ABOARD LIFTBOAT ROBERT, North Atlantic — Deep in Earth’s past, an icy landscape became a seascape as the ice melted and the oceans rose off what is now the northeastern United States. Nearly 50 years ago, a U.S. government ship searching for minerals and hydrocarbons in the area drilled into the seafloor to see what it could find.
It found, of all things, drops to drink under the briny deeps — fresh water.
This summer, a first-of-its-kind global research expedition followed up on that surprise. Drilling for fresh water under the salt water off Cape Cod, Expedition 501 extracted thousands of samples from what is now thought to be a massive, hidden aquifer stretching from New Jersey as far north as Maine.
It’s just one of many depositories of “secret fresh water” known to exist in shallow salt waters around the world that might some day be tapped to slake the planet’s intensifying thirst, said Brandon Dugan, the expedition’s co-chief scientist.
“We need to look for every possibility we have to find more water for society,” Dugan, a geophysicist and hydrologist at the Colorado School of Mines, told Associated Press journalists who recently spent 12 hours on the drilling platform. The research teams looked in “one of the last places you would probably look for fresh water on Earth.”
They found it, and will be analyzing nearly 50,000 liters (13,209 gallons) of it back in their labs around the world in the coming months. They’re out to solve the mystery of its origins — whether the water is from glaciers, connected groundwater systems on land or some combination.
The potential is enormous. So are the hurdles of getting the water out and puzzling over who owns it, who uses it and how to extract it without undue harm to nature. It’s bound to take years to bring that water ashore for public use in a big way, if it’s even feasible.
Why try? In just five years, the U.N. says, the global demand for fresh water will exceed supplies by 40%. Rising sea levels from the warming climate are souring coastal freshwater sources while data centers that power AI and cloud computing are consuming water at an insatiable rate.
The fabled Ancient Mariner’s lament, “Water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink,” looms as a warning to landlubbers as well as to sailors on salty seas.
In Virginia alone, a quarter of all power produced in the state goes to data centers, a share expected to nearly double in five years. By some estimates, each midsize data center consumes as much water as 1,000 households. Each of the Great Lakes states has experienced groundwater shortages.
Cape Town, South Africa, came perilously close to running out of fresh water for its nearly 5 million people in 2018 during an epic, three-year drought. South Africa is thought to have a coastal undersea freshwater bonanza, too, and there is at least anecdotal evidence that every continent may have the same.
Canada’s Prince Edward Island, Hawaii and Jakarta, Indonesia, are among places where stressed freshwater supplies coexist with prospective aquifers under the ocean.
Enter Expedition 501, a $25 million scientific collaboration of more than a dozen countries backed by the U.S. government’s National Science Foundation and the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (U.S. money for it was secured before budget cuts sought by the Trump administration).
Scientists went into the project believing the undersea aquifer they were sampling might be sufficient to meet the needs of a metropolis the size of New York City for 800 years. They found fresh or nearly fresh water at both higher and lower depths below the seafloor than they anticipated, suggesting a larger supply even than that.
Their work at sea unfolded over three months from Liftboat Robert, an oceangoing vessel that, once on site, lowers three enormous pillars to the seafloor and squats above the waves. Normally it services offshore petroleum sites and wind farms. This drill-baby-drill mission was different.
“It’s known that this phenomena exists both here and elsewhere around the world,” Expedition 501 project manager Jez Everest, a scientist who came from the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, Scotland, said of undersea water. “But it’s a subject that’s never been directly investigated by any research project in the past.”
By that, he means no one globally had drilled systematically into the seabed on a mission to find freshwater. Expedition 501 was quite literally groundbreaking — it penetrated Earth below the sea by as many as 1,289 feet or nearly 400 meters.
But it followed a 2015 research project that mapped contours of an aquifer remotely, using electromagnetic technology, and roughly estimated salinity of the water underneath.
That mission, by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, reported evidence of a “massive offshore aquifer system” in this area, possibly rivalling the size of America’s largest — the Ogallala aquifer, which supplies water to parts of eight Great Plains states.
Two developments in 1976 had stirred interest in searching for undersea freshwater.
