted from our studies," said study co-author Gene E. Likens, founding president emeritus of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and a distinguished research professor at the University of Connecticut. "Increased salinization of surface waters is becoming a major environmental problem in many places in the world."

The variety of sources and complex interactions between salt and the environment are poorly understood, and every lake, stream and aquifer presents a different set of management challenges. The study suggests that management strategies must evaluate salt contributions from different sources on a watershed-ecosystem level and prioritize regulation accordingly, much the way nutrient loads in watersheds are currently managed.

Improvements in technology have helped reduce nutrient runoff, but safe and effective alternatives to road salts do not yet exist. Kaushal hopes that regulation, new technologies and a coordinated management approach can reduce the potential threats of Freshwater Salinization Syndrome on a broad scale.

"Ultimately, we need regulation at the higher levels, and we're still lacking adequate protection of local jurisdictions and water supplies," Kaushal said. "We have made dramatic improvements to acid rain and air quality, and we're trying to address climate change this way. What we need here is a much better understanding of the complicated effects of added salts and regulations based on that. This can allow us to avert a really difficult future for freshwater supplies."

Going forward, the study emphasizes the importance of increasing water monitoring efforts and using modern sensor technology to capture continuous data. High-frequency sensor data allows scientists and managers to detect peaks in salinity and water flow that may eventually help them to predict the chemical composition and accumulation of toxins due to Freshwater Salinization Syndrome.

In addition, Kaushal said field studies and experiments that trace the rapidly expanding effects of salt in the environment are needed to improve scientific understanding of the problem. He has been conducting such research in the streams running through and near UMD's College Park campus, an urban environment inside the Washington, D.C. Beltway.

INFORMATION:

In addition to Kaushal, co-authors of this study include 18 undergraduate students from UMD who conducted field studies and literature research and helped to analyze data.

This work was supported by Maryland Sea Grant (Award No. SA75281870W), the National Science Foundation (Awards No. EAR 886 1521224, GCR 2021089), Pooled Monitoring Initiative led by the Chesapeake Bay Trust, Water Research Foundation, and the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. The content of this article does not necessarily reflect the views of these organizations.

The research paper "Freshwater Salinization Syndrome: from Emerging Global Problem to Managing Risks," was published on April 12, 2021 in the journal Biogeochemistry

Media Relations Contact: Kimbra Cutlip, 301-405-9463, kcutlip@umd.edu

University of Maryland
College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences
2300 Symons Hall
College Park, Md. 20742
http://www.cmns.umd.edu
@UMDscience

About the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences The College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland educates more than 9,000 future scientific leaders in its undergraduate and graduate programs each year. The college's 10 departments and more than a dozen interdisciplinary research centers foster scientific discovery with annual sponsored research funding exceeding $200 million.


[Attachments] See images for this press release:
Road salts and other human sources are threatening world's freshwater supplies

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Researchers engineer probiotic yeast to produce beta-carotene

2021-04-12
Researchers have genetically engineered a probiotic yeast to produce beta-carotene in the guts of laboratory mice. The advance demonstrates the utility of work the researchers have done to detail how a suite of genetic engineering tools can be used to modify the yeast. "There are clear advantages to being able to engineer probiotics so that they produce the desired molecules right where they are needed," says Nathan Crook, corresponding author of the study and an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at North Carolina State University. "You're not just delivering drugs or nutrients; you are effectively manufacturing the drugs or nutrients on site." The study focused ...

Spanking may affect the brain development of a child

2021-04-12
Spanking may affect a child's brain development in similar ways to more severe forms of violence, according to a new study led by Harvard researchers. The research, published recently in the journal Child Development, builds on existing studies that show heightened activity in certain regions of the brains of children who experience abuse in response to threat cues. The group found that children who had been spanked had a greater neural response in multiple regions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), including in regions that are part of the salience network. These areas of the brain respond to cues in the environment that tend ...

UConn researchers find bubbles speed up energy transfer

2021-04-12
Energy flows through a system of atoms or molecules by a series of processes such as transfers, emissions, or decay. You can visualize some of these details like passing a ball (the energy) to someone else (another particle), except the pass happens quicker than the blink of an eye, so fast that the details about the exchange are not well understood. Imagine the same exchange happening in a busy room, with others bumping into you and generally complicating and slowing the pass. Then, imagine how much faster the exchange would be if everyone stepped back and created a safe bubble for the pass to happen unhindered. An international collaboration of scientists, including UConn Professor of Physics Nora Berrah and post-doctoral researcher ...

Antidepressant use in pregnancy tied to affective disorders in offspring; no causal link

Antidepressant use in pregnancy tied to affective disorders in offspring; no causal link
2021-04-12
New York, NY - Major depressive disorder is highly prevalent, with one in five people experiencing an episode at some point in their life, and is almost twice as common in women than in men. Antidepressants are usually given as a first-line treatment, including during pregnancy, either to prevent the recurrence of depression, or as acute treatment in newly depressed patients. Antidepressant use during pregnancy is widespread and since antidepressants cross the placenta and the blood-brain barrier, concern exists about potential long-term effects of intrauterine antidepressant exposure in the unborn child. Using the Danish National Registers to follow more than 42,000 singleton babies born ...

