New Book: Kreiger, The Dead Sea and the Jordan River

Kreiger, Barbara. The Dead Sea and the Jordan River. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016.

 

 

For centuries travelers have been drawn to the stunning and mysterious Dead Sea and Jordan River, a region which is unlike any other on earth in its religious and historical significance. In this exceptionally engaging and readable book, Barbara Kreiger chronicles the natural and human history of these storied bodies of water, drawing on accounts by travelers, pilgrims, and explorers from ancient times to the present. She conveys the blend of spiritual, touristic, and scientific motivations that have driven exploration and describes the modern exploitation of the lake and the surrounding area through mineral extraction and agriculture. Today, both lake and river are in crisis, and stewardship of these water resources is bound up with political conflicts in the region. The Dead Sea and the Jordan River combines history, literature, travelogue, and natural history in a way that makes it hard to put down.

 

Table of Contents

• Part I. This Strange Water
  1. Some Early History, Travellers, Myths
• Part II. Nineteenth-Century Exploration
  2. Three Sailors, and a River
  3. Along the Briny Strand
• Part III. Origins and Evolution
  4. The Life of a Lake
• Part IV. Further Exploration
  5. Gentleman from Siberia
  6. A Lake Divided
• Part V. The Twenty-First Century
  7. The River and Lake in Distress
  8. Reclamation, and a Vision of the Future
• Afterword

 

BARBARA KREIGER is Creative Writing Concentration Chair and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at Dartmouth College. Her other publications include Divine Expectations: An American Woman in Nineteenth-Century Palestine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Smithsonian Magazine, and other publications.

New Article: Tal, The Sustainability of Israel’s Irrigation Practices in the Drylands

Tal, Alon. “Rethinking the Sustainability of Israel’s Irrigation Practices in the Drylands.” Water Research 90 (2016): 387-94.

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URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.watres.2015.12.016

 

Abstract

Broad utilization of drip irrigation technologies in Israel has contributed to the 1600 percent increase in the value of produce grown by local farmers over the past sixty-five years. The recycling of 86% of Israeli sewage now provides 50% of the country’s irrigation water and is the second, idiosyncratic component in Israel’s strategy to overcome water scarcity and maintain agriculture in a dryland region. The sustainability of these two practices is evaluated in light of decades of experience and ongoing research by the local scientific community. The review confirms the dramatic advantages of drip irrigation over time, relative to flood, furrow and sprinkler irrigation and its significance as a central component in agricultural production, especially under arid conditions. In contrast, empirical findings increasingly report damage to soil and to crops from salinization caused by irrigation with effluents. To be environmentally and agriculturally sustainable over time, wastewater reuse programs must ensure extremely high quality treated effluents and ultimately seek the desalinization of recycled sewage.

 

 

 

New Article: Yaar et al, Possible Sites for Future Nuclear Power Plants in Israel

Yaar,Ilan, Ayelet Walter, Yovav Sanders, Yaron Felus, Ran Calvo, and Yariv Hamiel. “Possible Sites for Future Nuclear Power Plants in Israel.” Nuclear Engineering and Design 298 (2016): 90-98.

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URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nucengdes.2015.12.005

 

Abstract

A preliminary work aimed at allocating suitable new sites for possible NPPs in Israel is presented. The work is based on Israel’s present NPP siting criteria, supported by selected procedure performed by various countries that conducted similar process. The site selection process was conducted in two stages: first, a selection procedure using demographic analysis was conducted; second, a seismological and geological analysis process was performed in the remaining area. From the combined two screening processes results, an overall new area of 569 km2 was located as a possible area for future construction of NPPs in Israel. Further and more comprehensive work, based on the IAEAs site selection guidelines, has to be performed in the future, in order to verify the preliminary findings presented in this work.

 

 

 

New Article: Pinsky, Israel’s Earthquake Early Warning System

Pinsky, Vladimir. “Modeling Warning Times for the Israel’s Earthquake Early Warning System.” Journal of Seismology 19.1 (2015): 121-39.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10950-014-9454-z

 

Abstract

In June 2012, the Israeli government approved the offer of the creation of an earthquake early warning system (EEWS) that would provide timely alarms for schools and colleges in Israel. A network configuration was chosen, consisting of a staggered line of ∼100 stations along the main regional faults: the Dead Sea fault and the Carmel fault, and an additional ∼40 stations spread more or less evenly over the country. A hybrid approach to the EEWS alarm was suggested, where a P-wave-based system will be combined with the S-threshold method. The former utilizes first arrivals to several stations closest to the event for prompt location and determination of the earthquake’s magnitude from the first 3 s of the waveform data. The latter issues alarms, when the acceleration of the surface movement exceeds a threshold for at least two neighboring stations. The threshold will be chosen to be a peak acceleration level corresponding to a magnitude 5 earthquake at a short distance range (5–10 km). The warning times or lead times, i.e., times between the alarm signal arrival and arrival of the damaging S-waves, are considered for the P, S, and hybrid EEWS methods. For each of the approaches, the P- and the S-wave travel times and the alarm times were calculated using a standard 1D velocity model and some assumptions regarding the EEWS data latencies. Then, a definition of alarm effectiveness was introduced as a measure of the trade-off between the warning time and the shaking intensity. A number of strong earthquake scenarios, together with anticipated shaking intensities at important targets, namely cities with high populations, are considered. The scenarios demonstrated in probabilistic terms how the alarm effectiveness varies depending on the target distance from the epicenter and event magnitude.