The Political Economy and Political Ecology of the Hydro-Social Cycle

Erik Swyngedouw

First published: 02 September 2009

 

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1936-704X.2009.00054.x

Citations: 270

 Journal of Contemporary Water Research & Education

PDF

We are witnessing something unprecedented: Water no longer flows downhill. It flows towards money

(Robert F. Kennedy Jr.).

Geographers have been engaged in research into access to safe drinking water for years. In fact, Abel Wolman helped chlorinate the world's water. Over the past few years and in the wake of the resurgence of the environmental question on the political agenda, a growing body of work has emerged on the political-economy and political-ecology of water and water circulation (Gandy 1997, Loftus 2005, Kaika 2005, Castro 2006). This is re-defining the contours of water resources research and opening up an exciting and vitally important research agenda for the years to come.

Political-ecological perspectives on water suggest a close correlation between the transfor-mations of, and in, the hydrological cycle at local, regional and global levels on the one hand and relations of social, political, economic, and cultural power on the other (Swyngedouw 2004). In a sustained attempt to transcend the modernist nature – society binaries, hydro-social research envisions the circulation of water as a combined physical and social process, as a hybridized socio-natural flow that fuses together nature and society in inseparable manners (Swyngedouw 2006a). It calls for revisiting traditional fragmented and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of water by insisting on the inseparability of the social and the physical in the production of particular hydro-social configurations (Bakker 2003, Heynen et al. 2005).

Such a perspective opens all manner of new and key research issues and urges considering a transformation in the way in which water policies are thought about, formulated, and implemented. In what follows, an outline is provided of some of the vital issues and socio-natural properties of the hydro-social cycle and charts the terrain for future research.

Metabolizing the Global/Local Hydro-Social Cycle: The Connection to Struggles for Power

Changes in the use, management, and socio-political organization of the water cycle and social changes co-determine each other (Norgaard 1994). Combined with the transformation of water's terrestrial and atmospheric circulation, they produce distinct forms of hydro-social circulation and new relationships between local water circulations to global hydrological circuits. In other words, hydraulic environments are socio-physical constructions that are actively and historically produced, both in terms of social content and physical-environmental qualities. There is, therefore, nothing apriori unnatural about constructed environments such as dams, irrigation systems, hydraulic infrastructures, and so forth (Harvey 1996).

Produced environments are specific historical results of socio-biophysical processes. Most social processes and socio-ecological conditions (cities, agricultural or industrial production systems and the like) are invariably sustained by and organized through a combination of social processes on the one hand (such as capital/labor relations and forms of organization of labor) and metabolic-ecological processes (that is the biological, chemical or physical transformation of ‘natural’ resources, usually organized through a series of interlinked technologies) on the other (Heynen et al. 2005). These metabolisms (for example, the production of potable water, agricultural products or computer chips) produce a series of both enabling and disabling social and environmental conditions. While environmental (both social and physical) qualities may be enhanced in some places and for some people, this often leads to a deterioration of social and physical conditions elsewhere (Peet and Watts 1996, Keil 2000). Processes of socio-environmental change are, therefore, never socially or ecologically neutral. This results in conditions under which particular trajectories of socio-environmental change undermine the stability or coherence of some social groups or environments, while the sustainability of others elsewhere might be enhanced. Consider, for example, how the provision of water to large cities often implies carrying water over long distances from other places or regions. The mobilization of water for different uses in different places is a conflict-ridden process and each techno-social system for organizing the flow and transformation of water (through dams, canals, pipes, and the like) shows how social power is distributed in a given society (Swyngedouw 1999). For example, access to potable water in the megacities of the Global South is precarious for a large number of people despite the fact that the rich and powerful generally have more than enough water available for necessary and luxury use. In sum, the political-ecological examination of the hydro-social process reveals the inherently conflict-ridden nature of the process of socio-environmental change and teases out the inevitable conflicts (or the displacements thereof) that infuse socio-environmental change. Particular attention, therefore, needs to be paid to social power relations (whether material, economic, political, or cultural) through which hydro-social transformations take place. This would also include the analysis of the discourses and arguments that are mobilized to defend or legitimate particular strategies. It is these power geometries and the social actors carrying them that ultimately decide who will have access to or control over, and who will be excluded from access to or control over, resources or other components of the environment. In sum, it will be vital to examine how hydro-social transformations are imbedded in and infused by class, gender, ethnic or other power struggles. These struggles will undoubtedly intensify in the near future as environmental change accelerates and this requires urgent scholarly attention.

Water Scarcities or Water Surpluses?

One of the pivotal terrains of environmental social struggle unfolds over access to, control over, and distribution of parts of the hydro-social cycle. Powerful arguments have been mobilized in recent years that frame water as a fundamentally scarce resource in some places on the one hand, and as posing immanent or real dangers due to overabundance in areas prone to flooding, hurricanes, and the like on the other (Bakker 2000, Kaika 2003). This area requires immediate and urgent attention, especially given impacts of climate change. Forms of relative scarcity in relation to existing socio-physical conditions can be observed in particular historical-geographical contexts. And, water power can wreck considerable socio-climatologic havoc (e.g., in New Orleans in 2005 or in the UK in 2007). Just as importantly, the positive and negative socio-environmental consequences of such conditions are socially highly unevenly distributed, and are generated through the particular political and institutional organization of the hydro-social cycle. While hegemonic neoliberal arguments claim that the market offers the optimal mechanism for the allocation of presumably scarce water resources, and the literature on water-related hazards charts the uneven distribution of the social effects engendered by such water crises, a political-ecological perspective insists on, and traces, the fundamentally socially produced character of such inequitable hydro-social configurations (Swyngedouw 2006b, 2007). There is an urgent need, therefore, to theorize and empirically substantiate the processes through which particular socio-hydrological configurations become produced that generate inequitable socio-hydrological conditions. Put simply, interventions in the organization of the hydrological cycle are always political in character and therefore contested and contestable. This intrinsically social character of water resources management and organization needs to be teased out and clarified.

