Wednesday, March 26, 2025

We are vastly overestimating the amount of fresh water available for lithium mining, new study finds

New research led by UMass Amherst hydrologists sounds the alarm over mining practices that have immediate implications for transition to low-carbon economy

University of Massachusetts Amherst

image:
An abandoned road and brine transitional pool at the margin of the Salar de Atacama Halite Nucleus.
view more
Credit: UMass Amherst

March 26, 2025

We Are Vastly Overestimating the Amount of Fresh Water Available for Lithium Mining, New Study Finds

New research led by UMass Amherst hydrologists sounds the alarm over mining practices that have immediate implications for transition to low-carbon economy

AMHERST, Mass. — New research into lithium mining in the “Lithium Triangle” of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia — source of more than half of the world’s lithium resources — shows that the commonly accepted models used to estimate water how much water is available for lithium extraction and what the environmental effects may be are off by more than an order of magnitude. The paper, published in Communications Earth and Environment, reveals that there is far less water available than previously thought. With demand for the mineral, which is critical for batteries powering the green transition, projected to increase 40-fold in the coming decades, the research suggests local communities, regulators and the lithium mining industry must quickly collaborate to bring their water usage within sustainable limits.

Lithium, says David Boutt, professor of geosciences at UMass Amherst the paper’s senior author, is a strange element. It’s the lightest of the metals, but it doesn’t like to be in a solid form. Lithium tends to occur in layers of volcanic ash, but it reacts quickly with water. When rain or snowmelt moves through the ash layers, lithium leaches into the groundwater, moving downhill until it settles in a flat basin where it remains in solution as a briny mix of water and lithium. Because this brine is very dense, it settles beneath pockets of fresh surface water, which lie on top of the lithium-rich fluid below, forming lagoons.

These lagoons often become havens for unique and fragile ecosystems and iconic species such as flamingos, and are crucial for local communities, including the indigenous peoples who have long called the Lithium Triangle home. Any use of freshwater runs the risk of disturbing both the ecological health of the region and the indigenous ways of life — and that’s where Boutt and his team, who have previously published on the age and lifecycle of water in the Triangle, come in.

“We looked at 28 different basins in the Lithium Triangle,” says lead-author Alexander Kirshen, who completed the study as a research assistant at UMass Amherst, “and we wanted to understand how scarce the fresh water is.”

This is not an easy task, because these basins are located in very high, extremely arid and relatively remote regions nestled within the Andes mountains. The Lithium Triangle is more than 160,000 miles square, and there are few sensors and monitoring stations with which to track factors like streamflow and precipitation.

“The climate and hydrology of the Lithium Triangle is very difficult to understand,” says Boutt, so scientists and engineers have relied on global water models to best estimate water availability and environmental impacts of lithium mining within the Triangle.

The two most commonly used global water models suggest that the freshwater flowing into the Lithium Triangle’s basins is approximately 90 and 230 mm per year. “But after an initial assessment,” says Kirshen, “we suspected it was going to be too inaccurate for our purposes.”

So the team built its own model, called the Lithium Closed Basin Water Availability model, or LiCBWA — and what they found was a sharp divergence from the conventional understanding.

“There’s not much new freshwater at all coming into these systems,” says Boutt. While global models estimate an average of 90 and 230 mm per year of inflow, LiCBWA estimates from 2 to 33 mm, depending on the particular basin, with an average of just 11 mm per year for the 28 basins in their study. “The conventional wisdom is overestimating the amount of water by at least an order of magnitude,” says Boutt, “and we found that all but one of the 28 basins in our study should be classified as ‘critically water scarce,’ even without incorporating current, to say nothing of future, demands on the water supply.”

At the same time, the processes for mining lithium are changing. The older method, called evaporative concentration, is being supplanted by direct lithium extraction (DLE) — and 56% of the DLE sites in the Triangle use more water than the older, evaporative process. Nearly one third of the DLE facilities (31%) used 10 times more water than evaporative concentration.

