This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine.

In the late 1700s, King George III glimpsed the future of shipping. Sir Charles Middleton, the comptroller of the British Royal Navy, approached the monarch with a vision. His pitch came with a demo—a specially modified model of a warship called the Bellona. The king’s eye soon fell on the shimmering copper plates that encased the miniature ship’s hull below the waterline.

“It was … shall we say, blinged up,” says Simon Stephens, a curator of ship models at Royal Museums Greenwich in London. When the king heard how the plates could make ships faster by repelling marine organisms that would otherwise encrust their hulls, he was sold. By the early 1780s, the entire British naval fleet had gotten the bling treatment too: Warships were adorned with copper plates mounted like overlapping roof tiles to ease the flow of water across them.

Middleton and his copper plates more or less solved an age-old maritime headache. Since the advent of long-distance sailing, ships that had lengthy stays at sea returned to port with hulls contaminated by barnacles, seaweed, and other marine gunk. This damaged the vessels and slowed them down—imagine trying to push a slimy, bumpy pineapple through water. Laborers toiled for days or weeks to scrape vessels clean again. But because copper is toxic to many marine organisms, Middleton’s plated ships remained smooth.

Today, copper is still applied to many oceangoing vessels—often as a component in certain characteristically red antifouling paints. As in the 1700s, the copper prevents fouling, leaving a smoother hull that creates less drag. This reduces fuel consumption and lowers carbon emissions. Less fouling also means fewer potentially invasive marine species being ferried around the world.

[Read: What’s wrong with all the ships?]

Yet with new regulations tightening emissions requirements, ship owners are taking hull coatings more seriously than ever before. Behind the scenes, the search for even better, more environmentally friendly solutions is gathering pace.

The challenge is to find effective, sustainable coatings that don’t cost the Earth or leach metals into the ocean. Ship owners must choose carefully. Even a small increase in the roughness of a ship’s hull can have a dramatic effect on emissions, explains Nick Aldred, a marine biologist at the University of Essex, in England: “You lose out in a big way by having any barnacles.”

When a ship enters the water, bacteria and phytoplankton don’t take long to colonize the hull. The microbes create a biofilm that attracts other organisms, and eventually the hull can become caked in barnacles and seaweed, says Maria Salta, a marine biofilm expert at Endures, a company in the Netherlands that studies fouling and corrosion.

So if you own a ship and want to stop this from happening, you have, broadly speaking, two options, says Salta: either a biocide-based coating or a fouling-release coating.

Like Middleton’s copper plates, biocidal coatings kill organisms looking to adhere to the ship’s hull. But pushing this too far is possible, and the biocidal coating tributyltin (TBT) is a disastrous example of what’s at stake. This potent antifouling coating was used on ships’ hulls for decades, but it poisoned seaways and caused oysters’ shells to thicken so much that the creatures could no longer open them to feed. TBT was banned internationally in 2008.

The other option, a fouling-release coating, is like cooking with a nonstick frying pan, says Salta. Organisms generally won’t stick to fouling-release coatings, and if they do, they tend to adhere weakly and drop off when the ship gets under way.

An example is the silicone-based coating Sigmaglide, a product that PPG Industries has been gradually updating and improving for around 20 years. At one time, the coating was transparent. “It was very difficult to apply; you could not see where you sprayed it,” says Joanna van Helmond, PPG’s global product manager of antifouling and fouling release.

The firm soon added a pigment and tweaked the coating to be less sensitive to temperature and humidity, making it easier to spritz onto hulls in shipyards around the world. In March, the company announced the latest version of this coating. Van Helmond declined to elaborate on how it works, but says the coating reacts with water, aligning at the nanoscale to become extra smooth.

[Read: The obscure maritime law that ruins your commute]

However, van Helmond did say that in laboratory trials the coating significantly reduced drag. The company claims its new super-sleek coating can reduce a ship’s carbon emissions by up to 35 percent when compared with traditional antifouling coatings.

Yet fouling-release coatings can be expensive compared with other options. And as Aldred notes, these coatings only work properly when water constantly brushes against the ship’s hull. That makes fouling-release coatings less useful for ships that are static for long periods, such as naval vessels.

Innovations to tackle fouling continue to develop in the footsteps of Middleton’s copper plates, and some of the most cutting-edge efforts to reduce fouling and drag function quite differently from existing coatings.

