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Every chip fabricated in a semiconductor plant needs ultrapure water. Most nuclear reactors need water as a coolant and neutron moderator. Every artificial intelligence (AI) data center drinks between 1 million and 5 million gallons of water a day, with thirst often peaking during drought.

Water runs through every technology priority the United States has named, yet the word does not appear once in “Launching the Genesis Mission,” an executive order (EO) released in November 2025. As described in the EO, the Genesis Mission is a “dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI-accelerated innovation and discovery that can solve the most challenging problems of this century.”

Led by the Department of Energy (DOE), the initiative aims to build an integrated AI framework that would harness federal scientific datasets to accelerate breakthroughs in advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, critical materials, nuclear fission and fusion energy, quantum information science, and semiconductor development. The scope of the mission is comparable to that of the Manhattan Project.

Since the announcement, the DOE has listed “Predicting U.S. Water for Energy” among its 26 Genesis Mission Science and Technology Challenges. The project is also soliciting proposals in three water-related focus areas.

This framework provides a foothold for hydrology in the Genesis Mission, but it is scoped narrowly around water as a supply variable for energy production.

In reality, water is a crosscutting constraint that will help determine whether the mission’s priorities translate into deployable outcomes. The hydrology community now has a seat at the table, and if it moves first and positions water security as one of the “most challenging problems of this century,” the Genesis Mission can become the sandbox in which AI reshapes how the country measures, models, and manages water.

Making this happen will require that the DOE and the Office of Science and Technology Policy charter a hydrology workstream inside the Genesis Mission, with interagency delivery involving the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), NOAA, the Bureau of Reclamation, the EPA, and partners at state, regional, and community levels. Here is what we think that workstream should look like:

While the existing challenges reflect some of these components, others will require coordinated effort from the hydrology community to bring into the Genesis Mission’s scope.

Build the Water Corpus Genesis Will Need

The Genesis Mission EO instructs the DOE to create an American Science and Security Platform to provide the public, scientists, agencies, and policymakers access to crucial scientific datasets.

The good news is that accessible water data systems already exist across several federal agencies and academic research centers. The USGS National Water Information System tracks real-time and historical water quality and use across the country. NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems Program provides open access to Earth science observations. NOAA’s National Water Center, the first federal facility dedicated to national water resource forecasting, operates the National Water Model, which continuously forecasts flows on 2.7 million stream reaches across the continental United States. The Catchment Attributes and Meteorology for Large-Sample Studies (CAMELS) dataset, currently hosted by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, provides data tailored for hydrological research on hundreds of river basins, and the Caravan framework pulls together multiple large-sample meteorological and hydrological datasets at a global scale.

What is missing is a unified, AI-ready repository that brings federal, state, and community data together. Building one is hard. Water data are fragmented, inconsistent, and often entirely absent. Consistent, reliable data for groundwater, withdrawals, reservoir operations, and water quality are especially difficult to obtain.

Local resistance to sharing data is real. In Texas, for example, landowners hold private property rights over groundwater and have opposed metering and reporting requirements imposed by groundwater conservation districts. In California, agricultural well owners fought metering mandates for years before the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act compelled local agencies to begin tracking withdrawals. Tribal nations face a different concern: Water data collected on Indigenous lands has been misrepresented in federal datasets that were modeled without accounting for Indian country, leading many nations to restrict access to their data as an exercise of sovereignty.

Practical steps toward building a unified AI-ready repository include tiered access and licensing for different stakeholders, clear provenance tracking for all data reported, financial and educational incentives for stakeholders for reporting, and targeted gap filling. Where measurements are missing, AI can fuse remote sensing with gauged records and operational logs—but only if the results carry honest uncertainty estimates tied to real decisions.

Get the corpus right, and it will outlive any single program name. It becomes infrastructure the country can lean on.

Develop Shared Hydrologic Foundation Models

The Genesis Mission EO directs the DOE to provide “domain-specific foundation models across the range of scientific domains covered.”

