Watery projects

[traditional activities on the Volga]

Back in 2011, I acquired a book from a charity shop from which I learned about the on-going and long-term problems with water management in the US. For which see reference 1. Ten years on, I find that the Russians, inheriting a lot of water management infrastructure on the Volga - dams, reservoirs and hydo-electric plants - from the Soviet era, from much the same time as that in the US, are having many of the same problems. With the Volga being the Russian version of the Mississippi. 

Plus a stray water fact from yesterday. I was looking into an eminent Australian, Derek Danton, at reference 3, the author of the interesting looking but very expensive books at references 4 and 5, for both of which it seems that one has to pay collectors', not so say antiquarian, prices.

And came across: '... meteorological data had shown that by 150-200 km from the ocean coast rainwater is devoid of Na [sodium] containing marine aerosols, and thus vast areas of the planet are Na depleted...'. Na, a lot of which comes from salt, is rather important for the normal functioning of lots of animals - including mammals - so this results in all kinds of interesting ramifications in continental interiors. You can get its close relative K [potassium] by eating lots of vegetables, but I failed to work out the connection, beyond being reminded that we contain lots of sodium channels and lots of potassium channels - with both being important parts of the normal workings of the neurons in the brain. Inter alia.

References

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2011/10/st-lukes.html.

Reference 2: The Soviets turned the Volga River into a machine. Then the machine broke: Too many dams have made Russia's most important river dysfunctional. Here's how the mother river can be fixed - Olga Dobrovidova, MIT Technology Review - 2021.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Denton. 

Reference 4: The primordial emotions: The dawning of consciousness – Derek Denton – 2005.

Reference 5: The hunger for salt an anthropological, physiological, and medical analysis – Derek A. Denton – 1982.