Take, for instance, attempts to develop a textured covering inspired by sharks. Rather than trying to make a ship’s hull extremely smooth, such coverings mimic sharkskin’s characteristic roughness, which is naturally drag-reducing and antifouling. Such textures have been applied successfully to the bodies of commercial airplanes to reduce drag in the air, though they are still being prototyped for ships.

Other scientists are looking to use ultrasound or ultraviolet light to deter marine organisms from attaching to hulls. Killing microbes before they get a chance to stick to the vessel could prevent the formation of biofilm onto which barnacles and other stowaways attach. Aldred cautions that these approaches have not been fully evaluated and could come with some unfortunate side effects. “Are we going to be selecting and breeding algae that are resistant to UV, for example? You can imagine all kinds of consequences,” he says.

In their own work, Aldred and his colleagues hope to develop a substance that would actually encourage the formation of a biofilm. But a special kind of biofilm: The team has identified bacteria capable of degrading barnacle glue, he says, which could prevent large marine organisms from colonizing a hull.

“We have a joke in our project that if we ever launched a company to sell this slime, we’d call it ‘boat yogurt,’” he explains. “It’s a kind of probiotic for your boat.”

Their research is yet to be published, and Aldred declines to share further details, though he says that, so far, he is happy with the results.

At least royal approval is no longer a requirement. What would King George III have made of boat yogurt?

Former Netherlands striker Quincy Promes is sentenced to 18 months in jail for stabbing his cousin in the knee at a family party in July 2020.

Singapore Wrestles With the Death Penalty

“Singapore has stubbornly maintained a hard-line policy on drugs that mandates the death penalty for even minor infractions,” Timothy McLaughlin wrote in April. The country resumed executions after a two-year hiatus during the coronavirus pandemic, McLaughlin reported, even amid an increase in public opinion against the mandatory death penalty.

In “Singapore Wrestles With the Death Penalty,” Timothy McLaughlin seems to express more sympathy for drug traffickers than for the hundreds of thousands across the world who die or are debilitated each year because of drugs and their families who bear the consequences.

For example, he dismisses the quantity found in the possession of one drug trafficker as “four small packets.” That amount is equivalent to 4,320 straws of heroin, enough to feed the addiction of 600 drug abusers for a week.

The article claims there has been an “upsurge in public sentiment in Singapore against the mandatory death penalty.” But, as McLaughlin acknowledges, surveys have repeatedly confirmed strong support for the death penalty for very serious crimes, including drug trafficking. The leader of the opposition in Singapore also agrees with this policy.

Domestic objections to our policies on drugs and the death penalty come mainly from a few vocal activists. They are free to advocate for their cause within the law, and they do so loudly and persistently. But our electorate knows that a permissive attitude toward drugs is unwise and fears the devastation drugs have brought in other countries. The chairman of the biggest Dutch police union has called the Netherlands a “narco-state.” The Belgian justice minister is reported to be living in safe houses because of threats from narco-criminals. A year has been shaved off the average life expectancy of American men because of opioid abuse.

Singapore could easily suffer such outcomes, too, if we liberalized our drug-control regime. Other countries can decide on the approach that best suits them. Our approach has saved countless lives and made Singapore one of the safest places in the world. Parents of students, including those at the Singapore American School, know that their children are protected from the scourge of drugs and the streets are safe from the associated crime.

We stand ready to share our perspective with all who are open to exchanging views. In fact, we offered McLaughlin a briefing when he wrote to us with questions, but he did not take it up.

Ashok Kumar Mirpuri
Ambassador of the Republic of Singapore
Washington, D.C.

Croatia are one win away from their first major title after two extra-time goals help them beat the Netherlands and earn a place in the Uefa Nations League final.

Tunisia's increasingly autocratic president hosted the leaders of Italy, the Netherlands and the European Union on Sunday for talks aimed at smoothing the way for an international bailout and restoring stability to a country that has become a major source of migration to Europe.

These are not your average reservoirs.

The plastic-lined cavities span, on average, 20 acres—more than 15 American football fields. Nicknamed “mega-basins,” they resemble enormous swimming pools scooped into farmland; about 100 basin projects are in the works across France. In wetter winter months, the basins are pumped full of groundwater; during punishing droughts and heat waves, those waters are meant to provide “life insurance” for farmers, who are among the region’s heaviest water users.

