A Data Center Turns Water Brown

During a congressional hearing last week, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) displayed a jar of turbid water to Jessica Kramer, the assistant administrator for water at the EPA. AOC said the sample was collected after the Meta center was built and the only change leading to the brown water was construction of the facility.

She added that data centers were forcing people to drink bottled water. She implied that the facilities were also causing appliances to stop working and decreasing water pressure. It’s alleged that people in that area of Georgia have not had clean water from their wells since before the construction of the Meta facility began. After questioning at the hearing, the EPA official said she would investigate this issue.

Concerns about data centers and their immense demand for water have been occurring for quite some time. Many of the facilities use water to cool their hot processors, mostly with systems that absorb heat and then evaporate it like our bodies do. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reports that in Northern Virginia, data centers consumed almost two billion gallons of water in 2023, which was an increase of 63 percent in four years.

According to Visual Capitalist, as of April this year Georgia was the third highest state in the U.S. for the number of existing and planned data centers—with Texas first and Virginia second.

There is growing opposition around the country to data centers. A recent Gallup poll showed that more than two-thirds of adults oppose the construction of the huge complexes, and a majority said they would rather have a nuclear power plant in their backyard. Last month, in Maine, the legislature passed a bill placing a moratorium on new centers, but Governor Janet Mills vetoed it. Now, local officials in that state are considering their own measures to investigate the impacts. Last week, the city council in Denver, Colorado, unanimously passed an ordinance to halt data center development for one year, and some officials wanted to ban them altogether. Among other jurisdictions, Fulton County Georgia, near Atlanta, placed a year-long moratorium on data centers.

In addition to water problems, these facilities can affect the air. A new study published last week shows that the heat data centers emit can increase air temperatures in nearby downwind neighborhoods by up to four degrees Fahrenheit. Researchers from Arizona State University measured heat pollution from data centers in Mesa and Chandler, Arizona, and concluded that the impact extended about one third of a mile from the facilities. Those findings are supported by other research that shows data centers are warming the land around them, in some cases by up to 16 degrees Fahrenheit.

All of this news comes as the Trump administration is making efforts to allow data center developers to begin pre-construction activities even before they receive final environmental permits.

A new study has determined that warming ocean water is the leading cause of rising sea levels, accounting for 43 percent of the increase since 1960. That’s due to a process called thermospheric expansion, where seawater expands as it absorbs heat from the atmosphere and takes up more space. Melting ice and glaciers contributed to the rest of sea level rise with mountain glaciers accounting for 27 percent, the Greenland Ice Sheet 15 percent and Antarctic Ice Sheet 12 percent.

A more troubling finding of the international study, led by researchers in China at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was the determination that sea level rise is accelerating every year. It was 2.06 millimeters per year averaged between 1960 and 2023 but doubled to 3.94 millimeters per year averaged between 2005 and 2023.  So, sea levels aren’t just rising, they’re rising faster than they were just a couple of decades ago.

Unfortunately, the team says that even if greenhouse gas emissions were slashed today, the large inertia of the ocean and the world's ice would push sea levels higher for centuries to come. 

The study was published in the journal Science Advances. 

What to do? Do what fish do. Fish make their own natural sunscreen with a UV-protective compound called gadusol. This compound is found in the eggs of several fish species such as cod, salmon, and zebrafish but is otherwise rare in nature.

So, even though gadusol was discovered over 40 years ago, it’s never been brought to market as a sunscreen because it would be difficult to extract in a scalable and environmentally sound way. But researchers in China have been able to use E. coli (Escherichia coli) bacteria as mini “biological factories” to synthesize gadusol from zebrafish. In experiments, their process increased the yield by nearly 93 times.

In an interesting twist, they found gadusol showed antioxidant activity comparable to that of vitamin C, which helps to neutralize the damage UV exposure causes cells. So, one day their method could be a green and sustainable way to both protect and repair skin. 

The study was published in the journal Trends in Biotechnology.