Whose Waters?

The above implies the need to address the question of who is entitled to what quality, kind and what volumes of water and who should control, manage and/or decide how the hydro-social cycle will be organized. While social movements often invoke principles of universal water rights on the basis of the biological necessity of access to minimum volumes of sufficient quality of water in order to sustain bodily metabolisms and social reproduction, such calls for universal water rights are systematically undermined by equally powerful calls related to property rights and the exclusive usage associated with them. In fact, uneven access to or control over water is invariably the outcome of combined geographical conditions, technical choices and politico-legal arrangements and water inequalities have to be understood increasingly as the outcome of the mutually constituted interplay between these three factors. Water research has for too long concentrated on either the physical side or the managerial side of the water problematic, often tiptoeing around the vexed question of how political economic power relations fuse the physical and the managerial together in particular and invariably socially uneven ways.

As Aristotle pointed out a long time ago, when two equal rights meet, power decides. Indeed, under the current neo-liberal hegemony, water rights are increasingly articulated via dynamics of commodification of water, private appropriation of water resources, dispossession tactics, and the like (Bakker 2003). Consider, for example, how in former socialist states or in China publicly owned water facilities and infrastructure have been transferred, often without much compensation, to private actors and capital, or how financial investment funds (of the kind that produced, in 2008, the greatest financial crisis in a century) have been investing in water facilities as a purely financial asset. Macquarie, the Australian investment fund, for example, bought Thames Water, London's water supply system, in 2006. In other words, the hydro-social circulation process is increasingly articulated via the financial nexus (see Swyngedouw 2009).

There is an urgent need to analyze how common or public water rights are socially, politically, and economically transformed into exclusive property rights whose access is choreographed though market mechanisms. There is significant urban-rural tension in this scenario, evident in cities such as Las Vegas (for more see the article by Smith, Jr. in this same volume). Accumulation by dispossession and the systematic inclusion of parts of the hydro-social cycle in accumulation tactics of private actors is rapidly reshaping the mechanisms and procedures that regulate and organize access to, and exclusion from access, to water, and is, consequently, altering the social mechanisms that shape water entitlements and water rights (Harvey 2003). Increasingly, access to water is understood and seen as organized through market mechanisms and the power of money, irrespective of social, human or ecological need.

An understanding of the above is vital in light of the failure of the international community to move decisively towards fulfilling the “Millennium Goal” of halving the number of people worldwide that have inadequate access to water and sanitation by 2015. It can now be confidently predicted that these objectives will not be met, largely because of the hegemony of the neo-liberal model that makes public subsidies unacceptable, while privatizing water delivery systems have systematically failed to alleviate significantly the water crisis in the Global South in places such as Manila, Jakarta, or Lagos (see Swyngedouw 2009). Inadequate access to water services, particularly in the less-wealthy world's megacities, is the prime cause of premature mortality and this human and environmental cost outweighs massively the predicted negative human consequences of global climate change.

Of course, it is invariably the poor and powerless that die of inadequate sanitation (Gleick 2004, Gleick and Cooley 2006). True scarcity does not reside in the physical absence of water in most cases, but in the lack of monetary resources and political and economic clout. Poverty and governance that marginalizes makes people die of thirst, not absence of water. It is these urban political-ecological perspectives that bring out the economic and political power relations through which access to, control over, and distribution of water is organized. While choices regarding what technology is ‘appropriate,’ in terms of being physically, culturally, and economically sustainable and equitable, also play a major role in determining access to safe water in less-wealthy settings (Smith, Jr. 2008), the consideration and implementation of these choices is a decidedly political process and should be analyzed as such.

Governing Hydro-Social Configurations

Hydro-social configurations, of course, generally reflect hegemonic political, social, and cultural preferences. Ever since Karl Wittfogel's seminal work on the relationship between autocratic power and hydrological systems, it has become clear that social power becomes articulated through socio-technical systems (Wittfogel 1957). This is as true for the Three Gorges Dam in China as for the management of the Upper and Lower Colorado River, or irrigation of vineyards in California. There is an urgent need, therefore, to explore the intricate relationship between political systems, and the use, management, and distribution of water and organization of the hydro-social system. In particular, questions arise as to the relationship between democratic governance on the one hand and water management on the other. It is now commonly recognized that many large hydro-social systems are associated with autocratic political and institutional organizations (Worster 1985, Swyngedouw 2006b). The present debate over water resources often sacrifices democratic governance on the altar of technological or economic efficiency, while safeguarding existing power relations. Exploring the relationship between democracy, water governance and social power is a vitally important research question. There are also quality questions to be asked regarding the capacity of democratic and other systems to deal with crises that can be associated with drought, floods, and disease. This is particularly acute as water-related crises are bound to increase both in number and in scale. There is an urgent need, therefore, to consider democratic modes of water governance on a variety of interrelated geographical scales. This is particularly acute in regions with strongly competing water demands (e.g., urban vs. rural demand regarding scarce water) on the one hand, or where significant socio-political tensions propel water to be used as a formidable geo-political weapon (e.g., in the recent threat by Israel to cut off Gaza's water supply).

