Month: July 2019

Enlarge / Hiroto Saikawa, president and chief executive officer of Nissan, speaks at the company's headquarters in Yokohama, Japan, on July 25, 2019. (credit: Akio Kon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Nissan says it will reduce global headcount by 12,500 people over the next three years after a brutal quarter that saw net income fall by 95% year over year.

Automakers around the world have been struggling in recent months. Ford said earlier this year that it would cut 12,000 jobs in Europe, while General Motors has announced plans to eliminate thousands of jobs in a series of cuts.

Nissan has been having a particularly rough year. Then-Chairman Carlos Ghosn was arrested in November 2018 on corruption charges, creating a massive distraction for the company. Nissan has a complex set of financial relationships with Renault and Mitsubishi that make management of the company more complicated. Since Ghosn's dismissal from Nissan's board, CEO Hiroto Saikawa has struggled to turn the automaker's fortunes around.

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  The circled areas are where the first mouse damage was noted. [credit: Groenmonitor ]

It isn’t only rabbits that breed like rabbits. Mice, given the opportunity, will do the same. A warm winter, dryish spring, and early summer in Friesland in the Netherlands has provided exactly the right conditions for the small rodents to get their groove on. The mice are now a literal plague, reducing fields of grass and grain to brown, barren wastelands. The damage done by the mice is visible from space, as pointed out by the Groen Monitor, run by Wageningen University.

Mice have been a problem in the past, but Dutch farmers no longer wring their hands and weep for their fields. No, they are prepared. In the Netherlands, there is generally a lot of water in canals just lying around waiting to be used. And often the water level in the canals is higher than the local ground level, so when you take water out of the canal, you get a puddle. The farmers pump water out of the canals to flood the fields, drowning the nest-bound pups. Flooding does not present a problem to adult mice, though, which clamber out of their holes and strike out for solid ground—there may even be an olympic medal for strongest mouse swimmer.

A sudden influx of water is only the beginning of the mice’s problems however, because the ever-present seagulls are unforgiving and voracious. Between the water and the predators, not many mice survive. Yet, for some reason, not all fields can be (or are) flooded. This leaves a sharp contrast between the healthy green fields, where the mouse numbers are controlled, and the brown unhealthy-looking fields where the mice are eating themselves—and the farmers—out of house and home.

Enlarge / An irrigation system working in a field of soybeans. As surface water becomes less reliable in the face of climate change, groundwater will become an increasingly crucial resource. (credit: flickr user: Nic McPhee)

Groundwater is an "invisible resource," writes environmental engineer Debra Perrone. It "flows slowly under our feet through cracks in rocks and spaces in sediments," she says, contrasting it with the more visible and obvious dams and rivers on the surface. This invisible resource is a quiet hero, supplying around a quarter of the US's daily freshwater needs.

Its distributed nature makes groundwater a challenging resource to manage. Unlike on the surface, where we can manage through public infrastructure like dams and reservoirs, groundwater is mostly tapped through millions of wells drilled by individuals, businesses, and farms. But current levels of groundwater use are not sustainable: resources are being steadily depleted as groundwater use outpaces natural replenishment.

This depletion means that shallower wells may run dry. Across the US, people are drilling deeper and deeper wells, report Perrone and her colleague Scott Jasechko in a paper in Nature Sustainability this week. That suggests that the easy-to-access water is already vanishing. But it's also not sustainable to keep going deeper.