The temperature is rising and the ice is melting, pouring hundreds of litres of water into the rivers today. But what about tomorrow? In order to better anticipate the consequences of melting glaciers on the availability of water resources, hydrologists are trying to gain a better understanding of the dynamics of these immense glacial masses.
Irrigate crops with wastewater? Installing connected water meters for farmers? Researchers are exploring these avenues to preserve the water resources of which the agricultural sector is a major consumer.
What if the most important thing was actually invisible to the eye? In France, around 75% of the water we consume comes from groundwater. At a time when water crises are looming, don't these large reservoirs called aquifers represent a manna that is too little known and under-exploited? Between ignorance here and ecological risks elsewhere, the sustainable exploitation of aquifers is still to be done.
There is life on the glaciers. A cryobiodiversity that is still poorly understood and that could well disappear before it has even revealed all its secrets. Because with each retreat, the glaciers are inexorably dying out. The "Life without ice" project aims to understand this phenomenon in all its dimensions.
This week in A LUM LA SCIENCE, Guillaume Maurin, researcher at the Charles Gerhardt Institute in Montpellier, is our guest. With his team, he has just developed a new membrane that improves the economic and ecological cost of gas purification. In the second part, Bernard Mongellaz shows us the cold laboratory of the University of Montpellier.
This week in A LUM la science, Wilfried Sanchez, deputy scientific director of Ifremer, presents the results of the Inrae-Ifremer collective scientific expertise on the impact of phytopharmaceutical products on biodiversity and ecosystem services.