Imagining Different Hydro-Social Metabolisms

To summarize, there are intricate and multidimensional relationships between the socio-technical organization of the hydro-social cycle, the associated power geometries that choreograph access to and exclusion from water, as well as the uneven political power relations that affect flows of water. There is an urgent need to explore the various ways in which social power in its different economic, cultural, and political expressions fuse together with water management principles, choice of technological systems, and structures of supply, delivery, and evacuation of water. To the extent that there is indeed a close relationship between hydro-social ordering and political-economic configurations or, in other words, between the “nature of society” and the “nature of its water flows,” every hydro-social project reflects a particular type of socio-environmental organization. Imagining different, more inclusive, sustainable and equitable forms of hydro-social organization implies imagining different and more effective, assumingly democratic, forms of social organization. This challenge is probably the most pressing one, and one that requires a sustained intellectual endeavor and the mobilization of significant creative energies of all those who make water their terrain of scholarly work.

Author Bio and Contact Information

Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography at the School of Environment and Development of Manchester University. He previously taught at Oxford University and was Fellow of St. Peter's College. He is the author of, among others, Social Power and the Urbanization of Water (Oxford University Press 2004) and co-editor of In the Nature of Cities (Routledge 2006). He has written extensively on the political ecology and the political economy of water. He can be contacted at erik.swyngedouw@manchester.ac.uk.

POLITICAL ECOLOGY IS POLITICAL ECONOMY

Intense drought or flash floods can shock the global economy

Rainfall extremes affect manufacturing and services more than agriculture, a study suggests

Heavy rains, like those that caused severe flooding in Old Town Alexandria, Va., on October 29, 2021, can disrupt the global economy.
ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES PLUS


By Carolyn Gramling
SCIENCE NEWS
JANUARY 21, 2022 

Extremes in rainfall — whether intense drought or flash floods — can catastrophically slow the global economy, researchers report in the Jan. 13 Nature. And those impacts are most felt by wealthy, industrialized nations, the researchers found.

A global analysis showed that episodes of intense drought led to the biggest shocks to economic productivity. But days with intense deluges — such as occurred in July 2021 in Europe — also produced strong shocks to the economic system (SN: 8/23/21). Most surprising, though, was that agricultural economies appeared to be relatively resilient against these types of shocks, says Maximilian Kotz, an environmental economist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Instead, two other business sectors — manufacturing and services — were the most hard-hit.

As a result, the nations most affected by rainfall extremes weren’t those that tended to be poorer, with agriculture-dependent societies, but the wealthiest nations, whose economies are tied more heavily to manufacturing and services, such as banking, health care and entertainment.

It’s well established that rising temperatures can take a toll on economic productivity, for example by contributing to days lost at work or doctors’ visits (SN: 11/28/18). Extreme heat also has clear impacts on human behavior (SN: 8/18/21). But what effect climate change–caused shifts in rainfall might have on the global economy hasn’t been so straightforward.

That’s in part because previous studies looking at a possible connection between rainfall and productivity have focused on changes in yearly precipitation, a timeframe that “is just too coarse to really describe what’s actually happening [in] the economy,” Kotz says. Such studies showed that more rain in a given year was basically beneficial, which makes sense in that having more water available is good for agriculture and other human activities, he adds. “But these findings were mainly focused on agriculturally dependent economies and poorer economies.”

In the new study, Kotz and his colleagues looked at three timescales — annual, monthly and daily rainfall — and examined what happened to economic output for time periods in which the rainfall deviated from average historical values. In particular, Kotz says, they introduced two new measures not considered in previous studies: the amount of rainy days that a region gets in a year and extreme daily rainfall. The team then examined these factors across 1,554 regions around the world — which included many subregions within 77 countries — from 1979 to 2019.

The disparity over which regions are hit hardest is “at odds with the conventional wisdom” — and with some previous studies — that agriculture is vulnerable to extreme rainfall, writes Xin-Zhong Liang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland in College Park, in a commentary in the same issue of Nature. Researchers may need to incorporate other factors in future assessments, such as growth stages of crops, land drainage or irrigation, in order to really understand how these extremes affect agriculture, Liang writes.

“That was definitely surprising for us as well,” Kotz says. Although the study doesn’t specifically try to answer why manufacturing and services were so affected, it makes intuitive sense, he says. Flooding, for example, can damage infrastructure and disrupt transportation, effects that can then propagate along supply chains. “It’s feasible that these things might be most important in manufacturing, where infrastructure is very important, or in the services sectors, where the human experience is very much dictated by these daily aspects of weather and rainfall.”

Including daily and monthly rainfall extremes in this type of analysis was “an important innovation” because it revealed new economic vulnerabilities, says Tamma Carleton, an environmental economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who was not involved in the new work. However, Carleton says, “the findings in the paper are not yet conclusive on who is most vulnerable and why, and instead raise many important questions for future research to unpack.”

Extreme rainfall events, including both drought and deluge, will occur more frequently as global temperatures rise, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted in August (SN: 8/9/21). The study’s findings, Kotz says, offer yet another stark warning to the industrialized, wealthy world: Human-caused climate change will have “large economic consequences.”

Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at feedback@sciencenews.org

CITATIONS

M. Kotz, A. Levermann and L. Wenz. The effect of rainfall changes on economic production. Nature. Vol. 601, January 13, 2022, p. 223, doi: 10.1038/s41586-021-04283-8.


X.-Z. Liang. Extreme rainfall slows the global economy. Nature. Vol. 601, January 13, 2022, p. 193. doi: 10.1038/d41586-021-03783-x.


