Authored by Viviana Re, Marie Curie Research Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy Sustainability, integrated water resources management, climate change, groundwater governance. These are some of the currently trending topics in hydrogeology, as reflected by their widespread use as keywords in recently published literature. Indeed, hydrogeologists are at the forefront of guaranteeing t ...[Read More]
Geology for Global Development
4th GfGD Annual Conference – Geology and the SDGs (Registration Open)
Registration for the next GfGD Annual Conference is now open! 4th GfGD Annual Conference – Geology and the Sustainable Development Goals Friday 4th November 2016 (registration open from 9.45 am, for a 10.20 am start), hosted and supported by the Geological Society of London (Burlington House, Piccadilly, London). Register here: http://gfgdconference2016.eventbrite.co.uk/ (£5 students/unwaged ...[Read More]
WaterUnderground
Brackish groundwater resources: is development advisable?
Authored by: Grant Ferguson – Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil & Geological Engineering at the University Saskatchewan Groundwater makes up a large fraction of the Earth’s freshwater but that represents only a part of groundwater resources. Large volumes of groundwater are saline, with some reaching salinities of over ten times that of seawater. Brackish water is an intriguing pa ...[Read More]
Geology for Global Development
35th International Geological Congress (Cape Town, South Africa)
The past few months have been busy with other work, and unfortunately I’ve not been able to post much on here. I’m hoping to get back to regular posts over the coming weeks, starting with a note on GfGD involvement in the 35th International Geological Congress (IGC) in Cape Town later this month. The IGC takes place every four years, and is a flagship event of the International Union o ...[Read More]
WaterUnderground
The great American groundwater road trip: Interstate 80 over the Ogallala Aquifer
Authored by: Sam Zipper – Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison In late July, my wife and I loaded the dog into the car, cranked up the water-related tunes, and drove over a few million cubic meters of water. No, we haven’t traded in our sedan for an amphibious vehicle – rather, we were driving west, a ...[Read More]
WaterUnderground
FloPy: A Python interface for MODFLOW that kicks tail!
Authored by: Kevin Befus – Assistant professor, Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering at the University of Wyoming Groundwater modeling is getting better. Models are becoming more sophisticated with simpler interfaces to add, extract, and process the data. So, at first appearances, the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) recent release of a Python module named FloPy for preparing, ru ...[Read More]
VolcanicDegassing
The smallest volcanic island in the world?
One of the delights of talking to children of primary school age is their disarming ability to ask really simple questions that demand straightforward answers, but leave you struggling to throw your academic caution to the wind. Even with the questions of the biggest, the smallest, the oldest and the youngest there are still different ways of (over)interpreting the question, that can leave you flo ...[Read More]
WaterUnderground
What caves can teach us about climate, past and present
Authored by: Gabriel C Rau, Associate Lecturer in Groundwater Hydrology at UNSW, Australia Andy Baker, Director of the Connected Waters Initiative Research Centre at UNSW, Australia Mark Cuthbert, Research Fellow in Hydrogeology at the University of Birmingham, UK Martin Sogaard Andersen, Senior Lecturer at UNSW, Australia Have you ever enjoyed the cool refuge that an underground cave offers from ...[Read More]
WaterUnderground
Protecting springs from groundwater extraction: is a ‘drawdown trigger’ a sensible strategy?
By Matthew Currell – Senior Lecturer at RMIT University Springs, some of which have been flowing for hundreds of thousands of years, have been disappearing in Australia due to human water use over the past century. Following a hotly contested court case, Australia’s Environment Minister imposed a 20cm ‘drawdown limit’ at a set of springs, to protect them from a proposed coal mine. However, this ig ...[Read More]
WaterUnderground
Human Drought?
By Anne Van Loon – a water science lecturer at the University of Birmingham Recently I published a commentary in Nature Geoscience with the title ‘Drought in the Anthropocene’. In that commentary, my co-authors and I argued that in the current human-dominated world, we cannot study and manage natural drought processes separately from human influences on the water system like water abstraction, dam ...[Read More]