WATERSHED+

After numerous high trucks hit the roof of the tunnel or drivers continuing to enter the tunnel during a fire despite warnings lights, a new warning system has been developed for the Sydney Harbour Tunnel.
The new system uses a combination of pumped water and light projection to create a huge soft stop sign impossible to ignore.

Watch the video here.

From Core77

Fishermen at the bottom of a dam overflow in Rayong, Thailand, picture by Anan Charoenkal.

via architecture of doom

After the Great Storm of 1900 hit Galveston, Texas, the city protected itself with a seawall, and the town was raised to a new ground level. Everything was raised, houses, churches, offices, trees, gardens.
Dredged sand was used to raise the city by as much as 17 feet (5.2 m) above its previous elevation. In the seven years operation 2,156 buildings were raised on jacks, manually and with the use of mules . Catwalks were built connecting houses and buildings, and canals were dug through town to allow the dredge barges to bring in the sand.

From Here, via BLDGBLOG and Pruned
More here

colchrishadfield:

Dust blows from what was once the Aral Sea floor. Tragic mismanagement of a natural resource

A levada is an irrigation channel or aqueduct specific to the Portugese island of Madeira. They were created from the sixteenth century to carry water across the island from the mountainous west and northwest of the island to the drier southeast, which is more conducive to habitation and agriculture
The total levadas network extends over 2150 km in this island 57 km long, 23km wide in the widest point.

Source 1, 2, 3

A film maker and a scientist are currently making a documentary, Fragile Legacy, using the 19th century Blaschka collection of glass invertebrates at Cornell as a time capsule to take a snapshot of change of our seas. How many of these creatures that were so common 150 years ago can still be found today?

See our previous post on the Blaschka’s models here

From the New York Times

Formerly one of the four largest lakes in the world, the Aral Sea has been steadily shrinking since the 1960s after the rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects. Although irrigation made the desert bloom, it devastated the Aral Sea.

From here, here, and there

Lying just outside the Amazon Basin, the Lençóis Maranhenses National Park in northeastern Brazil is subject to a regular rain season during the beginning of the year. The fresh water collects in the valleys between sand dunes creating lagoons for half of the year and almost completely disappear during the dry season.

Source 1, 2, 3

88floors:

Submerged Churches.

These churches from all over the world are not victims of natural disaster, they all sit in the valley of a reservoir. Many reservoirs were created in valleys with small towns or villages nestled in them, the benefit of having reservoirs always outweighed the cost in relocating a small population. In many of these settlements the religious buildings were the tallest and once the valleys were flooded they could still be seen poking out of the water in a surreal post apocalyptic manner. Lots of them still survive, making more of an appearance every time the water level drops.

Among these examples are Ladybower, Graun, Panta de Sau, Tehri and Potosi

(via hideback)

In order to understand Icebergs drift, the International Ice Patrol (IPP) used different tracking systems. One early method used glass tipped arrows dipped in dye.
The use of dye for tracking was later stopped as the dye dissapeared with melting and the iceberg rotation.

From the International Ice Patrol
The IPP monitors the iceberg danger near the Grand Banks of Newfoundland and provide the iceberg limit to the maritime community.