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Author: Neville

  • Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?

    Is a Sleeping Climate Giant Stirring in the Arctic?

    Permafrost zones occupy nearly a quarter of the exposed land area of the Northern Hemisphere. Permafrost zones occupy nearly a quarter of the exposed land area of the Northern Hemisphere. NASA’s Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment is probing deep into the frozen lands above the Arctic Circle in Alaska to measure emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane from thawing permafrost – signals that may hold a key to Earth’s climate future. Image credit: Hugo Ahlenius, UNEP/GRID-Arendal
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    June 10, 2013

     

    Flying low and slow above the wild, pristine terrain of Alaska’s North Slope in a specially instrumented NASA plane, research scientist Charles Miller of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., surveys the endless whiteness of tundra and frozen permafrost below. On the horizon, a long, dark line appears. The plane draws nearer, and the mysterious object reveals itself to be a massive herd of migrating caribou, stretching for miles. It’s a sight Miller won’t soon forget.

    “Seeing those caribou marching single-file across the tundra puts what we’re doing here in the Arctic into perspective,” said Miller, principal investigator of the Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE), a five-year NASA-led field campaign studying how climate change is affecting the Arctic’s carbon cycle.

    “The Arctic is critical to understanding global climate,” he said. “Climate change is already happening in the Arctic, faster than its ecosystems can adapt. Looking at the Arctic is like looking at the canary in the coal mine for the entire Earth system.”

    Aboard the NASA C-23 Sherpa aircraft from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility, Wallops Island, Va., Miller, CARVE Project Manager Steve Dinardo of JPL and the CARVE science team are probing deep into the frozen lands above the Arctic Circle. The team is measuring emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane from thawing permafrost — signals that may hold a key to Earth’s climate future.

    What Lies Beneath

    Permafrost (perennially frozen) soils underlie much of the Arctic. Each summer, the top layers of these soils thaw. The thawed layer varies in depth from about 4 inches (10 centimeters) in the coldest tundra regions to several yards, or meters, in the southern boreal forests. This active soil layer at the surface provides the precarious foothold on which Arctic vegetation survives. The Arctic’s extremely cold, wet conditions prevent dead plants and animals from decomposing, so each year another layer gets added to the reservoirs of organic carbon sequestered just beneath the topsoil.

    Over hundreds of millennia, Arctic permafrost soils have accumulated vast stores of organic carbon – an estimated 1,400 to 1,850 petagrams of it (a petagram is 2.2 trillion pounds, or 1 billion metric tons). That’s about half of all the estimated organic carbon stored in Earth’s soils. In comparison, about 350 petagrams of carbon have been emitted from all fossil-fuel combustion and human activities since 1850. Most of this carbon is located in thaw-vulnerable topsoils within 10 feet (3 meters) of the surface.

    But, as scientists are learning, permafrost – and its stored carbon – may not be as permanent as its name implies. And that has them concerned.

    “Permafrost soils are warming even faster than Arctic air temperatures – as much as 2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius) in just the past 30 years,” Miller said. “As heat from Earth’s surface penetrates into permafrost, it threatens to mobilize these organic carbon reservoirs and release them into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane, upsetting the Arctic’s carbon balance and greatly exacerbating global warming.”

    Current climate models do not adequately account for the impact of climate change on permafrost and how its degradation may affect regional and global climate. Scientists want to know how much permafrost carbon may be vulnerable to release as Earth’s climate warms, and how fast it may be released.

    CARVing Out a Better Understanding of Arctic Carbon

    Enter CARVE. Now in its third year, this NASA Earth Ventures program investigation is expanding our understanding of how the Arctic’s water and carbon cycles are linked to climate, as well as what effects fires and thawing permafrost are having on Arctic carbon emissions. CARVE is testing hypotheses that Arctic carbon reservoirs are vulnerable to climate warming, while delivering the first direct measurements and detailed regional maps of Arctic carbon dioxide and methane sources and demonstrating new remote sensing and modeling capabilities. About two dozen scientists from 12 institutions are participating.

    “The Arctic is warming dramatically – two to three times faster than mid-latitude regions – yet we lack sustained observations and accurate climate models to know with confidence how the balance of carbon among living things will respond to climate change and related phenomena in the 21st century,” said Miller. “Changes in climate may trigger transformations that are simply not reversible within our lifetimes, potentially causing rapid changes in the Earth system that will require adaptations by people and ecosystems.”