“Because lithium mining is a reality in the Lithium Triangle,” the authors conclude, “scientists, local communities, regulators and producers must collaborate to reduce water use,” as well as commit to better monitoring precipitation, streamflow and groundwater levels for an even more precise hydrological picture.

Researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, University of Alaska Anchorage and the University of Dayton contributed to this study, and funding was provided by BMW Group and BASF.

A full media kit, including a dozen photos and all caption and credit information, is available here.

About the University of Massachusetts Amherst

The flagship of the commonwealth, the University of Massachusetts Amherst is a nationally ranked public land-grant research university that seeks to expand educational access, fuel innovation and creativity and share and use its knowledge for the common good. Founded in 1863, UMass Amherst sits on nearly 1,450-acres in scenic Western Massachusetts and boasts state-of-the-art facilities for teaching, research, scholarship and creative activity. The institution advances a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community where everyone feels connected and valued—and thrives, and offers a full range of undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees across 10 schools and colleges and 100 undergraduate majors.

Journal

Communications Earth & Environment

DOI

10.1038/s43247-025-02130-6

Article Title

Freshwater inflows to closed basins of the Andean plateau in Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia

Article Publication Date

26-Mar-2025

If native plants are going to survive climate change, they need our help to move—here’s how to do it safely

UMass Amherst researchers uncover traits that can help plants succeed in new environments while also guarding against invasiveness

University of Massachusetts Amherst

March 26, 2025

AMHERST, Mass. – Many native plants in the U.S. cannot possibly move themselves fast enough to avoid climate-change driven extinction. If these native plants are going to have any chance of surviving into the future, they’ll need human help to move into adjacent areas, a process known as “managed relocation.” And yet, there’s no guarantee that a plant will thrive in a new area. Furthermore, movement of introduced plants, albeit over much larger distances, is exactly how the problem of invasive species began—think of kudzu-choked forests, wetlands taken over by purple loosestrife or fields ringed by Japanese honeysuckle. Thanks to new research from a pair of ecologists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, we now have a detailed sense of which plant characteristics will help ensure successful relocation while minimizing the risk that the plant causes unwanted ecological harm.

“We know that, because of climate, native species need to move,” says Thomas Nuhfer, lead author of the paper that appeared recently in Global Change Biology and a graduate student in UMass Amherst’s program in organismic and evolutionary biology. “But many of the people working to manage invasive plant species have real concerns about unwittingly contributing to the problem if we start moving native species around.”

“We’ve made the mistake of introducing invasive species so many times in the past,” says Bethany Bradley, professor of environmental conservation at UMass and the paper’s senior author, “and we don’t want to keep making that mistake. But in a changing climate, doing nothing might do even more harm.”

Bradley’s lab has previously shown that confronting the epidemic of invasive species is one of the best ways to prepare, at the local level, for climate change, that numbers of invasive plants are increasing exponentially and, crucially, that plants and animals need to be shifting their ranges by 3.25 kilometers per year just to keep up with the increasing temperatures and associated climactic shifts.

So how to help plants move successfully without risking them causing harm?

“We often use specific plant characteristics—like how quickly a plant grows, how long it flowers or whether its seeds can be spread by the wind—to determine its risk of becoming invasive,” says Nuhfer. “But these are also traits that could help a native species to survive in a new environment.”

To disentangle which traits could lead to success and which to ecological disaster, Nuhfer and Bradley surveyed a wide variety of papers from restoration and invasion ecology, as well as the plant risk assessments and frameworks that managers in the field often use. What they found is that the same traits help plants to establish themselves in a new location, whether they are invasive species or relocation candidates. However, as plants try to spread and particularly in the impact they have on their new ecologies, the traits for invasives and successful relocation diverge widely.

What this means is that a specific trait, like a high metabolic rate, is helpful when a plant is trying to establish itself, regardless of if the species is native or invasive. However, there are certain traits, like having a large size, that predispose a plant not only to establishing successfully, but spreading wildly and leaving an outsized impact on its new environment.