In the middle of Nantucket island, the U.S. Geological Survey drilled a test well to see how far down the groundwater went. It extracted fresh water from such great depths that it made scientists wonder if the water came from the sea, not the sky.
The same year, that federal agency mounted a 60-day expedition aboard the drilling vessel Glomar Conception along a vast stretch of the Continental Shelf from Georgia to Georges Bank off New England. It drilled cores in search of the sub-seabed’s resources, like methane.
It found an eye-opening amount of fresh or freshened water in borehole after borehole.
That set the stage for the water-seekers to do their work a half-century later.
Soon after Robert arrived at the first of three drilling sites May 19, samples drawn from below the seabed registered salinity of just 4 parts per thousand. That’s far below the oceans’ average salt content of 35 parts per thousand but still too briny to meet the U.S. freshwater standard of under 1 part per thousand.
“Four parts per thousand was a eureka moment,” Dugan said, because the finding suggested that the water must have been connected to a terrestrial system in the past, or still is.
As the weeks wore on and Robert moved from site to site 20 to 30 miles (30 to 50 kilometers) off the coast, the process of drilling into the waterlogged subsea sediment yielded a collection of samples down to 1 part per thousand salt content. Some were even lower.
Bingo. That’s what you find in many bodies of fresh water on land. That’s water you can drink, in theory. No one did.
In months of analysis ahead, the scientists will investigate a range of properties of the water, including what microbes were living in the depths, what they used for nutrients and energy sources and what byproducts they might generate; in other words, whether the water is safe to consume or otherwise use.
“This is a new environment that has never been studied before,” said Jocelyne DiRuggiero, a Johns Hopkins University biologist in Baltimore who studies the microbial ecology of extreme environments and is not involved in the expedition.
“The water may contain minerals detrimental to human health since it percolated through layers of sediments,” she said. “However, a similar process forms the terrestrial aquifers that we use for freshwater, and those typically have very high quality.”
By sequencing DNA extracted from their samples, she said, the researchers can determine which microorganisms are there and “learn how they potentially make a living.”
Techniques will also be used to determine whether it came from glacial ice melt thousands of years ago or is still coming via labyrinthian geologic formations from land.
Researchers will date the water back in the lab, and that will be key in determining whether it is a renewable resource that could be used responsibly. Primordial water is trapped and finite; newer water suggests the aquifer is still connected to a terrestrial source and being refreshed, however slowly.
“Younger means it was a raindrop 100 years ago, 200 years ago,” Dugan said. “If young, it’s recharging.”
Those questions are for basic science. For society, all sorts of complex questions arise if the basic science affirms the conditions necessary for exploiting the water. Who will manage it? Can it be taken without an unacceptable risk of contaminating the supply from the ocean above? Will it be cheaper or environmentally friendlier than today’s energy-hungry desalination plants?
Dugan said if governments decide to get the water, local communities could turn to the aquifers in time of need, such as drought, or when extreme storms flood coastal freshwater reserves and ruin them. The notion of actually using this old buried water is so new that it has not been on the radar of many policymakers or conservationists.
“It’s a lesson in how long it can take sometimes to make these things happen and the perseverance that’s needed to get there,” said Woods Hole geophysicist Rob Evans, whose 2015 expedition helped point the way for 501. “There’s a ton of excitement that finally they’ve got samples.”
Still, he sees some red flags. One is that tapping undersea aquifers could draw water away from onshore reserves. Another is that undersea groundwater that seeps out to the seafloor may supply nutrients vital to the ecosystem, and that could be upset.
“If we were to go out and start pumping these waters, there would almost certainly be unforeseen consequences,” he said. “There’s a lot of balance we would need to consider before we started diving in and drilling and exploiting these kinds of things.”
For most in the project, getting to and from Liftboat Robert meant a voyage of seven hours or more from Fall River, Massachusetts, on a supply boat that made round trips every 10 days or so to replenish stocks and rotate people.
On the platform, around the clock, the racket of metal bore pipes and machinery, the drilling grime and the speckled mud mingled with the quieter, cleaner work of scientists in trailers converted to pristine labs and processing posts.
There, samples were treated according to the varying needs of the expedition’s geologists, geochemists, hydrologists, microbiologists, sedimentologists and more.