Binge-eating is not caused by stress-induced impulsivity

Binge-eating is not caused by stress-induced impulsivity
2021-04-12
Stress alters brain activity in self-inhibition areas yet doesn't trigger binge-eating, according to new research published in JNeurosci. People who binge-eat, a hallmark symptom of several eating disorders, can feel out of control and unable to stop, and often binge after stressful events. This led scientists to theorize stress impairs the brain regions responsible for inhibitory control -- the ability to stop what you are about to do or currently doing -- and triggers binge-eating. Westwater et al. tested this theory by using fMRI to measure the brain activity of women with anorexia, bulimia, or without ...

Stress does not lead to loss of self-control in eating disorders

2021-04-12
A unique residential study has concluded that, contrary to perceived wisdom, people with eating disorders do not lose self-control - leading to binge-eating - in response to stress. The findings of the Cambridge-led research are published today in the Journal of Neuroscience. People who experience bulimia nervosa and a subset of those affected by anorexia nervosa share certain key symptoms, namely recurrent binge-eating and compensatory behaviours, such as vomiting. The two disorders are largely differentiated by body mass index (BMI): adults affected by anorexia nervosa tend to have BMI of less than 18.5 kg/m2. More than 1.6 million people in ...

USC Stem Cell study reveals neural stem cells age rapidly

USC Stem Cell study reveals neural stem cells age rapidly
2021-04-12
In a new study published in Cell Stem Cell, a team led by USC Stem Cell scientist Michael Bonaguidi, PhD, demonstrates that neural stem cells - the stem cells of the nervous system - age rapidly. "There is chronological aging, and there is biological aging, and they are not the same thing," said Bonaguidi, an Assistant Professor of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, Gerontology and Biomedical Engineering at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. "We're interested in the biological aging of neural stem cells, which are particularly vulnerable to the ravages of time. This has implications for the normal cognitive decline that ...

Following atoms in real time could lead to better materials design

2021-04-12
Researchers have used a technique similar to MRI to follow the movement of individual atoms in real time as they cluster together to form two-dimensional materials, which are a single atomic layer thick. The results, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, could be used to design new types of materials and quantum technology devices. The researchers, from the University of Cambridge, captured the movement of the atoms at speeds that are eight orders of magnitude too fast for conventional microscopes. Two-dimensional materials, such as graphene, ...

People want to improve mental health by exercising, but stress and anxiety get in the way

2021-04-12
New research from McMaster University suggests the pandemic has created a paradox where mental health has become both a motivator for and a barrier to physical activity. People want to be active to improve their mental health but find it difficult to exercise due to stress and anxiety, say the researchers who surveyed more than 1,600 subjects in an effort to understand how and why mental health, physical activity and sedentary behavior have changed throughout the course of the pandemic. The results are outlined in the journal PLOS ONE. "Maintaining a regular exercise program is difficult at the best of times and the conditions surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic ...

More than the sum of mutations

More than the sum of mutations
2021-04-12
A new algorithm can predict which genes cause cancer, even if their DNA sequence is not changed. A team of researchers in Berlin combined a wide variety of data, analyzed it with "Artificial Intelligence" and identified numerous cancer genes. This opens up new perspectives for targeted cancer therapy in personalized medicine and for the development of biomarkers. In cancer, cells get out of control. They proliferate and push their way into tissues, destroying organs and thereby impairing essential vital functions. This unrestricted growth is usually induced by an accumulation of DNA changes in cancer ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Toxic metal particles can be present in cannabis vapes even before the first use

Is food waste the key to sustainable, plastic-free diapers and sanitary pads?

Molecular crystal motors move like microbes when exposed to light

Conversations in an MR scanner provides a novel view of the brain’s language network

When words make you sick

Removal of incorrect penicillin allergy labels by non-specialist healthcare professional feasible

Is your partner’s disturbed sleep keeping you up at night? Letting go of unattainable dreams may keep you both happy in bed

Molecular orientation is key: shining new light on electron behavior using 2-photon photoemission spectroscopy

Continuous non-invasive glucose sensing on the horizon with the development of a new optical sensor.

Brain recordings in people before surgery reveal how all minds plan what to say prior to speaking

A KAIST-Seoul National University Hospital research team develops a computational workflow that predicts metabolites and metabolic pathways associated with somatic mutations in cancers

Bendable energy storage materials by cool science

Inorganic nitrate can help protect patients against kidney damage caused during coronary angiographic procedures

Active social lives help dementia patients, caregivers thrive

New technique measures psilocybin potency of mushrooms

UC Irvine-led research team discovers role of key enzymes that drive cancer mutations

All creatures great and small: Sequencing the blue whale and Etruscan shrew genomes

Sustainable solution for wastewater polluted by dyes used in many industries

Food companies’ sponsorship of children’s sports encourages children to buy their products, Canadian research suggests

USC receives $3.95 million CIRM grant for organoid resource center

New research finds boreal arctic wetlands are producing more methane over time

TLI Investigator Dr. Wei Yan named Editor-in-Chief of the Andrology Journal

New study reveals insights into COVID-19 antibody response durability

Climate change alters the hidden microbial food web in peatlands

Text nudges can increase uptake of COVID-19 boosters– if they play up a sense of ownership of the vaccine

A new study shows how neurochemicals affect fMRI readings

Digital reminders for flu vaccination improves turnout, but not clinical outcomes in older adults

Avatar will not lie... or will it? Scientists investigate how often we change our minds in virtual environments

8-hour time-restricted eating linked to a 91% higher risk of cardiovascular death

Alternative tidal wetlands in plain sight overlooked Blue Carbon superstars

[Press-News.org] Road salts and other human sources are threatening world's freshwater supplies
UMD-led study warns cascading effects of salts require coordinated management and regulation to avoid contaminating natural resources