    The CARVE team flew test flights in 2011 and science flights in 2012. This April and May, they completed the first two of seven planned monthly campaigns in 2013, and they are currently flying their June campaign.

    Each two-week flight campaign across the Alaskan Arctic is designed to capture seasonal variations in the Arctic carbon cycle: spring thaw in April/May, the peak of the summer growing season in June/July, and the annual fall refreeze and first snow in September/October. From a base in Fairbanks, Alaska, the C-23 flies up to eight hours a day to sites on Alaska’s North Slope, interior and Yukon River Valley over tundra, permafrost, boreal forests, peatlands and wetlands.

    The C-23 won’t win any beauty contests – its pilots refer to it as “a UPS truck with a bad nose job.” Inside, it’s extremely noisy – the pilots and crew wear noise-cancelling headphones to communicate. “When you take the headphones off, it’s like being at a NASCAR race,” Miller quipped.

    But what the C-23 lacks in beauty and quiet, it makes up for in reliability and its ability to fly “down in the mud,” so to speak. Most of the time, it flies about 500 feet (152 meters) above ground level, with periodic ascents to higher altitudes to collect background data. Most airborne missions measuring atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane do not fly as low. “CARVE shows you need to fly very close to the surface in the Arctic to capture the interesting exchanges of carbon taking place between Earth’s surface and atmosphere,” Miller said.

    Onboard the plane, sophisticated instruments “sniff” the atmosphere for greenhouse gases. They include a very sensitive spectrometer that analyzes sunlight reflected from Earth’s surface to measure atmospheric carbon dioxide, methane and carbon monoxide. This instrument is an airborne simulator for NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) mission to be launched in 2014. Other instruments analyze air samples from outside the plane for the same chemicals. Aircraft navigation data and basic weather data are also collected. Initial data are delivered to scientists within 12 hours. Air samples are shipped to the University of Colorado’s Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research Stable Isotope Laboratory and Radiocarbon Laboratory in Boulder for analyses to determine the carbon’s sources and whether it came from thawing permafrost.

    Much of CARVE’s science will come from flying at least three years, Miller says. “We are showing the power of using dependable, low-cost prop planes to make frequent, repeat measurements over time to look for changes from month to month and year to year.”

    Ground observations complement the aircraft data and are used to calibrate and validate them. The ground sites serve as anchor points for CARVE’s flight tracks. Ground data include air samples from tall towers and measurements of soil moisture and temperature to determine whether soil is frozen, thawed or flooded.

    A Tale of Two Greenhouse Gases

    It’s important to accurately characterize the soils and state of the land surfaces. There’s a strong correlation between soil characteristics and release of carbon dioxide and methane. Historically, the cold, wet soils of Arctic ecosystems have stored more carbon than they have released. If climate change causes the Arctic to get warmer and drier, scientists expect most of the carbon to be released as carbon dioxide. If it gets warmer and wetter, most will be in the form of methane.

    The distinction is critical. Molecule per molecule, methane is 22 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide on a 100-year timescale, and 105 times more potent on a 20-year timescale. If just one percent of the permafrost carbon released over a short time period is methane, it will have the same greenhouse impact as the 99 percent that is released as carbon dioxide. Characterizing this methane to carbon dioxide ratio is a major CARVE objective.

    There are other correlations between Arctic soil characteristics and the release of carbon dioxide and methane. Variations in the timing of spring thaw and the length of the growing season have a major impact on vegetation productivity and whether high northern latitude regions generate or store carbon.

    CARVE is also studying wildfire impacts on the Arctic’s carbon cycle. Fires in boreal forests or tundra accelerate the thawing of permafrost and carbon release. Detailed fire observation records since 1942 show the average annual number of Alaska wildfires has increased, and fires with burn areas larger than 100,000 acres are occurring more frequently, trends scientists expect to accelerate in a warming Arctic. CARVE’s simultaneous measurements of greenhouse gases will help quantify how much carbon is released to the atmosphere from fires in Alaska – a crucial and uncertain element of its carbon budget.

    Early Results

    The CARVE science team is busy analyzing data from its first full year of science flights. What they’re finding, Miller said, is both amazing and potentially troubling.

