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At a meeting of the governing body of the World Water Council (WWC) in Cairo, Egypt, on May 6, it was predicted that two-thirds of the world's population would suffer from water shortages by 2020. The council, founded in 1994, decided to speed up the preparation of a report on a global strategy to safeguard water supplies.
It was stated that US$5 million was required to complete the report before the second world water forum in The Hague (Netherlands) in March 2000. The Dutch government had promised US$2.5 million if other donors supplied the remainder, but no other funding had yet been offered.
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Scientists at the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced on March 5 that the satellite Lunar Prospector, launched on Jan. 6, had discovered significant quantities of water ice crystals beneath the surface of craters at the north and south poles of the moon. Estimates of the total quantities of water present ranged from between 10 million tonnes and 330 million tonnes, spread at low concentration over a total of some 70,000 sq km.
The announcement led to speculation that, if the ice could be extracted from the lunar soil, it could be converted to water and oxygen in order to sustain permanently inhabited bases on the moon. It was also suggested that that solar power could be used to split the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, the basic components of rocket fuel, thereby increasing the possibilities of inter-planetary travel.
The presence of water on the moon had first been indicated in 1994 by radar signals from the Clementine satellite. However, the neutron spectrometry used by Lunar Prospector, which measured neutron energy levels in the ricochets of cosmic radiation, provided more definitive evidence. The Lunar Prospector was to continue mapping the moon's surface until the end of 1998.
This article comes from Keesings Worldwide Online
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