36million LITRE reservoir DISAPPEARS Into Ground .. swishing before swallowing ... EYE Report

New Zealand March 8, 2011
Article found HERE
March 8, 2011 a MISSING reservoir has drained quote “into the ground” and no one knows where it went. and quote “strange sloshing sounds”… 

By Rachel Tiffen

A reservoir the size of a football field has emptied in the days since the earthquake, leaving the few residents still in the area wondering what’s happened to the water.

The reservoir in the hillside suburb of Huntsbury suffered cracks and shifted with the force of the quake.

It used to hold 36 million litres of water, but during last month’s quake, the reservoir sprung a leak and started making noises.

Two weeks on, the reservoir’s empty and so is the neighbourhood – but the question remains, where has all that water gone?

Down at the bottom of Huntsbury Hill, Wolf Just has a theory. He says he’s no engineer, but when the clay’s clearly sodden two metres down, it’s not too hard to figure out.

“The dampness is really what worries you, so if it’s gone down to bedrock, and again I’m not an expert, but if it’s gone down to bedrock and then you’ve got the loose on top of it it’ll start sliding,” he says. “I don’t think I feel terribly safe there.”

Over the weekend heavy rainfall caused water to spout from Ramahana Rd. Houses have shifted and sunk, one on the corner’s been red-stickered and quake-formed gutters have emerged.

A consultant for Civil Defence told 3 News damage to the reservoir floor allowed all 36 million litres to seep out, and while most of it was soaked up in the ground underneath, some of it ran out into naturally formed tunnels and in theory, could still be sitting there

Down on Cashmere Rd, Ron Bruce reckons he’s copped a fair bit of it. He’s been pumping thousands of litres from his house since the September quake and says the last one just made it worse.

“We’re actually thinking of bottling it and selling it as spring water, or otherwise we could do a trench and turn it into a spa,” he says, which just doesn’t seem fair with so many in Christchurch still without water.

Greenland ice cap melting at triple the rate of just a decade ago

Article found HERE … Greenland ice cap is disappearing at the rate of 300 Lake Windermeres a year. More than 273 gigatons of water is now pouring into the oceans annually, raising sea levels by nearly a millimeter every year, satellite imaging has shown. Such is the change in the vast ice sheet that the loss of weight is actually changing its affect on the earth’s gravitational pull, the study in Science claims. One gigaton could provide enough water for 17 million people in Britain and is the volume of Lake Windermere, Britain’s biggest water mass.