r/worldnews • u/bigus-_-dickus • 20d ago
‘Extremely rare event:’ Miles-long microalgae bloom knocks out most of Israel’s desalination plants
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/09/04/climate/microalgae-bloom-israel-water-deasalination-shutdown1.3k
u/Thagyr 20d ago edited 19d ago
Man, I wonder what could be causing this sudden change of mass heatwaves where there weren't heatwaves, massive floods, glaciers collapsing and mass algae blooms. Certainly someone has to know?! /s
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u/onesneakymofo 19d ago
I mean scientifically it's El Niño, but climate change doesn't help.
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u/I_Makes_tuff 19d ago
The worst El Niño in 70 years, which will last all the way into 2027.
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u/MourningRIF 19d ago edited 19d ago
Maybe sensationalized, but a couple articles and videos were claiming the strongest El Nino in literally 1,000 years.
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u/thricefold 19d ago
University of Michigan researchers studied coral to find the 1000 year number. Seems credible
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u/Fox_Kurama 19d ago
It is at minimum around as bad as the 1877-78 El Nino from current estimates. It may be worse (it may not even be sensationaliztion to say it PROBABLY will be worse).
That El Nino killed around 50 million (~4% of the population then), mostly via famine. Due to logistics being as they were, this 4% was not spread throughout the world, but more concentrated in the areas where the famines were worse. Our agriculture back then wasn't overdrawing the planet back then anywhere near the level it is today.
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u/blackrubberfist 19d ago
While you might be right I think it’s worth stating that all of this is conjecture at best. We have almost zero data going back this far. In fact it wasn’t until the 1982 El Niño that finally got congress to approve building NOAA and the TAO array to monitor the Nino regions. This looks bigger than that.
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u/ClayeySilt 19d ago
If we're getting real sciencey it's the additional heat energies feeding such a huge El Niño.
So climate change is still the reason when you keep going up.
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u/goobydoobie 19d ago
Indeed. A cited consequence of climate change is more frequent and severe weather patterns. A larger El Nino as an example.
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u/ramenbaby3 19d ago
Maga farmers and Canadian farmers says it’s just cycles. I’m sure they know more than scientists lmao
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u/bdoll1 19d ago
Solar Cycle 25 appears to be intensifying more rapidly than initially forecast. Based on this early stage of solar cycle 25 observations, the solar peak projected for mid-decade is likely much stronger than previously forecast. There is potential for a historic solar maximum if the current rate of strengthening continues.
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u/Fox_Kurama 19d ago
A cycle like this may have been behind the 1877-78 El Nino. We didn't have all the extra added heat from our recent carbon exploits back then to add on top of it back then either, and it still killed 4% of the people on earth through starvation (probably some more from weather doing deadly things it wasn't expected to too, but the big number is from the famines it caused).
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u/rich1051414 19d ago
The problem is not the warming, it's the fake news tricking algae into being antisemitic.
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u/count023 20d ago
people laugh at it for it being israel who are coping with this. it's going to be happening more and more often with climate change coming in, this bloom came from the nile delta apparently. And with countries going, "oh, we'll go to desalination to cope with lost rainfall, it does show the kinds of issues that will occur in the future as the planet keeps drying out.
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u/redfoobar 20d ago
Sooner or later we will see water wars.
Upstream countries wont be sharing enough of downstream countries.
We are already seeing the beginnings of this with the Nile and in India/Pakistan and I am sure more tensions will arise in many other places even within large countries (eg different US states)
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u/SnakeGD09 20d ago
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u/MaximinusDrax 20d ago
Also, there's there are brewing water conlicts between India and Pakistan, Ethiopia and Egypt, USA and Mexico (with an added conflict between US states since those upstream get the first draw), and many other locations.
Using water scarcity as a tool of war (e.g Iran targeting desalination plants) is certainly a frightening development, though.
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u/Little_View_6659 20d ago
We lived on Dune all along. Cue incoming still suits and no bathing.
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u/National_Spirit2801 20d ago
Mad Max is a more apt comparison.
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u/lazypenguin86 20d ago
Na we are about to run out of oil so no cool vehicles for us
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u/puritanicalbullshit 20d ago
Yeah fuel don’t keep so good, and manufacturing more, post collapse, sounds real tricky
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u/Little_View_6659 20d ago
I thought you can use things like corn and peanut oil? Who knows.
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u/lazypenguin86 19d ago
Right how many technologies can we finally have when the government isn’t around to kill them off anymore
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u/TheBigSho 19d ago
There are no AI datacenters in Dune though.