Passing through clear plastic tubes, muck was sliced into disks like hockey pucks. Machines squeezed water out. Some samples were kept sealed to enable study of ancient gases dissolved in the water. Other samples were frozen, filtered or left as is, depending on the purpose.
After six months of lab analysis, all the science teams of Expedition 501 will meet again — this time in Germany for a month of collaborative research that is expected to produce initial findings that point to the age and origin of the water.
On July 31, Liftboat Robert cranked up its legs from this place of hidden water to end a mission that lent credence to another passage from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem about life, death and mysteries at sea.
In a prelude to the poem, in some editions, Coleridge wrote: “I readily believe that there are more invisible than visible Natures in the universe.”
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Woodward reported from Seekonk, Massachusetts.
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The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
To mark the one-year anniversary of the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games, gold medallists Amy Truesdale, Bo Kramer, Charlotte Henshaw, and Simone Barlaam joined a special @Paralympics TikTok Mega Live.
In the Live, hosted by Paris 2024 Paralympian Maja Theuma on 2 September, the Paralympic stars reflected on their unforgettable experiences in the French capital and shared what they have been up to since the Games.
Amy Truesdale (Great Britain, Para taekwondo)
Bo Kramer (Netherlands, wheelchair basketball)
Simone Barlaam (Italy, Para swimming)
Charlotte Henshaw (Great Britain, Para canoe)
Q. Happy one-year anniversary! What are your thoughts on this special milestone?
Simone Barlaam:
Today is one year since I won my first gold at Paris 2024, and just by looking at the photos and even listening to the anthem and the music from Paris 2024, I get the feelings—the goosebumps—back.
It’s kind of a bittersweet feeling because you’re happy it happened and you still don’t believe it, but there is a part of you that wants to feel the emotions all over again. Hopefully, it will happen again in the future.
Watching the videos that @Paralympics and the International Federations post, like the throwbacks, and even the memes, brings us a good laugh and good memories of one year ago. But now, as athletes, we have to move on to our new goals, new things to achieve. So, it’s back to training.
Bo Kramer:
We won the gold medal in Paris, which was amazing. I won it on 8 September, which is almost a year ago, so I get all the memories back on my Instagram and Snapchat about what everything that happened the last year.
Q. Looking back, what was it like to compete at Paris 2024 with the crowds back?
Charlotte Henshaw:
We are based in Europe, so for us, it was relatively easy for our family and friends to get to Paris. We got it really nicely that my family and friends could pop over the English Channel and come and support. That was amazing.
I think that was a huge difference from Tokyo (2020) to Paris (2024). I didn’t realise how much we’d missed the crowds until we got them back in Paris. Tokyo was incredible, and they did an amazing job in the situation (with the Covid-19 pandemic) we had then.
But what we had in Paris—it was just so nice to have them back and supporting Paralympic sport. The crowds we got in Paris were so amazing, and I’m grateful to the French public for supporting us so well, because it was unbelievable.
Simone Barlaam:
I actually got the chance at the beginning of this year to go back to see the Tokyo 2020 pool. The pool was super alive. It was really cool to see the legacy of the Paralympic Games there.
Competing at Paris was surreal for me as well. I remember when I raced against Ugo and Hector from France. When they were entering the stage, these guys (the crowd) were so loud. The people—they were really cheering.
Q. What was your experience at the Paralympic Village like? Did you try the popular chocolate muffins that were viral on social media?
Amy Truesdale:
It’s embarrassing for me because everyone was going on about these muffins, and I was like, ‘I’ve had every dessert in that canteen.’ I liked the lemon meringue pies, the cookies—I was going for it and really enjoyed it.
For me, it sounds strange, but my favourite part is being in the canteen, especially with Para athletes. Watching different athletes—like how athletes with vision impairment do day-to-day activities—I find it unbelievable. That’s a memory that I’ll take with me, just how unbelievable everything we do is.
Charlotte Henshaw:
I try to explain to my friends without disabilities what a Paralympic Village is like. And I don’t think you can fully describe it.
