Earthweek: A Diary of the Planet (May 31, 2013)

Water Woes
Humanity's improvident use of water threatens to drive most of the 9 billion people on Earth into an acute shortage of the precious commodity within at least one or two generations, scientists warn.  More than 500 of the most esteemed water researchers, meeting in Bonn, Germany, said the shortages would be entirely self-inflicted and avoidable.  They urge governments to start conserving the resource instead of looking at it as an endlessly renewable resource.  Experts warn that climate change is producing more frequent droughts, floods, heat waves and storms.  Massive fertilizer use by industrial agriculture is polluting many bodies of water, leading to "dead zones" in seas and near the mouths of rivers.  And massive pumping of underground aquifers is rapidly depleting supplies that will take at least generations to replenish once they are pumped dry.
MERS Virus Alert
The U.N. health agency warns that a new deadly virus, which causes SARS-like symptoms, has the potential to spread further around the world and has a global death toll now of 27.  A total of 49 patients have been infected by what's being called the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus, or MERS-CoV for short.  It emerged last September in Saudi Arabia, and most of the cases have occurred on the Arabian Peninsula.  But people have died as far away as Tunisia, France and the U.K. after traveling to the Middle East or being in contact with people who had been there.  The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the virus acts like the one that causes the common cold.  But symptoms, which include fever and a cough, are far more severe and can lead to pneumonia and kidney failure.
'Astroplant' Candidates
Plants found beneath a retreating glacier have sprouted new growth after being dormant for 400 years, Canadian scientists say.  A team of biologists from the University of Alberta made the discovery on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic.  Lead researcher Catherine La Farge said the plants became entombed beneath the Teardrop Glacier during the Little Ice Age between 1550 and 1850.  The glacier has been shrinking by three to four yards per year due to climate change, exposing mosses and other non-vascular plants that still had traces green in them.  La Farge and her team ground up the samples and sprinkled them onto a petri dish to see what would happen.  They successful regeneration of the hearty plants, known as bryophytes, could mean that they would be good test subjects to send to Mars before humans arrive.
Volcano Evacuations
Residents in a remote stretch of the Andes were evacuated as nearby Copahue volcano showed signs of a potentially exposive eruption.  More than 2,200 people were asked to leave from around the volcano, which straddles the Chile-Argentina border.  But some insisted on staying behind to feed and protect their live stock until the government could evacuate the animals as well, or guarantee they would be fed.  Ash from a massive eruption of nearby Puyehue in 2011 disrupted air travel around the Southern Hemisphere.
Tropical Cyclone
Hurricane  Barbara killed two in southern Mexico as it became the second-earliest such storm to make landfall, and most easterly, on record.
Earthquakes
A massive 8.3 magnitude quake centered off Far East Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula on May 24 caused tremors that frightened residents as far away as Moscow, more than 4,000 miles to the west.  There were no reports of damage or injuries due to the world's most powerful temblor so far this year.
*   Earth movements were also felt in Uzbekistan, West Java, Tonga, northeastern New Zealand, Wales and Ireland, the Panama-Costa Rica border area, coastal Southern California and in northeastern California.
Green-Eyed Discovery
Entomologists say they have discovered what is possibly the last undiscovered butterfly species in the U.S. in a green-eyed specimen that had for a century been confused with a more common cousin.  Writing in the journal Zoo Keys, North American Butterfly Association president Jeffery Glassberg and Smithsonian butterfly curator Bob Robbins say the new species can be differentiated from the more common Gray Ministreak by eye color.  The newly named Vicroy's Ministreak has distinctive olive-green eyes, while the Gray has dark brown or black eyes.  Even though specimens of Vicroy's Ministreak were sent to the Smithsonian a century ago, the species was unrecognized as unique because it was confused with its more common cousin.  Both have different but overlapping habitats and are only about the size of a human thumbnail.  While Vicroy's Ministreak may be the last new species in the United States, many hundreds may be waiting to be identified in tropical regions of Latin America.