    “Some of the methane and carbon dioxide concentrations we’ve measured have been large, and we’re seeing very different patterns from what models suggest,” Miller said. “We saw large, regional-scale episodic bursts of higher-than-normal carbon dioxide and methane in interior Alaska and across the North Slope during the spring thaw, and they lasted until after the fall refreeze. To cite another example, in July 2012 we saw methane levels over swamps in the Innoko Wilderness that were 650 parts per billion higher than normal background levels. That’s similar to what you might find in a large city.”

    Ultimately, the scientists hope their observations will indicate whether an irreversible permafrost tipping point may be near at hand. While scientists don’t yet believe the Arctic has reached that tipping point, no one knows for sure. “We hope CARVE may be able to find that ‘smoking gun,’ if one exists,” Miller said.

    Other institutions participating in CARVE include City College of New York; the joint University of Colorado/National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Boulder, Colo.; San Diego State University; University of California, Irvine; California Institute of Technology, Pasadena; Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.; University of California, Berkeley; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, Calif.; University of California, Santa Barbara; NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, Boulder, Colo.; and University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

    For more information on CARVE, visit: http://science.nasa.gov/missions/carve/ .

    Alan Buis
    Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
    818-354-0474
    Alan.buis@jpl.nasa.gov

    2013-197

  • Nanoparticle Opens the Door to Clean-Energy Alternatives

    Nanoparticle Opens the Door to Clean-Energy Alternatives

    June 13, 2013 — Cheaper clean-energy technologies could be made possible thanks to a new discovery. Led by Raymond Schaak, a professor of chemistry at Penn State University, research team members have found that an important chemical reaction that generates hydrogen from water is effectively triggered — or catalyzed — by a nanoparticle composed of nickel and phosphorus, two inexpensive elements that are abundant on Earth.

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    The results of the research will be published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

    Schaak explained that the purpose of the nickel phosphide nanoparticle is to help produce hydrogen from water, which is a process that is important for many energy-production technologies, including fuel cells and solar cells. “Water is an ideal fuel, because it is cheap and abundant, but we need to be able to extract hydrogen from it,” Schaak said. Hydrogen has a high energy density and is a great energy carrier, Schaak explained, but it requires energy to produce. To make its production practical, scientists have been hunting for a way to trigger the required chemical reactions with an inexpensive catalyst. Schaak noted that this feat is accomplished very well by platinum but, because platinum is expensive and relatively rare, he and his team have been searching for alternative materials. “There were some predictions that nickel phosphide might be a good candidate, and we had already been working with nickel phosphide nanoparticles for several years,” Schaak said. “It turns out that nanoparticles of nickel phosphide are indeed active for producing hydrogen and are comparable to the best known alternatives to platinum.”

    To create the nickel phosphide nanoparticles, team members began with metal salts that are commercially available. They then dissolved these salts in solvents, added other chemical ingredients, and heated the solution to allow the nanoparticles to form. The researchers were able create a nanoparticle that was quasi-spherical — not a perfect sphere, but spherical with many flat, exposed edges. “The small size of the nanoparticles creates a high surface area, and the exposed edges means that a large number of sites are available to catalyze the chemical reaction that produces hydrogen,” Schaak explained.

    The next step was for team members at the California Institute of Technology to test the nanoparticles’ performance in catalyzing the necessary chemical reactions. Led by Nathan S. Lewis, the George L. Argyros Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, the researchers performed these tests by placing the nanoparticles onto a sheet of titanium foil and immersing that sheet in a solution of sulfuric acid. Next, the researchers applied a voltage and measured the current produced. They found that, not only were the chemical reactions happening as they had hoped, they also were happening with a high degree of efficacy.

    “Nanoparticle technology has already started to open the door to cheaper and cleaner energy that is also efficient and useful,” Schaak said. “The goal now is to further improve the performance of these nanoparticles and to understand what makes them function the way they do. Also, our team members believe that our success with nickel phosphide can pave the way toward the discovery of other new catalysts that also are composed of Earth-abundant materials. Insights from this discovery may lead to even better catalysts in the future.”

    In addition to Schaak and Lewis, other researchers who contributed to this study include Eric J. Popczun, Carlos G. Read, Adam J. Biacchi, and Alex M. Wiltrout from Penn State; and James R. McKone from the California Institute of Technology.