Obviously, we are surrounded by other Para athletes every day, but you don’t walk down the street and see many people with disabilities. Then to go into an environment where able-bodied people are almost outnumbered—it’s the most bizarre but amazing experience. I remember thinking how everything works so well—things are adapted and you don’t have to think about things not being accessible. There’s a solution to everything.
I remember thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if the actual real world was a bit more like this? Then we wouldn’t have to think about 5 million things before leaving the door.’ That was one of my favourite things about the Paralympic Village.
Bo Kramer:
I remember the first time going to the dining hall—my first Paralympics was Rio 2016, so I was 17 years old. The first time I walked into the dining hall, I was not ready for what was there. In a way, there were so many people with disabilities I didn’t know of. I had no clue what was going on, but in my head, it was kind of a switch moment where my biggest life lesson is, ‘Everybody at the Paralympics is achieving their dream, either by winning medals or just by being there.’
I was there, at the moment, thinking, ‘Everybody here is achieving their dream, so I will never have an excuse to not believe in the fact that I can achieve my dreams too.’ I think it would be very, very helpful for the rest of the world without a disability to go and sit there in the dining hall. Just have a look around and enjoy everybody who is achieving their dreams. It was beautiful. That’s why I tell people outside the Paralympics to come (to the Games).
Q. How has the one year since Paris 2024 been?
Charlotte Henshaw:
For me, Paris 2024 was the first time that I had the opportunity to race in two events. I knew I had the opportunity to go for two medals, which was a new challenge for me, and obviously the ultimate dream was to win both of them. I never anticipated that this would happen, but when it did, I felt like this might be, in terms of results, the pinnacle of my career. I might never be able to do this again. I’d love to try, but the beauty of sport is that you can never guarantee that.
After Paris 2024, I’ve had to find a real reason why I wanted to carry on, because just going and trying to win another gold medal wasn’t enough anymore. Paris released a lot of that self-pressure, and I felt more free racing this year.
I hope that what Paris did is start to increase the profile of our sport, and that’s a really important thing that we need to build on between now and LA28—to try to get more people involved and spread the word, because we’re trying to grow it as a sport, and that’s what I’m most proud of now. That’s my job now: to try and make Para canoe a heavy hitter in the Para sport world.
Q. What did you learn from your experience at the Paralympic Games?
Bo Kramer:
I think it really taught me that if you want something and if you work very hard for it, then you can achieve it. I think that is a skill you can use for the rest of your life.
I am also doing a study besides being a pro athlete, which can be very challenging at times. But it also shows me that if you have the motivation—that you want something—you can achieve it, not only with sports, but also in your study, within a family, or whatever. It really gave me skills that I can use for the rest of my life.
Q. What is your message for the next generation of Para athletes?
Amy Truesdale:
If you are new to Para sport, there are so many amazing role models in different sports. Just ask for advice. My inbox is always open to people. I reply to everyone. So if you have any questions about how you can develop yourself and how to overcome challenges, just make sure you’re asking your peers and your mentors those questions, because people are there to help.
Simone Barlaam:
I get the honour of sharing the pool with some of them—some Italian future Para athletes who are very promising and convincing for the future of our sport. My advice, especially for youngsters, including kids, is to try everything and see what gives you the spark—the joy we feel when we do our thing.
Always keep an open mind and try different things. Once you find your thing, you have to focus and give it all you’ve got if you want to get some results from it, because nothing comes easy and nothing is granted, especially in the sport world.
Please follow the @Paralympics TikTok account for more content from the Paralympic Games
ISLAMABAD (AP) — Authorities in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province have evacuated more than 100,000 people from low-lying areas along the Indus river, a government spokesman said on Friday, after neighboring India warned of cross-border flooding from dam release.
The evacuations come as rescuers mounted a major rescue and relief operation in the country’s eastern Punjab province, where flooding from weeks of monsoon rains and overflowing dams in India has displaced about 1.8 million people since August.
Since late June, monsoon flooding has killed more than 900 people across Pakistan, according to disaster officials. India notified Islamabad through diplomatic channels on Friday of the potential cross-border flooding, according to the National Disaster Management Authority or NDMA and local authorities.
Weeks of heavier-than-normal monsoon rains, compounded by water releases from dams in India, have swelled rivers in Punjab to dangerous levels.