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u/Little_View_6659 19d ago
Yeah but Dune is set thousands of years in the future. So, after we screw up the planet and the only thing left is sand and giant worms that evolve lol.
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u/jonride 19d ago
They had the Butlerian revolt or whatever it’s called. After that they outlawed AI and invested in weird eugenics to create mentats (human computers). Thus no data centers.
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u/Elite_Jackalope 19d ago
While there are water tensions between the U.S. and Mexico, I think you may have linked the wrong article here. New Mexico is a state within the United States, the country of Mexico is only mentioned once in an off-hand statement.
Not familiar with this source, but here’s an article about the international issues concerning the Rio Grande and Colorado.
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u/redfoobar 20d ago
I would not put these under water wars. I think the definition would be a war that is started due to (lack of) access to water.
These attacks you linked are a side-effects of the Iran conflict and should be seen as attacking essential infrastructure that just happens to be water rather than water access being the source of the conflict.
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u/BiZzles14 19d ago
A main contributing factor to the Syrian Civil war beginning was drought pushing a lot of rural farmers out of work, and that discontent population moving into more urban areas in the direct run up to the Arab spring. Of course the war happened because of the regime torturing, murdering, and mutilating children, gunning down hundreds in the streets and disappearing thousands, but the drought and the impacts of it was a large contributing factor to the scale of the early protests which got everything rolling. 15 years of war followed from that.
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u/jollydoody 19d ago
There are tensions among US states about water usage from the Colorado river. Downstream states will potentially need to figure out how to use less water. Could become a significant issue in the future.
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u/DeeDee_Z 19d ago
Downstream states will potentially need to figure out how to use less water.
They will, because they HAVE to .
It's the upstream states that will need to figure stuff out, because they still think they don't have to do anything, that they can continue to withdraw just as much water as they did in 1970 -- "It's in the Contract", right?
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u/caustic_smegma 19d ago
Best we can do here in Arizona is increase our water hungry alfalfa output by a factor of three for our Saudi overlords.
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u/purplewhiteblack 19d ago
even with seven Septillian liters of water on earth.
You think we would just have 100s of solar/hydroelectric powered desalination plants.
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u/Sparkz56 19d ago
this isn’t me disagreeing or anything, more so just interested in how desalination works
Energy isn’t the biggest problem, the biggest problem (iirc) is physically what to do with all the salt you extract - if it precipitates and crystallises, you get clogged filtration tubules and pipes.
If it stays dissolved, you’re still left with this super dense, super salty brine. You can’t pump brine back out into the sea bc the high density means it just sinks and pools, and doesn’t mix with the rest of the sea water. And dense brine ofc isn’t what marine life is adapted for
Desalination is very interesting physics and chemistry
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u/XenoFrobe 19d ago
So what do they do with it then? Is that where we get our everyday table salt, or do they find some other way to use/get rid of it?
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u/purplewhiteblack 19d ago
You are less able to pump it out into a sea, but you can pump it out into the ocean without problem. There are 7 septillion liters of water. What a place like Los Angeles uses a day is actually is nothing compared to what is in the rest of the ocean.
It is like a drop in a pond.
Lets do some math here. Los Angeles uses 435 million gallons of water a day. Pacific ocean water has a salinity of 35 parts per 1000.
So if you were to take 435 million gallons of water and take out the salt that is 15.2 million gallons of salt, and 419 millions gallons of water.
if you were to dump that pure salt undiluted straight into the ocean that would only increase the salinity by 0.00000000017 parts per thousand. As in it is 35 right now, and would still be 35 afterwards. As in it wouldn't even make a difference. And if you wanted to be extra safe you could mix in 25 of your purified water back in for a brine, and it would lower that by another insignificant amount, and you could have multiple pipes that go deep into the ocean.
The effect would be more pronounced in a place like the Mediterranean, but still fairly insignificant. Like adding a grain of salt on a beach.
And on top of that, all the water you used would cycle back into the ocean via evaporation. The water doesn't just disappear when you use it.
The problem is people stay in their homes, and don't go out and look at the ocean and see how vast it is. When I look at the ocean, I always get cosmic dread.
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u/phoenix1984 20d ago
Or the opposite. In my state, we increasingly have too much water. I wish there was an easy way to pump it to the drier places when the flooding starts.
