River

UK shipyard MMS has added a new member to its fleet of floating-debris collection vessels. The latest Envirocat is the first to clean up waterways without releasing engine fumes into the environment.

The Ocean Cleanup has announced a second Indonesian river trash removal mission. The solar-powered Interceptor 020 will prevent around 1,000 tons of plastic waste flowing into the Java Sea each year from the Cisadane River.

Mussels and other mollusks usually aren't thought of as being all that active. Recently, however, scientists have documented a water-squirting behavior in just one species, which is apparently using the action to give its larvae a fighting chance.

Water level sensors serve an important purpose in rivers, warning of floods and unsafe recreational conditions. A new one is claimed to be not only more robust and reliable than others, but also considerably less expensive.

While hydroelectric dams are capable of generating a lot of electricity, they drastically disrupt the environment. Scientists have now proposed a simpler but still effective alternative, in which electric trucks replace such dams.

A wide-ranging study into pharmaceutical pollution of the world's rivers has found that more than a quarter of those studied carry potentially toxic levels of drugs, with such pollution touching every continent on Earth.

Removing the vast amounts of plastic waste already polluting our oceans is going to need tackling in a number of ways. But the flow of plastic from rivers also needs to be stopped, and that's what Vietnam's trash traps are designed to do.

Back in 2014, we heard about a so-called "fish gun" or "salmon cannon" that safely shot spawning fish up over river-blocking obstacles such as dams. Its successor is now in use, offering a couple of key advantages over the original system.

The efforts of researchers to trace plastic waste continues to turn up evidence of its detrimental effects on the natural world, with the latest example a study detailing the first evidence of river-borne plastic waste traveling up the food chain.

Take a walk along the canal in Amsterdam’s Westerdok district, and you may see an unsightly mess of waste gathered at the edge of the canal. What you’re seeing is the work of a new bubble barrier, designed to stop plastic waste flowing out to sea.

In a huge global study hundreds of rivers around the world have been tested for levels of common antibiotics. It found 65 percent of all samples contained some concentration of antibiotics, with the worst cases showing levels more than 300 times higher than the generally accepted safe threshold.

Water.Shapes.Earth is a spectacular photographic project from veteran artist and storyteller Milan Radisics. The project tells the story of how water shapes the planet using aerial photography to deliver a series of stunning images that sit on the border between abstract art and documentary realism.