    The research was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. The team has filed a patent application.

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  • World population to reach 8.1 billion in 2025, UN says

    World population to reach 8.1 billion in 2025, UN says

    India’s population is expected to surpass China’s around 2028

    The Associated Press

    Posted: Jun 13, 2013 3:29 PM ET

    Last Updated: Jun 13, 2013 3:39 PM ET

    A crowd swarms at a market area near a train station in Mumbai, India in July 2012. The UN says India's population is expected to surpass China's in 2028. A crowd swarms at a market area near a train station in Mumbai, India in July 2012. The UN says India’s population is expected to surpass China’s in 2028. (Rajanish Kakade/Associated Pres)
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    The United Nations forecast Thursday that the world’s population will increase from 7.2 billion today to 8.1 billion in 2025, with most growth in developing countries and more than half in Africa. By 2050, it will reach 9.6 billion.

    India’s population is expected to surpass China’s around 2028 when both countries will have populations of around 1.45 billion, the report on “World Population Prospects.” While India’s population is forecast to grow to around 1.6 billion and then slowly decline to 1.5 billion in 2100, China’s is expected to start decreasing after 2030, possibly falling to 1.1 billion in 2100.

    “By the end of the century, Nigeria could start to rival China as the second most populous country in the world,” the report said, forecasting Nigeria’s population at 913.8 million in 2100.

    John Wilmoth, director of the Population Division in the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, which prepared the report, cautioned that “there is a great deal of uncertainty about population trends.”

    “Trends and future population will be affected by the trajectories of its three major components — fertility, mortality and migration — but especially by the future course of fertility,” he said.

    Fallen fertility rates

    He said fertility has fallen rapidly, especially since the 1960s. The average number of children per woman has swiftly declined in several large countries, including China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Brazil and South Africa, leading to a reduction in population growth rates in much of the developing world.

    But Wilmoth said the UN’s projections of future population have been revised upward from those issued two years ago, based mainly on recently available data on fertility levels.

    In 15 high-fertility countries of sub-Saharan Africa, the estimated average number of children per woman has been adjusted upwards by more than five per cent, he said. These include Angola, Cameroon, Congo, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Niger and Nigeria.

    The report said population in developing regions is projected to increase from 5.9 billion in 2013 to 8.2 billion in 2050.

    During that same period, it said, the population of developed countries is expected to remain largely unchanged at around 1.3 billion people.

    In Africa, the report said, the population could increase from 1.1 billion today to 2.4 billion in 2050 and potentially 4.2 billion by 2100.

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  • Methane Adsorption by Shales

    Methane Adsorption by Shales

    A new study focusing on the validated measurement of methane adsorption by shale under practical geological conditions has just been published in the American Chemical Society (ACS) journal Energy & Fuels.

    A shale sample

    This is an important topic due to the recent emergence of shale gas as a significant unconventional gas resource.

    Professor Mark Thomas of Newcastle University in the UK, and co-workers at Durham University (UK) and Hiden Isochema, studied methane (CH4) adsorption in a dry, organic-rich Alum shale sample at pressures up to approximately 14 MPa, in the temperature range 300 – 473 K. The measurement of adsorption at these elevated pressures and temperatures is important, in order to assess the capacity of shales under practical conditions, since commercial gas shales are commonly located at a burial depth of 1 – 2 km, which corresponds to pressures in the range 10 – 20 MPa and temperatures between 40°C and 80°C (313 – 353 K).

    The high pressure, above-ambient temperature methane adsorption data were complemented by adsorption measurements performed using nitrogen (N2) at 77 K, carbon dioxide (CO2) at 273 and 195 K, and methane at 112 K.

    The high pressure excess methane adsorption data were measured on a Hiden Isochema Intelligent Manometric Instrument (IMI) at ten different temperatures, and thus allowed a detailed analysis of the adsorption behaviour as a function of both temperature and pressure. Additionally, carbon dioxide adsorption data up to 3 MPa were measured using the IMI, with the low pressure adsorption of nitrogen, carbon dioxide and methane determined using a Hiden Isochema Intelligent Gravimetric Analyzer (IGA).

    The measurement of subcritical methane adsorption at 112 K was particularly useful because the absolute adsorption at this temperature, calculated assuming the adsorbed phase has the same density as liquid methane, represents an upper limit for adsorption.