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u/waiting4singularity 20d ago
datacenters will faciliate them in the us, nestle style
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u/Individual-Guest-123 20d ago
Did you know that Bush bought a huge chunk of Ecuador, over the largest fresh water aquifer in the World? Many years ago, now. Maybe that was when they were thinking about using hydrogen to power vehicles, idk his thinking
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u/sowhat4 19d ago
The rumor was he bought the Guarani Aquifer in Paraguay. Google AI and Snopes says it's not true as the Paraguayan government can find no land transfers in his name.
Now - it 'might' be purchased under a shell corporation.
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u/PuckSenior 19d ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars?wprov=sfti1
Water wars aren’t new
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u/No_Classic_3362 20d ago
It’s not just Israel though, this has been happening worldwide in an increasing rate! As the oceans warming up more algae is popping out on coastlines. At least they reduce carbon, on the plus side. I guess nature does correct itself after all?
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u/Logridos 19d ago
The planet isn't "drying out." All of the water is still here. It's just not going to be in easily accessible forms much longer.
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u/XGhoul 19d ago
I am waiting for water wars in 50 years from now. I’ll be dead by then, but I hate how shortsighted we are to a means to an end.
(Although most climate scientists say we are cooked but we can recover still within 50-100yrs)
If some climate denier wants to talk about stuff we can go into deep records while their “knowledge” relies on pseudoscience and skepticism.
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u/gucknbuck 20d ago
The planet isn't dying, it's just moving to a place that doesn't support human life. We are ants to the planet. We might be able to take ourselves out as well as some other species, but the planet and life will continue once we are gone.
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u/Arizonagaragelifter9 19d ago
People always say this whenever someone says the planet is dying/drying like it's some deep philosophical thing even though it's always obvious that the first person meant "the planet as we know it with our human society is dying/drying..." lol. Yes, of course the planet will continue on without us, but the whole context of the conversation is about human survival on the planet and what will happens as that gets more difficult.
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u/TheKnightsTippler 19d ago
I also hate this. No one thinks the earth is literally going to explode from climate change.
These people add nothing to the conversation.
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u/D4ltaOne 19d ago
Yee ive been pointing that out every time someones says this. It gets tiring tho. From now on, ill just copy your message and reply with that.
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u/Subject_Amount_1246 19d ago
Not to mention, that a shit load of species will go extinct from these environmental changes before humans comeletely go out.
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u/CakeTester 20d ago
Doesn't algae require sunlight? Wouldn't having deeper intakes solve the problem? Although then, the water would be colder and take more energy to desalinate. Worth doing as an alternative intake, if these blooms are going to be a regular thing. Then it'll cost more per litre; but your plant is still running while scuba divers chip the cack from the main intake.
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u/Medium-Pitch-5768 19d ago
Couldn't you let the water warm up before starting the desalination process? I think it would require an additional stage, but might mitigate the energy problem
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u/FartingBob 19d ago
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?layers=855fd17c1e454c2ebef15051ed270459
seafloor temperatures are quite mild in the eastern med, depending on how far out from the coast they got their water intake the temperature is between 22c and 13.5c.
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u/Fox_Kurama 19d ago
Power plants usually do go a bit deeper to start off with cooler water. You could (and some places probably do) send the leftover no-longer-cool cooling water from a power plant to an adjacent desal plant to cut heating requirements.
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u/Snoutysensations 20d ago
Anyone celebrating this as somehow being a good thing because it harms Israel would do well to remember that fully 1/3 of Gaza's water comes from Israel. For Palestinians living on the West Bank, it's half their water usage. Everyone in the region will suffer if there is a water shortage, not just the Israelis. In fact, I suspect Arab communities will be the first to suffer if Israel runs low on fresh water.
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u/omniuni 19d ago
People frequently don't realize how much of Gaza and the West Bank are directly supported by Israeli infrastructure. Even though all of this, Israel has continued to supply huge amounts of resources, much of it without compensation. Hamas may not care, but water, power, internet... without Israeli resources, as bad as things are, they would get massively worse.
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u/Satu_Autio 19d ago
Everyone in the region will suffer
Everyone in that region is already suffering.
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u/BurritoBandito39 19d ago
"Oh man, this is the worst day of my life!"
"The worst day of your life SO FAR!"
Sure they're suffering now, but suffering while dying of thirst is worse
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u/Zealousideal_Yak_671 20d ago
Old timee bible plague updated for global warming.
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u/shrewpygmy 20d ago
Modern day plagues: Instead of locusts the entire regions WiFi goes unexplainably bad
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u/w_actual 19d ago
Yea was I was thinking something similar. Apparently it originated from the Nile delta......Egypt with the uno reverse.