Deluges are now moving downstream toward Sindh, where they could swell the Indus river, officials said.
Currently, thousands of rescuers backed by the military are delivering food and other displaced people in Muzaffargarh and Multan districts in Punjab, where floods have inundated 3,900 villages since the Ravi, Sutlej, and Chenab rivers burst their banks two weeks ago.
Sindh Information Minister Sharjeel Memon said in a statement that evacuations were underway in vulnerable districts, with 109,320 people already moved to safer ground as water levels in the Indus rise.
Sindh was among the worst-hit regions in the catastrophic 2022 floods, which killed 1,739 people nationwide.
A new survey by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) shows that aviation professionals remain cautious about artificial intelligence. While they see potential, many still worry about risks, accountability, and safety.
Survey Findings
The survey, conducted in January 2024 with 231 participants, explored comfort, trust, and acceptance of AI in aviation. The average acceptance score was 4.4 out of 7, showing moderate support but with reservations.
Nearly two thirds of respondents rejected at least one AI scenario. This reflects doubts about how far AI should go in critical aviation operations.
Key Concerns
The main concerns were limits of AI performance, data protection, privacy risks, and accountability for errors. Safety implications were seen as critical.
Respondents also feared over reliance on AI could cause de skilling. Human pilots and engineers may lose essential knowledge if AI dominates decision making.
Regulatory Oversight
Many stressed the need for strict oversight by EASA and national aviation authorities. They want regulations that ensure safety before AI gains wider trust.
EASA’s Guillaume Soudain said AI can improve efficiency and safety, but trust is key. He called for balanced rules that allow innovation without lowering standards.
European Commission’s View
Christine Berg from the European Commission underlined AI’s role in traffic flow management, predictive maintenance, and autonomous systems. She stressed that aviation must remain safety critical. AI systems, she said, must be explainable, reliable, and certifiable.
Industry Developments
At the AI Days conference, EASA showcased research on AI assurance, human factors, and ethics based assessment. Agencies such as the FAA and EUROCAE also discussed collaboration.
Industry projects included Boeing’s auto taxiing system, Lufthansa’s troubleshooting assistant, and SESAR programmes like JARVIS, DARWIN, and SynthAIR. These highlight the pace of aviation innovation.
Pancreatic islets (artificially coloured) no longer secrete sufficient insulin in people with type 1 diabetes. Credit: Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library
In a medical first, researchers report that they have implanted CRISPR-edited pancreas cells into a person with type 1 diabetes. The cells pumped out sugar-regulating insulin for months — without the need for the recipient to take immune-dampening drugs, thanks to gene edits that allowed the cells, collected from a deceased donor, to evade detection by the recipient’s immune system1.
The study, orchestrated by the firm Sana Biotechnology in Seattle, Washington, raises hopes of an enduring cure for an autoimmune disease that consigns millions of people to a life of strict monitoring and dependence on injected insulin. “The preliminary data has definitely lifted the spirits of our community — and it’s a really elegant approach”, says Aaron Kowalski, the chief executive of Breakthrough T1D, a non-profit organization in New York City formerly known as JDRF.
Stealthy stem cells to treat disease
The ultimate goal is to apply immune-cloaking gene edits to stem cells and then direct their development into insulin-secreting islet cells. Unedited islets made from stem cells have already shown promise for treating type 1 diabetes in a small trial, according to results published in June2.
But some independent research groups have failed to confirm that the Sana method confers immune-skirting abilities on edited cells. And the study involved only one person who received a low dose of cells for a short time — not enough “to achieve insulin independence, so clinical efficacy remains unproven”, says Tim Kieffer, a molecular endocrinologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Still, Kieffer calls the demonstration of immune cloaking “convincing” and “a major milestone toward the goal of effective cell therapy without chronic immunosuppression”. Kieffer previously held the role of chief scientific officer at biotechnology company ViaCyte (that has since been acquired by Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Boston, Massachusetts), which, like Sana, focused on developing cell therapies for type 1 diabetes.
Currently, the only way for someone with type type 1 diabetes to avoid dependence on injected insulin is through the transplantation of cadaveric islet cells. The procedure can restore insulin production for years, but it is rarely performed — constrained by the scarcity of donor pancreases and the need for lifelong immune-suppressing drug therapy, which carries risks of infection, cancer and other serious side effects.
