Before sunrise, on a frigid, frozen lake south of Madison, Wisconsin, Zach Feiner is staring at a buzzing screen. He's drilled a hole through the ice on Lake Waubesa and dropped two things down: a fishing line and the transducer attached to a sonar device that will tell him if anything is moving below.

A freshwater reservoir hidden beneath the Atlantic seafloor off the U. S. East Coast could hold enough drinkable water to supply a city the size of New York for roughly 800 years, researchers recently confirmed.

Protection of the environment generally receives strong support from the public. Yet there has always been a paradox at the heart of that support: protection for water resources is consistently the highest environmental priority for the pubic, yet the sources of that water -- freshwater ecosystems -- are often less protected and more degraded than terrestrial or marine ecosystems.