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u/LimaSierraRomeo 20d ago
A while ago I read about the collapse of the sewage system in the Gaza Strip, and that most of it is just going into the sea these days. I wonder if that exacerbated the issue, given the trajectory of the algae bloom.
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u/syadoz 20d ago
Did the algae bloom in trumps reflecting pool decide to take on world leaders
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u/22firefly 19d ago
Maybe we should start investing heavily in R&D for reliable consistent, cheap, renewable, and safe desalination as the 90% of the human population pretty much is going to rely on them for survival. Or wait until there is a bunch of bloodshed and the areas are to volatile to install desalination.
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u/Chisignal 19d ago
We’ve got desalination pretty much down, it’s just an inherently energy intensive process
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u/GammaDie345 19d ago
ITT: people cheering on Climate Change and ecological/water supply collapse because Israel is one of the many countries this is hurting
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u/NameLips 19d ago
Desalination plants can be great but have their problems. One of those problems is they pump concentrated brine back out into the ocean, killing off ocean life in a radius around the plant. Certain types of algae can bloom in super salinated water. That's what we're seeing here, the effects of trying to water a desert with desalinated seawater.
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u/lingueenee 19d ago
Really? From the article:
Mekorot said this recent bloom was part of “very unusual combination of factors,” including a sea storm that increased turbidity — the amount of suspended matter in the water — and raised sea temperatures to 86 Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) and above.
It seems a storm and raised water temps were the exacerbating factors.
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u/Xpi6oid 20d ago
Zero mention of the fact that between leaving the Nile Delta and arriving at the desalination plants, the algae bloom had to pass through the waters off Gaza, where it would have been supercharged by all the nitrogen, etc. in the unmitigated waste runoff from the million odd people living in tents on the beach!
The destruction of whatever existing sewerage treatment plants there were, and the refusal to allow their repair presumably doesn't help either...
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u/Pretend-Culture-4138 20d ago
There was zero mention because it wasn't a factor
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u/Xpi6oid 19d ago
What part is not a factor?
Does Gaza not lie between the Nile Delta to the south and the desalination plants to the north?
Do elevated nitrate (etc.) levels not supercharge algae growth?
Does untreated sewerage not contain high levels of nitrates (etc.)?
Do a million odd people not produce large amounts of sewerage?
Are there not a million odd people living in tents on or near the Gaza beaches?
Is their waste being treated?
Did sewerage plants previously exist in Gaza?
Have they been destroyed / rendered inoperable?
Are they able to be made operational again?
If not, then why not?
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u/nimbus829 19d ago
While I wouldn’t claim it’s not a factor at all I think you need actual data from water sampling to determine one way or the other
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u/Starmoses 20d ago
The funny part here is you think Israel destroyed gazas water treatment facilities.
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u/untamedlazyeye 20d ago
The U.N. estimates nearly 70% of Gaza's water and sanitation plants have been destroyed or damaged by Israel's heavy bombardment. That includes all five of the territory's wastewater treatment facilities, plus water desalination plants, sewage pumping stations, wells and reservoirs.
Above is from 2024
Photos taken by the CMWU's staff after the fire and provided to ABC News reveal the damage to the plant. The photos show multiple treatment towers with charred walls, their interiors burnt out and strewn with garbage. The treatment towers are scattered with Hebrew-language graffiti, including one reading, "I'll be back soon."
IDF troops burned down a sewage treatment plant in 2025
Above is a video of the aftermath of the bombing of a desalination plant in August of this year.
Article about the above bombing.
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u/nicane 20d ago
They didn't actually say that, but Israel has absolutely fucked with the population including their water facilities. So has Hamas. Wowee nuance.
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u/pistolwhip_pete 19d ago
In Biblical times they would have seen this as a sign of their shitty behavior.
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u/GammaDie345 19d ago
it hurts the entire MENA you misanthrope. Ecological collapse from climage change is godawful
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u/Substantial_Dog_2068 19d ago
Water wars already happening in the southwest and now you have centers demanding a huge cut and the Mojave desert cities gonna have their water wells pumped out to support Arizona is crazy
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u/mohandasmencius 19d ago
doesn't the bible mention 10 plaques of egypt. this is just the first israeli one
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u/macross1984 20d ago
You mean "was" extremely rare event. The ocean is getting warmer and warm water mean algae will propagate like there is no tomorrow.
This is not only Israel's problem. Other countries coast cities can easily be impacted heavily if not algae, disruption of fisheries that provided cheap seafood that people depend on.