    At 273 K, the gravimetrically-determined carbon dioxide adsorption data, plotted as a function of relative pressure, agreed with the manometrically-determined carbon dioxide data in the overlapping regime, thus validating the data. This is important due to the low uptakes typically exhibited by shales, which make accurate sorption measurements more challenging than those performed on high surface area nanoporous materials, such as activated carbons, zeolites and metal-organic frameworks (MOFs).

    In addition, the subcritical methane, carbon dioxide and nitrogen adsorption isotherms, plotted as a normalized molar uptake against relative pressure, also show good agreement, indicating that the use of carbon dioxide and nitrogen adsorption to characterize the pore volume of this particular shale is valid.

    A number of models were then fitted to the high pressure methane adsorption data in order to parameterize the behaviour of the material. The fitting parameters from the best performing model, which used the Supercritical Dubinin-Radushkevich (SDR) equation, then allowed the prediction of the excess and absolute amounts of adsorbed methane for this particular shale as a function of geological depth.

    Find out more by downloading the full article now from the ACS Energy & Fuels website:

    Methane Adsorption on Shale under Simulated Geological Temperature and Pressure Conditions

    Thomas F. T. Rexer, Michael J. Benham, Andrew C. Aplin, and K. Mark Thomas, Energy & Fuels, 2013, Article ASAP (As Soon As Publishable)

    DOI: 10.1021/ef400381v

    The study was supported by the GASH (Gas Shales in Europe) project, which is funded by Bayerngas, ExxonMobil, GdFSuez, Marathon, Repsol, Schlumberger, Statoil, Total, Vermilion and Wintershall.

    If you would like to find out more about our instrumentation for the measurement of high pressure methane adsorption, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

    Posted on June 10th 2013 in Research

  • Warm Ocean, Not Icebergs, Causing Most of Antarctic Ice Shelves’ Mass Loss NASA

    J.D. Harrington
    Headquarters, Washington
    202-358-5241
    j.d.harrington@nasa.gov

    Maria-Jose Vinas Garcia
    Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
    301-614-5883
    maria-jose.vinasgarcia@nasa.gov

    Whitney Clavin
    Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
    818-354-4673
    whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

    June 13, 2013

    RELEASE : 13-183

    Warm Ocean, Not Icebergs, Causing Most of Antarctic Ice Shelves’ Mass Loss

    PASADENA, Calif. — Ocean waters melting the undersides of Antarctic ice shelves are responsible for most of the continent’s ice shelf mass loss, a new study by NASA and university researchers has found.

    Scientists have studied the rates of basal melt, or the melting of the ice shelves from underneath, of individual ice shelves, the floating extensions of glaciers that empty into the sea. But this is the first comprehensive survey of all Antarctic ice shelves. The study found basal melt accounted for 55 percent of all Antarctic ice shelf mass loss from 2003 to 2008, an amount much higher than previously thought.

    Antarctica holds about 60 percent of the planet’s fresh water locked into its massive ice sheet. Ice shelves buttress the glaciers behind them, modulating the speed at which these rivers of ice flow into the ocean. Determining how ice shelves melt will help scientists improve projections of how the Antarctic ice sheet will respond to a warming ocean and contribute to sea level rise. It also will improve global models of ocean circulation by providing a better estimate of the amount of fresh water ice shelf melting adds to Antarctic coastal waters.

    The study uses reconstructions of ice accumulation, satellite and aircraft readings of ice thickness, and changes in elevation and ice velocity to determine how fast ice shelves melt and compare the mass lost with the amount released by the calving, or splitting, of icebergs.

    “The traditional view on Antarctic mass loss is it is almost entirely controlled by iceberg calving,” said Eric Rignot of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the University of California, Irvine. Rignot is lead author of the study to be published in the June 14 issue of the journal Science. “Our study shows melting from below by the ocean waters is larger, and this should change our perspective on the evolution of the ice sheet in a warming climate.”

    Ice shelves grow through a combination of land ice flowing to the sea and snow accumulating on their surface. To determine how much ice and snowfall enters a specific ice shelf and how much makes it to an iceberg, where it may split off, the research team used a regional climate model for snow accumulation and combined the results with ice velocity data from satellites, ice shelf thickness measurements from NASA’s Operation IceBridge — an continuing aerial survey of Earth’s poles — and a new map of Antarctica’s bedrock.
    Using this information, Rignot and colleagues were able to deduce whether the ice shelf was losing mass through basal melting or gaining it through the basal freezing of seawater.