Political ecology - Wikipedia
The term "political ecology" was first coined by Frank Thone in an article published in 1935.^[3] It has been widely used since then in the context of human geography and human ecology, but with no systematic definition. Anthropologist Eric R. Wolf gave it a second life in 1972 in an article entitled "Ownership and Political Ecology", in which he discusses how local rules of ownership and inheritance "mediate between the pressures emanating from the larger society and the exigencies of the local ecosystem", but did not develop the concept further.^[4] Other origins include other early works of Eric R. Wolf, Michael J. Watts, Susanna Hecht, and others in the 1970s and 1980s.

What Is Political Ecology?

Tatiana Romanova

From Practice to Theory and Strategy

Tatiana Romanova is Associate Professor at the European Studies Department, Saint-Petersburg State University; and Head of Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence, Russia.

Resume: Political ecology is an extremely interesting and promising area of research – both theoretical and applied. However, further probes are required, that would make it possible to move on from the accumulation of empirical data to the required level of theorizing, and also to devise a comprehensive strategy for the state to follow in practice. Delays in this field would keep Russia in a second-rate position in the world for decades to come.

Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction

Paul Robbins
John Wiley & Sons, Dec 12, 2011 - Science - 298 pages
0 Reviews
This fully updated new edition introduces the core concepts, central thinkers, and major works of the burgeoning field of political ecology.
Explores the key arguments and contemporary explanatory challenges facing the sub-discipline
Provides the first full history of the development of political ecology over the last century and its theoretical underpinnings
Considers the major challenges facing the field now and for the future
Study boxes introduce key figures in the development of the discipline and summarize their most important works
Fully updated to include recent events, such as the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill, as well as both urban and rural examples, from the developed and underdeveloped world

What the Tonga volcano’s past tells us about what to expect next

The January 15 blast triggered atmospheric shock waves and a rare volcanic tsunami

The explosive eruption of Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha'apai volcano in the South Pacific Ocean on January 15 spewed ash and dust into the stratosphere, while the undersea part of the event triggered a deadly tsunami.
NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY


By Carolyn Gramling
JANUARY 21, 2022 

On January 15, an underwater volcano in the island nation of Tonga erupted with the explosive force of a nuclear bomb, and it may not be done just yet.

The eruption of Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai volcano in the South Pacific launched a towering, mushroom-shaped cloud of ash and dust at least 20 kilometers into the atmosphere — and possibly as high as 39 kilometers by one estimate. The blast sent shock waves that are still rippling through the atmosphere a week later.

Images show ash caked on Tonga islands, coating buildings, clinging to crops and probably contaminating water supplies. The power of the explosion also triggered a rare volcanic tsunami that raced across the ocean, inundating the densely populated island of Tongatapu 65 kilometers away from the eruption, sending residents fleeing to higher ground. At least three people have died due to the eruption and tsunami.

The volcano may now return to a period of dormancy after releasing its fury. But it also might not. Researchers who have studied Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai’s eruptive history, recorded in layers of hardened ash and fragments of volcanic pumice, say that this volcano has tended to erupt explosively every thousand years or so — and not just once, but in multiple pulses.

Whether that will happen this time, and if so, when, is very difficult to say at this point, says Shane Cronin, a volcanologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He has been working with colleagues to gather information on the volcano to help with relief efforts and predict what might come next.

As a mushroom-shaped cloud burst from the Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai volcano in Tonga in the South Pacific, the blast generated a sonic boom heard as far away as Alaska and sent atmospheric shock waves rippling around the world.

NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY

“Time will tell, and the next few days may tell us a lot,” he says.

Tonga has no active seismometers — and communications from the island nation remain largely incapacitated by ashfall and flooding. But with the help of satellite images, Cronin and others are keeping close watch over the region, hunting for changes to the volcano’s shape or height or other indicators that may signal that magma might be on the move again.

For now, the volcano’s violent past may offer some clues to its future. Even before the recent eruption, most of the volcano, including the caldera, or central crater, was submerged; now it’s sunk even farther. But at the crater’s fringe lie two small, uninhabited islands — Hunga-Tonga and Hunga-Ha’apai. They once rose a hundred meters or so above the water. That’s where, after a small 2014–2015 eruption, a new volcanic cone appeared, essentially bridging the two islands. That provided a landing spot for Cronin and his colleagues, who journeyed there in 2015 and discovered Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai‘s hidden history.

Cronin talked with Science News about the recent eruption, why its tsunami was so unusual and his and his colleagues’ efforts to piece together the volcano’s history. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

SN: What’s happening in the eruption’s aftermath? Satellite images show a cloud of sulfur dioxide from the volcano over the Pacific.

Cronin: Yes, the plume is stretched out really long now to the northwest. It’s quite high in the atmosphere, over 25 kilometers in elevation. So it will stay there for a little while, not long enough to make a long-term climate impact but certainly enough to generate some acid rain [in the region].

SN: What are some of the ashfall hazards?

Cronin: [Satellite photos suggest many Tonga] islands are gray and covered in ash. It’s very hard to tell from the air, but it looks in the range of a few centimeters thick. That means the risk of buildings collapsing is low. The biggest problem is crops, because the ash sticks to the plants and they may die.

The January 15 eruption of Hunga-Tonga-Hunga-Ha’apai volcano caused extensive damage to the Tongan island of Nomuka, 70 kilometers away. Two days after the eruption, heavy ash covered much of the once verdant island, as shown here in a photo taken during a surveillance flight by the New Zealand Defense Force.

NEW ZEALAND DEFENSE FORCE VIA GETTY IMAGES

A secondary problem is drinking water: The ash has salts in it that dissolve in water and turn it acidic. Around 50 percent of Tongans have their water from roof-fed rainwater supplies. The taste and odor are unpleasant, and it could cause stomach upsets, but it’s not poisonous in that it doesn’t have high concentrations of heavy metals.