Additionally, there are some traits, like toxicity, which can help identify poor native species candidates for relocation - traits that don’t really help the plants establish, but do help them spread or cause harm.

This suggests that there are certain traits associated with invasiveness, especially those that aid in establishing a plant in a new place, that we should actually be looking for in native species to ensure their survival. Instead of filtering out those traits, risk assessments should focus on traits like having water dispersed seeds or toxicity, which don’t help plants establish much but do help them spread and cause harm.

“Many of the current risk assessments that managers are using in the field are so risk-averse as to guarantee that managed relocation will fail,” says Bradley.

“And if the relocation fails,” adds Nuhfer, “then we’ve wasted all sorts of resources and haven’t helped native plants persist.”

This research was supported by the U.S. Geological Survey Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center.

About the University of Massachusetts Amherst

Journal

Global Change Biology

DOI

10.1111/gcb.70145

Article Title

Balancing risk and resilience: which plant traits should inform managed relocation species selection?

Article Publication Date

26-Mar-2025

Research infrastructure for innovative power grids

Kickoff for high power grid lab: platform for testing new grid components under realistic conditions receives EUR 32.8 million in construction funding

Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT)

Electricity is increasingly being supplied by distributed sources of renewable energy, replacing central power plants and changing the demands on power grids. At the High Power Grid Lab (HPGL), new grid technologies are to be analyzed in a test environment designed to emulate the real power grid as accurately as possible. The focus will be on low- and medium-voltage grids for regional power distribution. The test platform is set to begin operation in 2030 as part of the Energy Lab at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Its construction is being funded with EUR 32.8 million in strategic development funding from the Helmholtz Association.

“With the HPGL, we’re setting up a unique research facility for evaluating the performance of innovative grid components under realistic conditions,” said Professor Marc Hiller, who heads KIT’s Institute of Electrical Engineering (ETI). “This infrastructure will play a crucial role in the development of the new technologies needed to upgrade our power grids.” The HPGL’s objective is to investigate the system properties of new types of grid components, such as power converters for medium-voltage DC grids, in a grid environment that is as realistic as possible.

Coupled medium-voltage grids, regional distribution grids, and industrial grids are becoming increasingly important as electricity consumption grows. The KIT Energy Lab’s Smart Energy System Simulation and Control Center will combine real-time power grid simulations with the medium-voltage grid emulators that will be available at the HPGL, with the real-time simulation determining the system behavior of the electrical grids while the emulators replicate this behavior in the real world with real power flows. With this approach, various components can be subjected to comprehensive testing. The result of the project will be a flexible test environment (power hardware in the loop) with behavior that reproduces the real grid as accurately as possible. For example, the flow of power from one medium-voltage grid to another can be regulated.. As one of the largest research platforms in Europe, the Energy Lab real-time laboratory links test facilities for power generation, energy storage, and energy use to support the development of a smart integrated energy supply system.

Cutting-edge Technology for Medium-voltage Grids

“The medium-voltage emulators used in the HPGL are being specially developed for this project,” noted Lukas Stefanski, HPGL project manager responsible for scientific and engineering aspects. “We can emulate AC grids up to 20 kilovolts and DC grids up to 35 kilovolts without transformers and up to a capacity of 40 megavolt-amperes. That’s a major advance for research on high-performance technologies for the increasingly important medium-voltage distribution grids.” Dr. Rüdiger Schwendemann, assistant project manager for HPGL components, added: “A key objective of the HPGL is to develop innovative equipment for medium-voltage grids and test it under realistic conditions. The emulators will enable us to accurately simulate grid behavior while safely reproducing operational modes and fault conditions.”

National and International Cooperation for the Energy Transition

In addition to the ETI, other KIT institutes involved in the project include the Institute of Electric Energy Systems and High-Voltage Technology, the Institute for Automation and Applied Informatics, and the Institute of Technical Physics. Many German and multinational industrial companies, grid operators, and research institutes will also be involved during the construction phase. The HPGL will thus act as a bridge enabling the rapid transfer of research results into practical applications – an essential aspect for a successful energy transition.

