Archive News

August 6, 2018Lagoons are valuable natural habitats as well as being good for tourism. In the case of the “Mar Menor” in the Spanish province of Murcia, however, such large quantities of nutrients are entering the unique ecosystem via the groundwater that algal blooms are making swimming impossible. Working together with Eawag, Spanish researchers have been modelling the underground water flows in order to develop better cultivation and water management scenarios.

August 2, 2018Eawag, the ETH Zurich and the University of Bern have developed a new instrument: the “Combined Vacuum Crushing and Sieving System” (CVCS). This device makes possible the extraction of minute water and noble gas inclusions that are thousands of years old from the pores of minerals in caves, without distortion by the present atmosphere.

July 27, 2018Knowledge brokering is a technical term used to describe activities to facilitate mutual learning between researchers, practitioners and policy makers. While frameworks exist for assessing academic impact, few equivalent tools are available for assessing the contributions of knowledge brokers at the interface between research, policy and practice. 

July 26, 2018Roy Brouwer was invited to be part of a panel discussion during the 2018 session of the United Nations High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) in New York Mid-July. Brouwer is Executive Director of the Water Institute and Professor of Economics at the University of Waterloo (Canada) and visiting Professor at Eawag.

July 26, 2018Thin mulch films made of polyethylene are used in agriculture in numerous countries, where they cause extensive soil contamination. Researchers at ETH Zurich and Eawag have now identified an alternative: films made of the polymer PBAT biodegrade in soils. 

July 19, 2018Thanks to Copernicus – the EU Earth Observation Programme initiated in 2014 – environmental researchers now have access to vast amounts of high-quality satellite data. As this is also invaluable for aquatic research, Eawag is currently expanding its capacity in the area of remote sensing.

July 17, 2018Black plastic balls, which aim to reduce evaporation losses from open-air reservoirs under drought conditions, are not quite as efficient as previously assumed. Considerable quantities of water are already used in their production. 

July 12, 2018Researchers from Agroscope and Eawag have discovered that, under certain conditions, the herbicide glyphosate is rapidly degraded in Lake Greifen (Greifensee). The evidence strongly suggests that this is due to cyanobacteria using the substance as an alternative source of phosphorus.

July 5, 2018Small hydropower plants are often constructed on alpine streams, where they may have adverse impacts on sensitive ecosystems. Little is known, however, about the particular effects of individual plants, or the cumulative effects of multiple plants within the same river system. The current state of knowledge has now been reviewed in a study by Eawag researchers. 

July 4, 2018Janet Hering will take up her fourth term as Director of Eawag in 2019. Today, the Federal Council re-elected her based on the recommendation of the ETH Board. One of Janet Hering's important goals is that Eawag can integrate and synthesize knowledge from a wide variety of areas and thus make it useful in practice.