SN: A lot of the land you mapped in 2015 is now submerged. What’s it like to know that this place is just gone?

Cronin: It’s a bit sad. It’s remarkable how changeable these volcanic landscapes are. This one hasn’t maybe sunk in yet because I’ve been so busy in the aftermath of it. We’re still looking at all of the photos coming through of the changes. It seems that the whole top of the volcano actually just dropped vertically, by at least 10 meters; just the tips of [Hunga-Tonga and Hunga-Ha’apai] islands are now above sea level.

SN: Was there a large magma chamber under the caldera that emptied and collapsed, dropping everything down?

Cronin: That would be my interpretation. Some other volcanologists are saying there’s no evidence yet, and that the [observed volume of erupted magma] was quite small. But the explosion originated maybe 250 meters below sea level. You have material exploding upward, but also a lot that probably went sideways.

SN: When did you realize the volcano might be bigger and more explosive than suggested by the 2014-2015 eruption?

Cronin: Well, we knew that there was a bigger volcano [than just the cone] there, we just didn’t know what the shape of it was. We took with us a multibeam seafloor mapping system, thinking we’d try to map the submarine shape of the new cone.

As we were driving [offshore] with the multibeam, we started seeing a whole lot of other little submarine volcanic cones. It was like, “Wow, look at that!” And then we realized that they were all within a deep basin, about 150 meters deep. The little cones were actually all inside one large submerged caldera, about 6 kilometers across.

On the rim of the volcano’s large underwater caldera sit two small, uninhabited islands, Hunga Tonga (at left) and Hunga-Ha’apai (at right). Before the January 15 event, a small volcanic cone sat between the two islands. That land bridge was the remnant of an earlier eruption in 2014-2105. An image taken a few days after the volcano’s massive blast on January 15 shows that the cone has vanished and the islands have sunk. Small floating rafts of pumice streak across the waves. Use the slider to compare the before and after pictures.
BOTH: MAXAR VIA GETTY IMAGES

[Meanwhile] I spent a lot of time looking at a series of [volcanic] deposits on Hunga-Tonga and Hunga-Ha’apai. It was clear they were produced by much more violent processes [than what had formed the new cone. These deposits] were ignimbrite: They were hot, welded together and contained charcoal, which we used to get the year of the event: 1100. Then, below a layer of soil, there was another series of very similar deposits [dating to about the year 200].

SN: So basically you realized that every thousand years or so, there was a series of powerful eruptions?

Cronin: Yes. And probably there were two or three more sets of deposits underneath that array.

SN: Ocean island volcanoes like Kilauea aren’t usually very explosive (SN: 5/16/18); their basalt magma tends to be less thick and gassy. So what happened here?

Cronin: We don’t know the composition of this eruption, because we don’t have any sample material yet. But everything else we’ve sampled from this volcano is actually quite boring — it’s all basalt, more or less the same compositions during the little magma leaks as during the major explosive events.

The main difference in the major explosive events is that the magma maybe had a little bit more residence time [within the magma chamber], allowing it to accumulate more gas. [As magma rises toward the surface and the pressure decreases, gases in it expand, giving magma its potentially explosive power.]

When there’s plenty of water around and the gassy magma blasts quickly into the ocean, you can also have some explosive blasts. You’ve got the interaction of fragmenting hot magma with cold seawater, and you flash the seawater into steam, adding a lot of energy to the explosion. We call that a phreatomagmatic eruption.

SN: It’s pretty unusual for a volcano to produce a tsunami, too, isn’t it?

Cronin: Yes, there’s been a lot of discussion about how the tsunami was so energetic. It’s hard to create enough energy with volcanoes [because they don’t tend to be big enough and shift enough water to create a powerful tsunami, unlike earthquakes].

Even if you consider the whole 6-kilometer diameter of the underwater crater, and the whole thing dropping by 10 or even 100 meters, that’s still a very small area. It’s a relatively small volume of water that gets displaced to generate a tsunami.

I’ve been thinking about this the last few days, to try to explain the energy transfer from volcano to waves. During an explosive eruption, you have processes that blast material upward, producing the main eruption column. But when we are close to sea level, or maybe even submarine, you also end up generating very dense eruption columns underwater that can collapse and travel out laterally.

So you can end up with these laterally directed currents made up of a mix of hot rock particles, air and water droplets flowing down the flanks of the volcano. And we’ll never see them because they’re underneath the waves. [These flows] are potentially a mechanism for a lot more extra volume, and for a lot of lateral energy, that could create tsunami events. They’re very unusual tsunamis in that respect.

SN: The volcano had a few smaller eruptions on December 30 and January 13. Were you bracing for more?

Cronin: I was watching it like a hawk, for sure. After the 30th of December event, we scrambled around to get images to try and figure out what was happening.

The 2014–2015 eruption had some small surges at the [volcano’s] base, some jets, spectacular to look at but mainly locally important. The December 30 and January 13 events were more vertical, quite decent plumes, a step up in terms of explosive energy, and obviously the pressure was rising, and by the 15th, that pent-up, gas-rich magma was ready to erupt.

SN: So the big question: What can we expect next?

Cronin: We don’t have a lot to go on. There are no seismographs anywhere near this volcano, or in Tonga, which is a real problem. All the observations up to now were taken from a boat, or these aerial images. It’s hard to do any prediction.

So [volcanologists] have come up with three possible scenarios, small, medium and large, based on the geologic background. The large scenario is that there’s this pent-up, gas-charged magma that has erupted, and it caused a very large explosion, and has changed the shape of the upper part of the volcano. So, if new magma rapidly arrives to take its place and comes into that really unstable edifice, it may start to create further explosive eruptions, but also potential flank collapses [possibly causing more tsunamis].