Hydrology has a head start. Long short-term memory (LSTM) networks are a key type of neural network designed to last thousands of time steps. Hydrology LSTMs trained on CAMELS data have already matched traditional conceptual models for daily streamflow discharge prediction. Open-source Neural Hydrology tools serve as baselines for regional runoff prediction. These predictions may serve as precursors to the foundation models the Genesis Mission envisions and building blocks from which they could be developed.

The process of scaling up these tools is not straightforward, however. A hydrologic investigation of snowmelt-driven streams in Colorado will not require the same spatiotemporal data as tile-drained fields in Iowa, for example. A hydrology-specific foundation model must take nuanced requirements into consideration and provide a clear path for managing and exploiting a variety of datasets.

Google’s Flood Hub shows what is possible: Its AI-enabled flood forecasts now cover more than 80 countries. However, Flood Hub’s core model code and trained weights remain proprietary, meaning researchers can use the forecasts but cannot rebuild or adapt the underlying models. Genesis, if well positioned, can fill that accessibility gap by producing foundation models for water that are reusable, reliable, and openly governed.

Build a National Water Digital Twin

The EO prescribes an integrated AI platform combining foundation models with simulation tools to stimulate AI-enabled innovations.

That architecture is exactly what a digital twin requires. Europe’s Destination Earth initiative is already building digital twins for weather extremes and nonstationary conditions on the Large Unified Modern Infrastructure (LUMI) supercomputer. The United Nations–led AI for Good initiative has prioritized water applications, warning that fragmented national efforts risk duplicating work.

If the United States aims for global strategic leadership in AI-accelerated science, water infrastructure cannot be an afterthought.

Rather than starting from scratch, a water-centric Genesis Mission would unite existing federal models—the National Water Model, reservoir simulators, and groundwater codes—in a single digital twin. AI can become the thread that stitches them together, correcting biases and providing numerical solvers to enforce mass and energy balance.

What should this twin actually do? Help a dam operator decide whether to release water ahead of a storm. Tell planners where a new data center can draw cooling water without drying up a stream. Flag which coastal defenses will fail first under rising seas.

A water digital twin earns its keep when it makes the consequences of choices visible, in terms of flows, levels, temperatures, and risks to people and ecosystems.

Turn Basins into AI Test Beds

The Genesis Mission promotes AI-directed experimentation and directs the DOE to keep a record of robotic laboratories and production facilities in which such experimentation could be conducted. Hydrological field sites belong in that inventory. The National Ecological Observatory Network already operates 81 sites with standardized measurements of meteorology, surface water, groundwater, and biodiversity. The Critical Zone Collaborative Network instruments catchments to track water-soil-vegetation interactions over decades.

Formalizing these networks as AI test beds would link field observations back into the water digital twin so that experiments and models continually sharpen each other. Imagine mobile sensors steered by AI agents during a storm or aquifer recharge experiments designed by algorithms and verified in real time. That feedback loop is what separates a useful model from a decorative one.

Expand Water Challenges on the Genesis Mission List

Earlier this year, the DOE released 26 Genesis Mission Science and Technology Challenges, and “Predicting U.S. Water for Energy” was among them. The accompanying funding call (DE-FOA-0003612) solicits proposals on cloud microphysics, coupled surface water–groundwater modeling, and seasonal to multiyear prediction, all framed around energy needs and flood resilience.

These inclusions are a significant win for a hydrology component to Genesis, but several urgent challenges sit outside their scope. Can AI close the gap between a flood forecast issued 12 hours out and the 48 hours emergency managers actually need? Can it map compound extremes, in which drought, heat, and infrastructure failure collide in the same week? Can it redesign monitoring networks so that coverage follows risk rather than where gauges happened to be installed a century ago? Integrating energy and water systems is equally urgent: Floods have caused 80% of major U.S. grid outages since 2000, while drought-driven water stress curtails cooling at thermoelectric plants and reduces hydropower output, exposing how deeply energy infrastructure depends on hydrologic extremes.