More information

More about the KIT Energy Center

Being “The Research University in the Helmholtz Association”, KIT creates and imparts knowledge for the society and the environment. It is the objective to make significant contributions to the global challenges in the fields of energy, mobility, and information. For this, about 10,000 employees cooperate in a broad range of disciplines in natural sciences, engineering sciences, economics, and the humanities and social sciences. KIT prepares its 22,800 students for responsible tasks in society, industry, and science by offering research-based study programs. Innovation efforts at KIT build a bridge between important scientific findings and their application for the ben

DEI

Sexism in the City traces history of forgotten pioneers

The history of women stockbrokers in the UK from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries

Lancaster University

Carrie Bradshaw and friends would shudder at some of the revelations in a new book by one of Lancaster University’s historians.

Sexism in the City, authored by Professor of Modern British History James Taylor, is the first book to trace the history of women stockbrokers in the UK from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries.

Forgotten pioneers, these businesswomen fought against the odds to establish successful brokerages across the country and in the process, challenged society's beliefs about women and money.

A far cry from the popular American comedy-drama television series Sex and the City, the book tells the story of how the nation's stock exchanges denied these women membership for generations, mobilizing increasingly desperate arguments to try to justify their exclusion, until women finally won the right to join the London Stock Exchange in 1973.

Though historians have recently reassessed women's roles in the development of capitalism, highlighting their involvement as investors and entrepreneurs, they have assumed that because women were not members of stock exchanges, they were not active as financial intermediaries until modern times.

By spotlighting the lives and careers of women who worked as stockbrokers outside male-monopolized institutions, the book reframes the historical development of finance in several ways.

It highlights the extent to which the seemingly gender-neutral institutions and practices of finance were, in fact, based on gendered ideologies and exclusions.

It argues that focusing on institutions only reveals part of the financial ecosystem, meaning that we miss what was happening outside the formal market.

And it challenges London-centric interpretations of financial history, asking questions about the financial cultures existing outside the metropolis.

“If we look beyond the official exchanges—and beyond London—a more diverse financial environment comes into view,” says Professor Taylor.

“Women have been working in finance for much longer than we think. In many cases, they built successful careers, and some even became minor celebrities in their day.”

The history uncovered in Sexism in the City also helps to address problems with financial culture in the twenty-first century.

Current reform initiatives are unlikely to succeed unless they acknowledge that for hundreds of years, professional identities and institutional structures in finance have been based on the denigration and marginalization of women.

Acknowledging the efforts of those female stockbrokers who challenged misogynistic beliefs and defied men's monopoly of high finance by forging their own careers is the first step towards imagining a different kind of market, adds Professor Taylor.

The book launches on 27 March and is available here.

Biochar and microbe synergy: a path to climate-smart farming

A team of UConn researchers is developing a fuller picture of biochar's environmental and agricultural benefits

University of Connecticut

Most people probably don’t think about soil as a living thing. But it is filled with millions of tiny organisms that play a critical role in everything soil does – including sequestering carbon.

Soil contains a diverse array of microorganisms including fungi and bacteria that perform vital functions such as breaking down organic matter, nutrient cycling, and carbon sequestration.

“Microbes — you may not see them with the naked eye, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important,” says Yogesh Kumar ‘27 (CAHNR), a Ph.D. student in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment.

Thanks to these microbes, soil holds onto a tremendous amount of the earth’s carbon. By supporting the functioning of these microorganisms, a substance known as biochar can improve soil’s ability to serve as a much-needed carbon sink.

Biochar is a charcoal-like substance made by burning organic waste, such as, generated by forestry and agriculture. Biochar has recently emerged as a “Climate-Smart Agriculture” practice given its potential to improve soil health, nutrient and available water holding capacity, resilience, and agricultural sustainability without the negative environmental consequences associated with traditional fertilizers.