The medium scenario is that there’s new magma, but [any] new cracks in the volcano’s flanks mean the magma could degas [becoming less likely to explode] before it erupts. There will still be magma-water interaction, though, and chances of a small eruption plume and maybe a small tsunami.

The small scenario is that there’s a little bit of residual activity, some small water-magma events, and then everything quiets down. Right now, we aren’t seeing a great deal of disturbance or discoloration in the water from aerial images, which seems to indicate that things are quieting down.

Time will tell now, and we’ll be watching.

Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at feedback@sciencenews.org

CITATIONS

S.J. Cronin et al. New volcanic island unveils explosive past. Eos. Published online June 26, 2017. Doi:. 10.1029/2017EO076589

Carolyn Gramling is the earth & climate writer. She has bachelor’s degrees in geology and European history and a Ph.D. in marine geochemistry from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Nanoplastic Pollution Found at Both of Earth’s Poles for First Time

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Damian Carrington wrote this article in The Guardian:

Nanoplastic pollution has been detected in polar regions for the first time, indicating that the tiny particles are now pervasive around the world.

The nanoparticles are smaller and more toxic than microplastics, which have already been found across the globe, but the impact of both on people’s health is unknown.

Analysis of a core from Greenland’s ice cap showed that nanoplastic contamination has been polluting the remote region for at least 50 years. The researchers were also surprised to find that a quarter of the particles were from vehicle tyres.

Nanoparticles are very light and are thought to be blown to Greenland on winds from cities in North America and Asia. The nanoplastics found in sea ice in McMurdo Sound in Antarctica are likely to have been transported by ocean currents to the remote continent.

Plastics are part of the cocktail of chemical pollution that pervades the planet, which has passed the safe limit for humanity, scientists reported on Tuesday. Plastic pollution has been found from the summit of Mount Everest to the depths of the oceans. People are known to inadvertently eat and breathe microplastics and another recent study found that the particles cause damage to human cells.

Dušan Materić, at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and who led the new research, said: “We detected nanoplastics in the far corners of Earth, both south and north polar regions. Nanoplastics are very toxicologically active compared to, for instance, microplastics, and that’s why this is very important.”

The Greenland ice core was 14 metres deep, representing layers of snowfall dating back to 1965. “The surprise for me was not that we detected nanoplastics there, but that we detected it all the way down the core,” said Materić. “So although nanoplastics are considered as a novel pollutant, it has actually been there for decades.”

Microplastics had been found in Arctic ice before, but Materić’s team had to develop new detection methods to analyse the much smaller nanoparticles. Previous work had also suggested that dust worn from tyres was likely to be a major source of ocean microplastics and the new research provides real-world evidence.

The new study, published in the journal Environmental Research, found 13 nanograms of nanoplastics per millilitre of melted ice in Greenland but four times more in the Antarctic ice. This is probably because the process of forming sea ice concentrates the particles.

In Greenland, half the nanoplastics were polyethylene (PE), used in single-use plastic bags and packaging. A quarter were tyre particles and a fifth were polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is used in drinks bottles and clothing.

Half the nanoplastics in the Antarctic ice were PE as well, but polypropylene was the next most common, used for food containers and pipes. No tyre particles were found in Antarctica, which is more distant from populated areas. The researchers took samples only from the centres of the ice cores to avoid contamination, and tested their system with control samples of pure water.

Previous studies have found plastic nanoparticles in rivers in the UK, seawater from the North Atlantic and lakes in Siberia, and snow in the Austrian alps. “But we assume the hotspots are continents where people live,” said Materić.

The researchers wrote: “Nanoplastics have shown various adverse effects on organisms. Human exposure to nanoplastics can result in cytotoxicity [and] inflammation.”

A recent research suggested people may be breathing 2,000–7,000 microplastics per day in their homes. Prof Anoop Jivan Chauhan, a respiratory specialist at Portsmouth hospitals university NHS trust, said: “This data is really quite shocking. Potentially we each inhale or swallow up to 1.8m microplastics every year and once in the body, it’s hard to imagine they’re not doing irreversible damage.”

‘Facebook’s Tamil censorship highlights risk to everyone’ – The Intercept

 19 January 2022

Experts have said the censorship of the Tamil voices by Facebook threatens press and cultural freedom worldwide after the Tamil Guardian Instagram account was twice suspended last year, writes Sam Biddle in The Intercept today.

In October 2021, Facebook twice banned Tamil Guardian’s Instagram account, claiming that content had breached their ‘Dangerous Individuals and Organisations policy’.

Amidst uproar worldwide, as press freedom organisations and parliamentarians in Sri Lanka, Canada and the UK expressed their concerns, the account was restored.

Yet, despite Facebook meeting with the Tamil Guardian team, content has continued to be removed.

“Indeed, experts said Facebook’s censorship of the Guardian calls into fundamental question its ability to sensibly distinguish “dangerous” content that can instigate violence from journalistic and cultural expression about groups that have engaged in violence,” writes Biddle.

Read more from The Intercept here.