In 2022, France faced its worst drought on record; 2023 stands to be worse still. In 2020, anticipating future dry spells, federal environmental and agricultural agencies proposed prioritizing and subsidizing basins as “the most satisfactory way of securing water resources.”

But critics say that this so-called climate-change adaptation is, in reality, a maladaptation—a lesson in how not to prepare for water scarcity. Already, almost two-thirds of the world’s population experiences a water shortage for at least one month each year, and “basins are absolutely not the solution,” Christian Amblard, a hydrobiologist and an honorary director at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, told me.

Humans have, for millennia, smoothed out seasonal water availability by damming rivers or lakes to create artificial reservoirs. Jordan’s Jawa Dam, the world’s oldest, is 5,000 years old. But the first mega-basins in France were built only a few decades ago and, unlike traditional dams, draw some of their reserves from underground. Once on the surface, this water becomes vulnerable to evaporation (even more so as the planet warms) and to pathogens including bacteria and toxic algae.

France is not the only country collecting groundwater to combat major droughts. Others have done the same, with devastating effects on local people and ecosystems. In Petorca, Chile, about 30 groundwater-rights bearers control 60 percent of the region’s total streamflow; most residents depend on a few daily hours of access to water-tank trucks for their needs. In India, groundwater is a primary source for drinking water; overexploitation has led to declining groundwater levels across the country and could slash some winter agricultural yields by up to two-thirds, experts warn. Iran has increased its groundwater withdrawal by 200,000 percent over the past 50-plus years and now faces a potential state of “water bankruptcy.”

[Read: Suddenly, California has too much water]

Climate change will leave many regions alternating between harsh multiyear droughts and sudden, extreme flooding—all as the water frozen in Earth’s poles, glaciers, and permafrost melts away. Groundwater might seem to be a limitless resource of moisture in the unpredictable and imbalanced future. But it’s not, and scientists say that the freshwater lying beneath our feet should be managed  like any other nonrenewable resource.

“They’re thinking very short-term,” Amblard said of mega-basin proponents. “Water needs to stay in the ground.”

Surface water is all the water we can observe: ponds, streams, rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans. It coats almost three-quarters of the planet. When we imagine water, we usually envision surface water.

Our stores of groundwater, on the other hand, are invisible and vast.  Most of this water is stored in the gaps between rocks, sediment, and sand—think of it like the moisture in a sopping wet sponge. Some groundwater is relatively young, but some represents the remains of rain that fell thousands of years ago. Overall, groundwater accounts for 98 percent of Earth’s unfrozen freshwater. It provides one-third of global drinking water and nearly half of the planet’s agricultural irrigation.

Water is constantly cycling between below-ground stores and the world above. When rain falls or snow melts, some replenishes surface waters, some evaporates, and some filters down into underground aquifers. Inversely, aquifers recharge surface waters like lakes and wetlands, and pop up to form mountain springs or oases in arid lands.

Despite our utter dependence on groundwater, we know relatively little about it. Even within the hydrological community and at global water summits, “groundwater is kind of sidelined,” Karen Villholth, a groundwater expert and the director of Water Cycle Innovation, in South Africa, told me. It’s technically more difficult to measure than visible water, more complex in its fluid dynamics, and historically under- or unregulated. It “is often poorly understood, and consequently undervalued, mismanaged and even abused,” UNESCO declared in 2022. “It’s not so easy to grapple with,” Villholth said. “It’s simply easier to avoid.”

Take a crucial U.S. groundwater case, 1861’s Frazier v. Brown. The dispute involved two feuding neighbors and “a certain hole, wickedly and maliciously dug, for the purpose of destroying” a water spring that had, “from time immemorial, ran and oozed, out of the ground.” Frazier v. Brown questioned the rights of a landowner to subterranean water on the property. Ohio’s Supreme Court ultimately argued against any such right, on the premise that groundwater was too mysterious to regulate, “so secret, occult and concealed” were its origins and movement. (The case has since been overturned.)