The water footprint of new AI infrastructure deserves a place on that list. A separate executive order (14318, “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure”) is already fast-tracking expansion of data center construction, and a single hyperscale facility can consume 1 million to 5 million gallons of water daily. Emerging research shows how withdrawals at that scale can push streams below ecological thresholds during low flows.

Make Hydrology the Conscience of AI Governance

The EO directs the DOE to set data access rules and clarify policies for ownership, licensing, trade secret protections, and commercialization of products and tools associated with it.

Three principles should anchor such policies for AI use in water security.

First, Indigenous and community data rights must be embedded in every major AI water security effort, in line with the collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics (CARE) principles for Indigenous data governance.

Second, AI’s own water footprint, through electricity generation and cooling, must be treated as a design constraint. Transparent reporting, stress-based siting, and efficiency targets will prevent hydrology in Genesis from being self-defeating.

Third, the DOE should define what failure looks like. Missing a flood crest portends loss of lives and livelihoods and breaches of treaties. Accountability standards must be measurable, and they must ask not just how accurate the forecast was on average, but who bore the cost when it was wrong.

A single executive order will not solve the country’s water security problems, and a single challenge topic will not either.

But the Genesis Mission has provided a seat at a table that did not exist 6 months ago. Whether the hydrology community treats it as a ceiling or a foundation depends on what happens next. Europe’s Destination Earth and the United Nations’ AI for Good water initiatives are already moving.

American hydrology now has a seat at the table. We should take it.

Author Information

Amobichukwu C. Amanambu (acamanambu@ua.edu), Department of Geography and the Environment, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa; and Jonathan Frame (jmframe@ua.edu), Department of Geological Sciences, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa

Citation: Amanambu, A. C., and J. Frame (2026), The Genesis Mission needs hydrology: Here’s how to incorporate it, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260131. Published on 28 April 2026.

This article does not represent the opinion of AGU, Eos, or any of its affiliates. It is solely the opinion of the author(s).

Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.

MIRI, June 10 — Sarawak Water Sdn Bhd (Sarawak Water) has confirmed that the 1,100mm main pipeline at Mile 7 Miri-Bintulu Road is the source of a major leak here.

In a statement posted on its Facebook page around midnight, Sarawak Water said the confirmation followed system testing and isolation works carried out on Tuesday night on the 750mm pipeline, which verified that the pipeline is in good condition and not affected by any leakage.

“Following the confirmation, the scheduled repair works on June 10 will proceed as planned and will involve repair works on the 1,100mm main pipeline.

“The works are expected to cause temporary water supply interruptions and low water pressure in several affected areas as previously communicated through the official infographic issued earlier,” it said.

The affected areas are Krokop, Jee Foh, Jalan Bulan Sabit, Piasau Area, Pulau Melayu/Taman Bayshore, Pujut, Vista Perdana, Desa Bahagia, Permyjaya, Desa Pujut, Desa Indah, Southlake, Tudan, Senadin, Lutong/Baram, Kampung Masjid, Sungai 7, Lambir, Kampung Bukit Beraya and Bukit Song pump station (under the Sarawak Rural Water Supply Department), KFC Tanjong, Jalan Temenggong Oyong Lawai Jau, Jalan Brighton, Sunlight Garden, Woodhouse Garden, Marina Commercial Centre Centre Point, Town Area, Pelita Commercial Centre, Jalan Miri Pujut, Kampung Lereng Bukit, Pujut Padang Kerbau, Lambir Prison area, New Barrack Sarawak Water, and Kampung Muhibbah, Kuala Baram.

The utility provider added it will provide water collection centres to enable the public to obtain clean water supply during the temporary interruption throughout the repair period.

“Consumers are advised to store sufficient water for essential use and to practise prudent water usage throughout the disruption and subsequent recovery period,” Sarawak Water said, adding it would continue to provide updates from time to time through its official communication channels.