A team in the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources is developing a fuller picture of its environmental and agricultural benefits.

Their recent publication in Biochar highlights how biochar supports soil microbes.

Kumar is the lead author on the paper. Other authors include Wei Ren, associate professor of natural resources and the environment; Haiying Tao, associate professor of soil nutrient management and soil health; and Bo Tao, assistant research professor of natural resources and the environment.

The researchers looked at data from hundreds of field studies conducted all around the world to determine biochar’s impact on soil microbes.

On average, biochar application improved soil microbial biomass carbon (SMBC) by approximately 21%.

“When we conducted global data analyses, we found how biochar as a stable carbon influences soil features, particularly microbial activities leading to changes in microbial carbon,” Ren says. “That in turn influences soil’s physical and chemical characteristics and carbon storage.”

A piece of biochar has many tiny pores all over its surface. Microorganisms move into these holes and feed on the carbon, nitrogen, and other essential nutrients the biochar provides. This is especially important in nutrient-deficient soil or soil with a suboptimal pH which would not otherwise be able to support a diverse population of microbes.

“It provides food, nutrients, and a habitat for those microbes,” Kumar says.

The researchers also found that biochar is more effective when used in combination with other management practices, like the use of compost or manure.

By limiting the scope of their analysis to field studies, which take place in real-world conditions, rather than controlled greenhouse environments, this work has clearer and more immediate implications for farmers.

“That helps us understand the reality of the situation with weather or soil or other environmental factors interacting with biochar,” Ren says.

This group’s previous work has looked at how biochar impacts other factors like crop yield and greenhouse gas emissions.

“We want to have a complete understanding of biochar as an effective climate smart agricultural practice,” Ren says.

Biochar is particularly attractive to farmers in the Northeast, which has smaller operations than other parts of the country, like the Midwest. Biochar is still expensive for farmers to implement, making it difficult to apply at a larger scale.

“Although biochar is more expensive than other practices, they see the long-term benefits for the savings in water and nutrient inputs and the long-term carbon storage,” Ren says. “In the northeast region, our farmers and our growers have already shown interest.”

Further, biochar is most effective in climates with an average annual temperature below 59 degrees Fahrenheit and about 20 to 40 inches of rain, like Connecticut and other parts of the region.

Given this interest, the next steps in this research are to collaborate with local farmers to conduct pilot studies of biochar.

In addition to supporting field studies, the group is also using this work to develop models that can predict the long-term impacts of biochar on soil health and other key metrics.

The ultimate goal of this work is to develop a regional bioeconomy in which organic waste is collected, turned into biochar, and reused to grow more crops while keeping the soil healthy.

“We do want to collaborate with our field scientists, people with diverse backgrounds in climate and land use, and socioeconomics,” Ren says. “We want to propose an interdisciplinary program to promote region bioeconomy development.”

Journal

Biochar

DOI

10.1007/s42773-024-00391-6

Method of Research

Meta-analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Impact of biochar amendment on soil microbial biomass carbon enhancement under field experiments: a meta-analysis.

‘It's a shot, not a vaccine like MMR’: New skepticism prompts call for action

This ‘vaccine is not a vaccine’ is a new, previously unreported type of vaccine-specific scepticism, and it arose only during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it might, according to the researchers, also apply to the flu vaccine

Lancaster University

A new type of ‘vaccine scepticism’ has been uncovered by researchers at Lancaster University, who examined a nine-million-word corpus of tweets looking at vaccine comparisons and evaluations.

They focused on claims that some vaccines, notably those against COVID-19, were not perceived by some people posting on Twitter/X as ‘proper’ vaccines.

Based on their findings they suggest it would be helpful for future public health messaging to address potential confusion among the public about what counts as a vaccine.

This new research, led by Professor Elena Semino, of Lancaster University, working with the researchers from the UK Health Security Agency, as well as at UCL and Georgetown University, is published in the March edition of Elsevier’s Vaccine X Journal.