Today, groundwater is still a mystery, says Elisabeth Lictevout, a hydrogeologist and the director of the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre in the Netherlands. Scientists and state officials often don’t have a complete grasp of groundwater’s location, geology, depth, volume, and quality. They’re rarely certain of how quickly it can be replenished, or exactly how much is being pumped away in legal and illegal operations. “Today we are clearly not capable of doing a worldwide groundwater survey,” Lictevout told me. Without more precise data, we lack useful models that could better guide its responsible management. “It’s a big problem,” she said. “It’s revolting, even.”

[Read: 2050 is closer than 1990]

Water experts are certain, however, that humans are relying on groundwater more than ever. UNESCO reports that groundwater use is at an all-time high, with a global sixfold increase over the past 70 years. Across the planet, groundwater in arid and semi-arid regions—including in the U.S. High Plains and Central Valley aquifers, the North China Plain, Australia’s Canning Basin, the Northwest Sahara Aquifer System, South America’s Guarani Aquifer, and several aquifers beneath northwestern India and the Middle East—is experiencing rapid depletion. In 2013, the U.S. Geological Survey found that the country had tripled the previous century’s groundwater-withdrawal rate by 2008. Many aquifers—which, because they are subterranean, cannot easily be cleaned—are also being contaminated by toxic chemicals, pesticides and fertilizers, industrial discharge, waste disposal, and pumping-related pollutants.

Because these waters are hidden and can seem “infinite,” Lictevout said, few people “see the consequences of our actions.” She and other hydrology experts often turn to a fiscal analogy: All of the planet’s freshwater represents a bank account. Rainfall and snowmelt are the income. Evaporation and water pumping are the expenditures. Rivers, lakes, and reservoirs are the checking account. Groundwater is the savings or retirement fund—which we are tapping into.

“We have to be careful about dipping into our savings,” says Jay Famiglietti, an Arizona State University hydrologist and the executive director emeritus of the University of Saskatchewan’s Global Institute for Water Security.

As they face down hotter and drier growing seasons, some French farmers say the water backup of basins is crucial to food security. (Agriculture, according to the federal government, accounts for two-thirds of France’s total water consumption.)

“If we don’t continue with this project, there are farms that won’t survive,” Francois Petorin, an administrator of the 200-plus-farm Water Co-op 79, in Western France, has said. "We have no other choice."

Under a deal with local water authorities, farmers can access set volumes from the basins in exchange for reducing pesticide use, planting fields with hedges, and increasing biodiversity. Proponents of the mega-basins also argue that they would be careful to pump only when groundwater levels are above certain thresholds and would draw from shallow aquifers that could be quickly recharged by precipitation.

[Read: One nation under water]

Experts don’t disagree that groundwater must be a part of adapting to climate change. But many argue that overdependence on and overexploitation of a shrinking natural resource cannot be the solution to a problem created by the overdependence on and overexploitation of nonrenewable natural resources.

Instead, experts told me that regulated groundwater tapping could be paired with other adaptations—many of which involve reducing water use and consumption. Farmers could swap out water-intensive crops such as corn (which is grown on 60 percent of France’s irrigated lands, much of it for livestock) in favor of drought-resistant species adapted to local climates. They could employ  more efficient irrigation technologies and plow less, which would make for healthier, more permeable soil, which could retain more water and filter it down more effectively to aquifers. Reducing meat consumption and cutting down on food waste would also shrink water use. Instead of drawing groundwater up for dry seasons, we could inject and help infuse water into depleted aquifers for storage.

“It is a common resource, at the end of the day,” Villholth said. “It’s an issue of equity. It’s almost a democratic question.”

That’s certainly how France’s mega-basin opponents see it. They have staged numerous protests and acts of civil disobedience, including planting hedges on land earmarked for basins and excavating crucial pumps and pipes. In March, thousands of activists (30,000 according to organizers, 6,000 according to state officials) faced off against 3,000 militarized police over the construction of a new mega-basin in Sainte-Soline, in western France, that would supply 12 farms. Organizers say 200-plus people were injured by tear-gas grenades and rubber-ball launchers. A few weeks later, a French court approved the construction of 16 heavily subsidized mega-reservoirs in western France, including the one at Sainte-Soline.

This is one advantage of mega-basins: They make the invisible hyper-visible. “It puts the matter in front of everybody,” Villholth said. Pulled to the surface, groundwater becomes more measurable, as does its use—as do debates over the ethics of its use. But that won’t tell us how much is left. If we’re not careful, we’ll discover that only once it’s all tapped out.