The list of areas in Miri, Sarawak affected by the water supply interruption. — The Borneo Post pic

On Tuesday, Sarawak Water acting chief executive officer Malseni Jamal said if the leak is traced to the 1,100mm pipeline, more than 70,000 consumers, which is equivalent to 70 per cent of the city’s population, could be affected by a supply interruption.

She also said repair works would begin on Wednesday (June 10), with valve closure scheduled for 5pm.

For more information, contact Sarawak Water on 085-426626. — The Borneo Post 

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MIRI, June 12 — Repair works on the damaged 1,100mm main pipeline at Mile 7 of Jalan Miri-Bintulu were completed at 8.30am, with water supply expected to be restored to affected areas in stages over the next 12 hours.

Deputy Minister for Utility and Telecommunication Datuk Liwan Lagang said Sarawak Water is refilling the system, stabilising the distribution network, and carrying out flushing activities to ensure water quality is satisfactory before supply is fully restored to consumers.

“I have been informed that the repair works on the 1,100mm main pipeline at Mile 7, Jalan Miri-Bintulu were successfully completed in full earlier this morning at approximately 8.30am,” he said in a statement.

“Water supply is expected to be restored in stages over the next approximately 12 hours, as a large-scale distribution system requires time to be refilled, stabilised, and brought back to normal operating pressure.”

He thanked all parties involved in the repair operation, including Sarawak Water and various government agencies that worked around the clock to complete the repairs and assist affected residents.

Among them were the Rural Water Supply Department, Fire and Rescue Department, Public Works Department, Sarawak Energy, Miri Resident’s Office, Miri District Office, Miri District Education Office, Miri City Council, Royal Malaysia Police, Malaysian Armed Forces, Malaysian Red Crescent, Ministry of Domestic Trade and Cost of Living, Miri Hospital, elected representatives, media personnel, and volunteers.

“On behalf of the Ministry of Utility and Telecommunication Sarawak, I would also like to extend my appreciation to all consumers in the Miri Division for their patience, cooperation, and support throughout the period of water supply disruption,” he said.

Liwan also expressed hope that the restoration process would proceed smoothly and that all affected areas would receive their normal water supply again as soon as possible.

Heavy rainfall at the site early Thursday morning resulted in difficult working conditions and temporarily hampered repair progress.

Repair works began on Wednesday following a valve closure at 5pm, with completion initially targeted for 5pm on Thursday.

On Tuesday, Sarawak Water acting chief executive officer Malseni Jamal said the supply interruption due to the repairs affected more than 70,000 consumers or about 70 per cent of the city’s population. — The Borneo Post

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In late 2025, astronomers spotted an interstellar comet making a quick trip through the solar system. 3I/ATLAS was discovered in July when it was just inside Jupiter’s orbit. It’s now about halfway between Jupiter and Saturn and getting farther away every day.

Astronomers have been observing 3I/ATLAS throughout its journey inward toward the Sun and back out again, compiling the most comprehensive and detailed view thus far of an interstellar object, including the chemistry of the gases that sublimated from its surface and formed its coma and tail.

In a first-of-its-kind observation of an interstellar object (ISO), researchers have discovered that the ratio of deuterium to hydrogen in 3I/ATLAS’s outgassed water is 30–40 times higher than in solar system objects. That suggests that the comet formed in a much colder environment than our own solar system did.

“It is always hard to really pinpoint where these objects form,” said Luis E. Salazar Manzano, the lead researcher on these observations and a doctoral student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “We know that they were formed in different parts of the galaxy, but it’s hard to connect what we measure with how they were formed. These types of measurements, such as the relative abundance of deuterium to hydrogen in water, are one of the best ways we have to actually [learn] about their forming conditions and their evolution.”