‘Smart’ insulin prevents diabetic highs — and deadly lows
To address the donor shortage, some companies have turned to stem-cell technologies to generate limitless supplies of replacement islets in the laboratory.
Vertex is furthest along. As reported in June, the company transplanted embryonic stem-cell-derived islets into 12 people with type 1 diabetes. After one year, ten participants no longer required insulin injections2. The company plans to seek regulatory approval for this cell therapy next year.
In a similar vein, scientists at regenerative-medicine company Reprogenix Bioscience in Hangzhou, China, are creating islets from reprogrammed stem cells derived from a recipient’s own fat tissue, with early reports of success3. Both approaches, however, still require recipients to take anti-rejection drugs, either to fend off immune attacks on donor cells or to counter the autoimmune assault that persists even against a person’s own cells.
Sana’s strategy aims to bypass the need for those drugs entirely. Company scientists began with islets from a deceased donor who did not have diabetes. Using CRISPR gene editing system, the researchers disabled two genes that normally help to flag foreign invaders to T cells, the immune system’s front-line defender. They then used a virus to shuttle genetic instructions for a protein called CD47 into the cells. This protein serves as a protective ‘do not eat me’ signal that prevents immune watchdogs, known as natural killer cells, from attacking the edited cells.
Brain cells given an ‘invisibility cloak’ fix Parkinson’s symptoms in rats
Getty ImagesThe US jobs market weakened further in August, raising new fears about the health of the world’s largest economy.
Employers added just 22,000 jobs last month, fewer than expected, while the unemployment rate ticked up from 4.2% to 4.3%, according to the Labor Department.
The figures cap a string of shaky data this week on the job market and add to the concerns that spiked last month, when the Labor Department said hiring in May and June had been far weaker than it had initially estimated.
On Friday, the department said its latest estimates showed the US actually lost jobs in June, the first such decline since 2020.
Investors, who had already been betting that the US central bank would respond to the weakening labour market with a cut to interest rates at its meeting this month, said that move was now all but certain.
“The warning bell that rang in the labour market a month ago just got louder,” said Olu Sonola, head of US economic research for Fitch Ratings.
US President Donald Trump responded to the signs of slowdown in August by firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, accusing her, without evidence, of rigging the numbers to make him look bad.
But analysts say the troubles in the job market are partly due to the president’s sweeping changes to tariff and immigration policy, which economists have consistently warned would hurt the economy, by raising costs and uncertainty for firms.
His administration has also cut government spending, firing thousands of government workers.
The Labor Department said the federal government shed 15,000 positions last month. Manufacturing and construction firms also reported payroll declines, offsetting gains in health care.
“Four straight months of manufacturing job losses stand out,” Mr Sonola said. “It’s hard to argue that tariff uncertainty isn’t a key driver of this weakness.”
The number of jobs created each month has been slowing steadily since the boom that followed the reopening from the pandemic.
But analysts have said the economy only needs to create about 50,000 jobs each month to keep up with population growth – far fewer than it once did – as Trump’s crackdown on immigration prompts the stream of new workers that entered the US in recent years to dry up.
Stock markets opened slightly higher following the report, which also showed average hourly pay rising 3.7% over the past year.
In the global bond markets, the rates that investors demand for borrowing dropped sharply, reversing a surge earlier in the week, as confidence grew in a Fed rate cut.
“The initial reaction suggests markets are focused on Fed rate cuts rather than concerns about a cooling economy,” said Ellen Zentner, chief economic Strategist for Morgan Stanley Wealth Management.
“Bad news looks like good news, at least this morning.”
Speaking to broadcaster CNBC, White House economic adviser Kevin Hasset conceded that the August jobs numbers were “disappointing” but said he expected revisions in future months would present a better picture.
Earlier this week, the government reported that job openings had fallen to the lowest level since 2024, while job seekers outnumbered the posts for the first time since the pandemic.
Claims for unemployment payments also ticked up this week, while Friday’s report put the unemployment rate at the highest level since October 2021, although it is still not far from historic lows.