The COVID-19 vaccines were often evaluated negatively compared with vaccines like MMR due to the public perceiving the COVID-19 vaccines as having low effectiveness.

This perception of low effectiveness led some Twitter/X ‘posters’ to claim that COVID-19 vaccines are not vaccines.

While it is well-known that vaccine hesitancy can be vaccine-specific, researchers do not know very much about how and why people spontaneously evaluate different vaccines in comparison with one another, or the implications of these comparisons for vaccine attitudes.

The nine-million-word body of words or ‘corpus’ created by the researchers consists of tweets containing references to the MMR vaccine posted between 2008 and 2022.

First, tweets posted in 2020–2022 and also containing references to COVID-19 were examined for vaccine-specific evaluation and vaccine-related topic.

Then, the whole corpus was analysed for tweets that contained expressions that challenged the status of a vaccine as a vaccine – for example ‘not a vaccine’, and the use of ‘shot’ in contrast with ‘vaccine’.

The researchers found that in 2020–2022, tweets mentioning COVID-19 alongside MMR had an increasing tendency to compare the COVID-19 vaccines unfavourably with the MMR vaccine, based on the perceived low effectiveness of the COVID vaccines against infection.

For example, one Twitter/X poster said: “It's not even a real vaccine. You can catch covid and also spread it if you are vaccinated. You don't catch polio or MMR after you are vaccinated.”

The research also showed a perceived contrast in 2020–2022 between the words ‘shot’ and ‘vaccine’, with the ‘shot’ being described as an ‘inferior’ medical intervention and associated with COVID 19.

The researchers also noted that scepticism about the status of any vaccine being a real vaccine was very rarely expressed on Twitter before 2020.

“Overall, the new form of vaccine specific scepticism we have identified is relevant for any current or future vaccines that primarily modify disease rather than prevent infection,” says the research.

Lead author Professor Semino, from Lancaster University’s Linguistics Department, ranked third in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2025, said: “The finding that some people on Twitter/X question the status of the COVID-19 vaccines as vaccines was unexpected. It shows that it is important to explain how different vaccines work, depending on the nature of the disease.”

Examples of posts from the data include:

“It’s not even a real vaccine. You can catch Covid and also spread it if you are vaccinated. You don’t catch polio or MMR after you are vaccinated.”

“That’s why it [the COVID-19 vaccine] shouldn’t be called a vaccine, but a shot like the flu shot, yearly. MMR were actual vaccines to prevent measles and rubella. So was the polio vaccine.”

“How about we start with the fact that it's not a vaccine, it's a therapeutic. True vaccines immunize you from the virus. The COVID ‘vaccine’ still allows you to catch COVID just with lesser symptoms. Not the same with polio, MMR, etc.”

“Vaccine: polio, MMR, smallpox. You don't have to get them again and you won't get the disease. Shot: tetanus, flu, Covid. You have to keep getting them because they aren't a cure because there is no cure, especially for a coronavirus. Stop calling it a vaccine. It's a shot.”

Journal

Vaccine

DOI

10.1016/j.jvacx.2025.100620

Article Title

‘It's a shot, not a vaccine like MMR’: A new type of vaccine-specific scepticism on Twitter/X during the COVID-19 pandemic

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Wednesday, March 26, 2025

We are vastly overestimating the amount of fresh water available for lithium mining, new study finds

Journal

DOI

Article Title

Article Publication Date

If native plants are going to survive climate change, they need our help to move—here’s how to do it safely

Journal

DOI

Article Title

Article Publication Date

Research infrastructure for innovative power grids

Sexism in the City traces history of forgotten pioneers

Biochar and microbe synergy: a path to climate-smart farming

Journal

DOI

Method of Research

Subject of Research

Article Title

‘It's a shot, not a vaccine like MMR’: New skepticism prompts call for action

Journal

DOI

Article Title

About Me