Coming In from the Cold

Water appears to be ubiquitous throughout the universe, sprinkled within distant galaxies and in star-forming nebulae. But there are different flavors of water: heavy, semiheavy, and plain old H₂O. In the molecular clouds where stars form, the cold environment favors a chemical reaction that increases the amount of gaseous deuterium (D), an isotope of hydrogen, relative to regular hydrogen atoms. That deuterium then bonds with hydrogen and oxygen atoms to create semiheavy water, or HDO.

By measuring the quantity of semiheavy water relative to regular water in an object, scientists can infer the object’s ratio of deuterium to hydrogen, or D/H, and decode the physical conditions in which that water formed. Astronomers have made such measurements for baby stars, planet-forming disks, solar system comets, and meteorites, as well as Earth’s ocean.

“What is fundamentally important about ISOs is that they are physical leftovers of the process of forming another planetary system and they can give us clues to that process,” said Karen Meech, an astrobiologist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa who was not involved with this research.

The team observed 3I/ATLAS with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile on November 2025 when the comet was 335 million kilometers (208 million miles) from Earth. It had just passed its closest approach to the Sun and was as bright as it was ever going to be. This timing was critical for the measurements the team wanted to make because the signal for HDO is very subtle, especially when it has to compete with the much more abundant H₂O in the comet and within Earth’s atmosphere, Salazar Manzano explained.

Those measurements showed that for every 1,000 hydrogen atoms in 3I/ATLAS, there were about 5–7 deuterium atoms. While that’s not a lot, the ratio is still at least 40 times more than what’s found in ocean water and at least 30 times the average value in solar system comets.

“The conditions in the stellar system in which 3I/ATLAS formed may have been quite different from the one in the solar system,” said Paul Hartogh, a physicist and atmospheric science researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany.

The first interstellar object, 1I/ʻOumuamua, did not outgas any material, and although the second object, 2I/Borisov, did, it was not bright enough to detect deuterium. 3I/ATLAS was the first opportunity astronomers had to measure the D/H ratio of an interstellar comet. Those measurements suggest that 3I/ATLAS formed in a much colder galactic environment than the solar system did, less than 30°C above absolute zero. The team published these results in Nature Astronomy in April.

Planning for the Next Interstellar Visitor

Hartogh, who was not involved with this research, said that on the one hand, 3I/ATLAS’s high deuterium enrichment is surprising because it is higher than that of any known comet. On the other hand, he added, some scientists predicted such high values for cometary water several decades ago.

Meech said she found these results “really interesting.” She never expected all other solar systems to have formed just like ours, and 3I/ATLAS fits with that idea.

“This gives us an intriguing look into the processes of planetary system formation—and that there are differences from our own solar system,” Meech said. “It is too early to tell what this implies for the formation of planets or habitable worlds. We are just at the beginning of an exciting story.”

3I/ATLAS is getting harder to see with telescopes, but astronomers still have a lot of data from when it was much brighter to go through, Salazar Manzano said. Teams around the world are working on creating a holistic picture of the comet’s chemistry and evolution.

What’s more, “the fact that we were able to make this measurement with 3I will allow us to better prepare what to expect with the next generation of interstellar objects,” Salazar Manzano said.

Scientists expect that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory could discover between 6 and 51 interstellar objects within the next 10 years. If objects are detected early enough in their journey through the solar system, “there may be enough time to coordinate observations with ground-based and spaceborne telescopes, taking advantage of the recent experience gained by the multiple 3I/ATLAS observations,” Hartogh said.

“These are rare opportunities to study another planetary nursery up close, and we have to take advantage of each new ISO to learn as much as we can,” Meech said. “It may be harder for a large number of individual teams to get all the data they want, so I think coordination and collaboration is needed more than ever.”

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@astrokimcartier.bsky.social), Staff Writer

Citation: Cartier, K. M. S. (2026), Interstellar comet was born in a very cold place, Eos, 107, https://doi.org/10.1029/2026EO260141. Published on 7 May 2026.

Text © 2026. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.