Water

As shoreline communities in the San Francisco Bay Area scramble to prepare for rising seas, they should also be mindful that protecting themselves could worsen flooding elsewhere. This is because [...]

Hundreds of thousands of people in the Bay Area get their water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, but this vital source is imperiled. Islands in the heart of the Delta have lost so much soil [...]

When ecologist Jackie Charbonneau learned that cattle ponds in the East Bay hills are vital to rare amphibians, it came as a surprise. Stock ponds can be so muddy and trampled that “they can look [...]

In 2016 the Bay Area voted on Measure AA, which will raise half a billion dollars to restore the tidal marshes that protect against rising tides. The measure passed in a landslide, prompting the [...]

When Brenda Goeden first started working on mud, silt, and sand in the San Francisco Bay two decades ago, dredgers and contractors couldn’t get rid of all the sediment they excavated fast enough. [...]

When most people think of sea otters, they picture these charismatic creatures wrapped in kelp as they float on their backs in the ocean. But this iconic image is only part of the story. Sea [...]

People have dreamed of turning salty water into drinking water since the early 1960s, when President John F. Kennedy famously said, “If we could produce fresh water from saltwater at a low cost, [...]

As a little girl in Iran, Stanford water researcher Newsha Ajami always knew she could achieve whatever she wanted. “I was raised as a gender-blind child,” she recalled. “I was taught that I [...]

Stroll through just about any of the cities ringing the San Francisco Bay and you’re likely walking on water. Not literally, of course. Rather, chances are that somewhere along your way, there’s [...]

The San Francisco Bay Area is already crowded, ranked among the nation’s top ten most congested metropolitan regions, and soon it will be even more packed. Over the next two decades, our [...]