Related Articles: 

27 October 2021 : STATEMENT - Instagram disables Tamil Guardian’s page in act of online censorship

28 October 2021 : How Sri Lanka’s CID tried to take down Tamil Guardian’s Twitter

28 October 2021 : 'This is completely unacceptable!' - UK and Canadian parliamentarians speak out against Facebook's censorship of Tamil Guardian

29 October 2021 : STATEMENT - Tamil Guardian Instagram disabled once more

30 October 2021 : Canadian politicians denounce Instagram’s ban of Tamil Guardian

31 October 2021 : Tamil politicians say Instagram’s censorship of Tamil Guardian contributes to the ‘decades of repression and attacks on the Tamil press’

09 November 2021 : Reporters Without Borders calls for Tamil Guardian’s Instagram to be reinstated

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‘Tamils have been fighting for over 70 years for self-determination’ - P2P movement demands state structural reform

 19 January 2022

 

Britain’s Minister for South Asia, Tariq Ahmad meeting with P2P coordinator S. Sivayoganathan

Following a meeting with Britain’s Minister for South Asia, Tariq Ahmad, People Uprising Movement (P2P) has released two letters detailing the ongoing plight of Tamils in Sri Lanka and their demand for self-determination.

“We Tamils have been fighting for over seventy years for self-determination. We are a nation of people living in the merged North and East in the island of Ceylon. We have our right to determine our own destiny. Successive Sri Lanka Sinhala – Buddhist Governments have continually suppressed our right to self-determination and govern us employing brutal military force to annihilate, which amounts to Genocide” the statement read.

The letter went on to reject the 13th Amendment stating:

“As long as Sri Lanka remains a unitary state with absolute powers in the hands of the Sinhala politicians, the structural genocide of Tamils will not stop. We do not believe a solution based on the 13th amendment or similar provisions will lead to long-lasting peace”.

The statements reemphasised the demands of the P2P protesters who marched Pottuvil in Amparai to Polikandy in Jaffna, two points delineating the furthest ends of the traditional Tamil homeland, in defiance of numerous court orders.

Read more here: From Pottuvil to Polikandy: Why are Tamils marching?

The letter further expresses disappointment at the failure of the UN Human Rights Council adding:

“Six years on, the process has not led to any tangible progress towards accountability or justice. This has emboldened the Sri Lankan state and security forces to continue their human rights abuses against the Tamils with impunity”.

In addition, it highlights the continued use of Sri Lanka’s draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act which has been used “to intimidate and imprison Tamils without due process and many Tamils continue to languish in Sri Lanka prisons under this law that breaches international conventions”.

The statement also details “the intimidation and targeted attacks on activists and human rights defenders” which has seen a number of deaths in suspicious circumstances. It also stresses the allegations of sexual violence against Sri Lanka’s security forces. In detailing the complete failure of accountability in Sri Lanka the letter details the pardoning of Sunil Rathnayake, who was sentenced to death over the massacre of eight Tamil civilians, including three children.

In their conclusion, they call for Sri Lanka to be referred to the International Criminal Court; request that the UK “as a voting member of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) call for not only economic reform but state structural reform”; and “work with international partners to find a political solution based on the Tamil People being able to exercise their democratic rights to self-determination”.

They add:

“As a guarantee that the Genocide that took place against Tamils is not repeated, a permanent political solution should be found by getting the wishes of the Tamil people through internationally conducted and monitored referendum”.

Read the letters here and here.

Read more about Lord Ahmad's visit below:

‘Imagine if it was your child who disappeared’ – Families of the Disappeared slam British Minister

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=LEMURIA

 

‘Unacceptable’ - India snubs Tamil heritage in Republic Day Parade

 23 January 2022

Responding to the Indian government’s decision to exclude Tamil Nadu’s submission for its 75th annual Republic Day parade, Tamil Nadu’s Chief Minister, M.K. Stalin maintained that this was “unacceptable”.

“Exclusion of the tableau of Tamil Nadu will deeply hurt the sentiments and patriotic feelings of the people of Tamil Nadu. That the committee chooses to ignore and reject all of these seven designs shown to it as per the modifications suggested by its members is unacceptable” Stalin wrote in an open letter that urged India’s Prime Minister to intervene.

The central theme of the parade which will be held in New Delhi is India’s freedom struggle and the submission from Tamil Nadu featured renowned freedom fighters from Tamil Nadu including V.O Chidambarnar, Subramania Bharathi, Rani Velu Nacchiyar, and the Marudhupandiyar brothers.

The letter noted that Tamil Nadu representatives appeared before the Expert Committee for selection thrice with the committee initially expressing approval for their designs. The committee did not invite Tamil Nadu to a fourth round of meetings and informed the state that it had been left out while shortlisting.

 

Who was Chidambaranar?

The Tamil Nadu tableau featured V.O. Chidambaranar, a former leader of the Indian National Congress, who rose to prominence by establishing the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company (SSNC) in 1906 which challenged Britain’s naval monopoly of the region.

Chidambaranar launched the first indigenous Indian shipping service between Tuticorin and Colombo with the SSNC. The Tuticorin port, one of India’s 13 major ports was later named after him.

He was also a renowned Labour activist known well for his 1908 speech in Thoothukudi in which he encouraged workers at Coral Mill to protest against their low wages and harsh working conditions. Following the subsequent strike, he joined 50 workers to met with their managers and agreed to increase their wages, reduce working hours and provide leave on Sunday.

Catching wind of his political activism British authorities detained him in Coimbatore and Kannanoor jail where he was treated as a convict and forced to do hard labour which impaired his health.

 

Who was Subramania Bharathi?

Subramania Bharathi, also referred to as Maha Javi Bharathiar, was a pioneer of modern Tamil poetry and freedom fighter who wrote avidly about patriotism, the emancipation of women, against child marriage, and reforming Bhraminism and religion. He also stood in solidarity with Dalits and Muslims.

Stalin’s letter details the high esteem Mahatma Gandhi held for the patriot.

 

Who was Rani Velu Naciyar?

The rear of the tableau was to feature a statue of Rani Velu Nachiyar riding a horse with a sword in hand and with women soldiers.

She was the first Indian Queen to wage war with the East Indian Company in India and was known as the Queen of Sivagangai Region from 1780 to 1790.