    In some places, basal melt exceeds iceberg calving. In other places, the opposite is true. But in total, Antarctic ice shelves lost 2,921 trillion pounds (1,325 trillion kilograms) of ice per year in 2003-2008 through basal melt, while iceberg formation accounted for 2,400 trillion pounds (1,089 trillion kilograms) of mass loss each year.

    Basal melt can have a greater impact on ocean circulation than glacier calving. Icebergs slowly release melt water as they drift away from the continent. But strong melting near deep grounding lines, where glaciers lose their grip on the seafloor and start floating as ice shelves, discharges large quantities of fresher, lighter water near the Antarctic coast line. This lower-density water does not mix and sink as readily as colder, saltier water, and may be changing the rate of bottom water renewal.

    “Changes in basal melting are helping to change the properties of Antarctic bottom water, which is one component of the ocean’s overturning circulation,” said author Stan Jacobs, an oceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y. “In some areas it also impacts ecosystems by driving coastal upwelling, which brings up micronutrients like iron that fuel persistent plankton blooms in the summer.”

    The study found basal melting is distributed unevenly around the continent. The three giant ice shelves of Ross, Filchner and Ronne, which make up two-thirds of the total Antarctic ice shelf area, accounted for only 15 percent of basal melting. Meanwhile, fewer than a dozen small ice shelves floating on “warm” waters (seawater only a few degrees above the freezing point) produced half of the total melt water during the same period. The scientists detected a similar high rate of basal melting under six small ice shelves along East Antarctica, a region not as well known because of a scarcity of measurements.

    The researchers also compared the rates at which the ice shelves are shedding ice to the speed at which the continent itself is losing mass and found that, on average, ice shelves lost mass twice as fast as the Antarctic ice sheet did during the study period.

    “Ice shelf melt doesn’t necessarily mean an ice shelf is decaying; it can be compensated by the ice flow from the continent,” Rignot said. “But in a number of places around Antarctica, ice shelves are melting too fast, and a consequence of that is glaciers and the entire continent are changing as well.”

    For images related to this release, please visit:

    http://go.nasa.gov/175OAkF

     

    – end –

  • Debate on Environment Grows as Drought Tests Texas Rivers

    Note the rust on the bridge
    The Texas Tribune

    Debate on Environment Grows as Drought Tests Texas Rivers

    Michael Stravato for The Texas Tribune

    Part of the Neches River, above, turned black in 2011, the driest year in Texas history.

    By
    Published: June 14, 2013
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    BEAUMONT — As the Neches River flows south toward a string of oil refineries and manufacturing plants in Southeast Texas, it winds through an area so ecologically diverse that the National Park Service runs a preserve called Big Thicket along its banks.

    The Texas TribuneExpanded coverage of Texas is produced by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit news organization. To join the conversation about this article, go to texastribune.org.

    Michael Stravato for The Texas Tribune

    A survey map of vegetation at the Neches, near Beaumont.

    Despite recent spring rains, years of drought have caught up to the landscape. In 2011, the driest year in recorded Texas history, part of the river became so stagnant that it turned black.

    “You see all those dead trees?” said Kirk Winemiller, who runs an aquatic ecology laboratory at Texas A&M University, pointing from a boat toward bald cypress trees that rose like ghosts along the bank. “They weren’t dead when we came out in 2011.” (Texas A&M University is a corporate sponsor of The Texas Tribune.)

    Like the Neches, other rivers across Texas have been severely tested by the long-running drought, which still blankets most of the state and comes on top of increasing demands for water from a growing population and industrial base. Average stream-flow measurements are well below normal, especially in western regions, prompting worries about increased salinity and the health of fish and plants. The environmental group American Rivers recently listed the San Saba River in the Hill Country as the country’s third-most-endangered river, because of heavy pumping by farmers.

    Six years ago, the Texas government began an effort to manage the rivers’ health better. But environmental advocates fear that ecology still takes a back seat while the state frets about having enough water in the future for its growing cities. And climate change threatens further disruptions.

