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Rare isotope helps track an ancient water source
- The Nubian Aquifer, the font of fabled oases in Egypt and Libya
- The aquifer is one of the world's oldest. But its workings — how it flows and how quickly surface water replenishes it — have been hard to understand, in part because the tools available to study it have provided, at best, a blurry image.
- Now, to solve some of the puzzles, physicists at the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois have turned to one of the rarest particles on earth: an elusive radioactive isotope
- Their first success was in distilling these elusive isotopes, krypton 81, from the water in the huge Nubian Aquifer
- Their second was in holding these isotopes still and measuring how much they had decayed since they last saw sunlight.
- Knowing how long water has been underground helps researchers understand how fast aquifers are recharged by surface water and how fast they move, leading to more accurate geological models.
- Groundwater is becoming an increasingly crucial component of the world's available fresh water, and the findings could significantly increase understanding of how it behaves.
- Carbon 14 dating, so useful in archaeology, reaches back just 50,000 years or so. It is now clear that the Nubian Aquifer has been a million years in the making.
- “The reason this model was done,” he said, “is that there is an international agreement among the countries that share this water” — Egypt, Libya, Chad and Sudan. “The issue is if Libya is starting to pump on their water seriously and Egypt is doing the same thing in their oasis areas,” what happens to the rest of the aquifer? If heavy pumping comes too close to a coastline, saltwater may be drawn into the hydrologic depression created by the pumping.
- In addition to being applied to other aquifers in places like the Philippines and Australia, the krypton 81 techniques are being explored as a way of tracking underground brine in places like southeastern New Mexico, where radioactive waste from ships, submarines and aircraft carriers is stored underground.
- In the end, management of nuclear waste, like management of water, is a political matter.
Mobile handset sales set to reach 231 m units
- Mobile device sales in India are forecast to reach 231 million units in 2012, against 213 million units in 2011, an increase of 8.5 per cent
- The mobile handset market is expected to show steady growth through 2015 when end-user sales will surpass 322 million units.
- Indian mobile device market is competitive with more than 150 manufacturers selling devices to consumers.
- G'five, Karbonn Mobile and Micromax occupied third, fourth and fifth positions after Nokia and Samsung in the third quarter.
- India accounts for about 12 per cent of worldwide sales
- The market is also supported by many local manufacturers. Mobile manufacturers are also competing against many brands in the black market who are selling without invoices.
- With the growing influence of local handset players in the low-end segment, the traditionally stronger, big global players have had their position weakened.