In defiance of British rule, she blew up an ammunition storage of the East Indian Company by arranging a suicide attack. She is hailed as “Veeramangai” a brave woman.

 

Who were the Marudhupandiyar brothers?

Accompanying her statue were images of the Marudhupandiyar brothers who brave warriors who fought alongside the queen and were able to secure back Sivagangal from the British. They became the Kings of the region before being executed by the East Indian Company.

Read Stalin's full letter below.

 

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=LEMURIA

GUATEMALA

Five former paramilitaries face trial for rape after 40 years

Five former Guatemalan paramilitaries are currently on trial for the rape of 36 Indigenous Mayan women during the 1980s. 

Indigenous people were often targeted and harassed by the military government for allegedly backing the left-wing guerrillas during the conflict that took place between 1960 and 1996. In 2018, the five former paramilitaries were arrested along with three others. However, the case was dismissed and the magistrate released them. One died before being released. After authorities re-captured the remaining ex-paramilitaries, two were acquitted.

According to prosecutors, victims were as young as twelve years old when the abuse began and were alleged to have taken place around the small town of Rabinal, north of the capital of Guatemala City where a mass gravesite was discovered with over 3,000 bodies.

Lawyer, Lucia Xiloj said that many Mayan women “were raped after the (forced) disappearance of their husbands” by paramilitaries and soldiers.

"Today is a historic day not just for the Achi women of Rabinal (in Baja Verapaz), but also for the thousands of women who were victims of sexual violence in the armed conflict," Virginia Valencia, who is representing five of the 36 alleged victims, said. 

The government military stand accused of numerous atrocities during the conflict, including the death and or disappearance of 200,000 civilians in the 36-year civil war. According to The Guardian, more than 100,000 women had been raped during the 36-year long conflict. This is not the first trial of this nature to take place in Guatemala. In 2016, a Guatemalan court sentenced two former members of the military to 360 years in jail for the murder, rape and sexual enslavement of indigenous women. according to The Guardian, more than 100,000 women had been raped during the 36-year long conflict.

For the first time in 2016, rape was considered to be a weapon of war and was identified as a deliberate military strategy; where soldiers had acted upon direct commands from government officials to kill local women’s husbands and later force them into sex slavery. Many other countries including Sri Lanka, Bosnia, and Rwanda have used sexual violence as a strategy during armed conflicts. 

Read more here and here. 

Former Police chief claims Spanish intelligence knew of impending Barcelona terror attack

 13 January 2022

A former senior Spanish police officer has claimed that Spanish intelligence services knew about the plans of the terror cell responsible for the 2017 Barcelona attacks but failed to act in a bid to destabilise Catalonia before a crucial independence vote.

The government of Catalonia is demanding an investigation after a controversial former police officer claimed that the CNI, Spanish intelligence services, knew about the activities of a terrorist cell ahead of a deadly attack it carried out. which left sixteen people dead and more than a hundred injured.

Fourteen people died on August 17th, 2017, when a van driven by Younes Abouyaaquob deliberately ploughed into pedestrians in central Barcelona. Abouyaaquob stabbed and killed another person soon afterwards and five other members of his jihadist cell ran over and killed a woman in the town of Cambrils, also in Catalonia. All six terrorists were eventually shot dead by police.

The former police officer, José Manuel Villarejo, who is currently on trial for bribery and extortion, appeared to suggest that the CNI intelligence service knew not only about the terrorist cell but also about its plans. He told the high court that the then head of the CNI, Félix Sanz Roldán, made “a serious mistake” with regard to the terrorist cell because “he miscalculated the consequences of causing a bit of a scare in Catalonia”.

The 2017 attack took place just a few weeks before the Catalan government oversaw a referendum on independence, in defiance of the Spanish courts. Some pro-independence Catalans have maintained ever since that the attack was somehow linked to the Spanish state’s efforts to thwart the independence movement. The referendum held the following month posed the question "Do you want Catalonia to become an independent state in the form of a republic?". The "Yes" side won, with 2,044,038 (90.18%) voting for independence and 177,547 (7.83%) voting against, on a turnout of 43.03%. The Catalan government estimated that up to 770,000 votes were not cast due to polling stations being closed off during the police crackdown.

It later emerged that the alleged mastermind of the attacks Abdelbaki Es Satty, an imam in the city of Ripoli, was a CNI informant. 

The former commissioner made the remarks whilst in court during a case involving police spying allegations. He stated his claims could be authenticated and called for archives to be released.

“All the evidence is in my archives. I authorise their release...We must think that the citizenry is not a minor and the law of secrets cannot be used to hide everything. It is an obsolete Francoist law from 1968.” Villarejo said.

Catalan President Peres Aragones said on Twitter: “17-A was a barbarity that has marked us forever. And if Villarejo’s words are true, explanations are needed now.

“We know very well how the state sewers work, so we demand that they be investigated in order to clarify the truth."

“I have also asked the legal services of the Generalitat [government] to study these statements and the relevant legal actions that can be taken. For the truth. For the victims, for the Catalans and for all those who are on the side of peace and democracy.”

 

 

In 2019, the Catalan city of Barcelona called for an investigation into the genocide of Tamils by Sri Lanka, and to recognise the rights of the Tamil people to an independent homeland, Tamil Eelam.

In a resolution voted by the city’s municipal council on January 25, representatives denounced systematic violations against the rights of Tamils, urged the recognition of Tamil sovereignty and called for an end to the Sri Lankan military’s occupation of the Tamil homeland.

Read more here: Barcelona calls for investigation into genocide of Tamils and recognition of Tamil Eelam