    The Texas water plan, a wish list of water-supply projects like reservoirs that lawmakers are willing to spend $2 billion to finance, includes no projects to help fish and wildlife, said Myron Hess, who manages the Texas Water Program for the National Wildlife Federation.

    “In my mind, it’s not acceptable to just say we’re not going to worry about what’s going to happen to the environment,” he said, noting that rivers offer economy-boosting activities like fishing, tourism and recreation.

    Merry Klonower, a spokeswoman for the Texas Water Development Board, said that the state water plan did take water for the environment into account, because the water supply available was reduced.

    Texas’ focus on the environmental health of its rivers increased in 2007, when state lawmakers passed a bill that created a process for studying and managing “environmental flows,” the amount of water needed to sustain the ecology of major river basins and bays.

    The bill “represents one of the most groundbreaking environmental compromises” between Texas water suppliers and environmental groups, said Mary Kelly, who runs Parula, an environmental consulting firm in Austin, and was involved in the negotiations.

    After a river basin is studied, scientists, farmers, citizens, water suppliers and other stakeholders make recommendations for its management. The input also takes future water needs of people and businesses into account. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the state’s environmental agency, has the final say over how much water should flow down the river. Lawmakers provided $2 million in additional money for the process during the legislative session that concluded recently.

    On a practical level, environmental flow standards can translate to the release of more water from reservoirs. This spring, for example, the agency that manages Texas’ Colorado River released a large amount of water — roughly equivalent to 35,000 Texas households’ annual use — from its reservoirs to aid the blue sucker, a threatened fish species, during its spawning season.

    The agency has already issued flow standards for a number of rivers, including the Colorado, but it has more to cover, including the Rio Grande, the Brazos and the Nueces. Dr. Winemiller and Ms. Kelly (who serves on a science advisory committee in the flows process) say that the commission’s recommendations have often fallen short of scientific recommendations. So the ecological standards for rivers like the Neches, the Trinity and the Guadalupe are not as high as scientists (and even some stakeholders) think they should be.

    “T.C.E.Q.’s adopted environmental flow standards include many of the science team and stakeholder recommendations,” Terry Clawson, an agency spokesman, said in an e-mail.

    A big concern hangs over this river-management process: if the state cannot manage its own rivers, the federal government could step in to help, amid concerns about endangered species.

    A court case with potentially significant implications for Texas river management involves the whooping crane, an endangered bird that likes to spend winters on the Texas coast. In March, a federal district judge ruled that the environmental quality commission had failed to ensure that sufficient water to aid the whooping cranes was released down the Guadalupe and San Antonio Rivers. At least 23 cranes died as a result, the judge found.

    Texas has appealed, and a federal appeals court will hear oral arguments in the case in August.

    “Texas is very proud of their history of making largely autonomous water-permitting, water-use decisions,” said David Smith, a lawyer with the Austin firm Graves Dougherty Hearon & Moody. “You throw a couple of federal listed species in the mix, and all of a sudden you have those decisions being made with the specter of having federal oversight.” (Graves Dougherty Hearon & Moody is a corporate sponsor of The Tribune.)

    In the coming years, Texas may encounter further endangered-species questions involving its waterways. For example, the federal government is expected to consider whether to list various species of freshwater mussels found in Texas rivers.

    Meanwhile, human demands continue to put pressure on the rivers. The United States Army Corps of Engineers is seeking Congressional approval to deepen the Sabine-Neches Waterway, downstream from Big Thicket near the Gulf of Mexico, to allow larger ships to reach the ports.

    That could cause more saltwater to flow upriver, scientists say. The saltwater, which can harm swamp vegetation, is stopped by a barrier near Beaumont, which protects the city’s water supply.

    When the river turned black two years ago, saltwater was a key factor — some of it left over from Hurricane Ike in 2008, according to Scott Hall, general manager of the Lower Neches Valley Authority, which manages the river and sells its water.

    A paper mill has a permit to discharge an average of 65 million gallons of wastewater daily into the Neches not far below the barrier. Mr. Hall said in an e-mail, however, that he believed “the water color was much more influenced by the high salt concentration than the paper mill effluent.”

    This year, with the rains, the river system is “in pretty good shape,” he added.

    kgalbraith@texastribune.org

    A version of this article appeared in print on June 14, 2013, on page A21A of the National edition with the headline: Debate on Environment Grows as Drought Tests Texas Rivers.

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