WaterUnderground

WaterUnderground

Groundwater—the world’s largest freshwater store— is a life-sustaining resource that supplies water to billions of people, plays a central part in irrigated agriculture and influences the health of many ecosystems. Water Underground is a groundwater nerd blog written by a global collective of hydrogeologic researchers for water resource professionals, academics and anyone interested in groundwater, research, teaching and supervision. The blog, started by Tom Gleeson and managed by Xander Huggins, is the first blog hosted on both the EGU blogs and the AGU blogosphere.

How Covid-19 could change international food trade and impact water resources

6th July 2020
How Covid-19 could change international food trade and impact water resources
Will the coronavirus pandemic have long lasting implications for food systems and water resources?

By Carole Dalin The coronavirus outbreak is a global shock that has affected labour supply, productivity and aggregate demand around the world. However, less is known about what impact this shock will have on global water resources.         Disruptions of global food systems caused by the Covid-19 pandemic are, at least for now, more linked with the supply chain than with food production or food s ...[Read More]

Calling on hydrologists to help each other with emergency remote teaching

26th June 2020
Calling on hydrologists to help each other with emergency remote teaching
Lecture halls will be empty for many this fall. How can you help the hydrology community pivot to online teaching?

By Tom Gleeson, Adam Ward, Anne Jefferson, and Skuyler Herzog Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, many of us are in the same situation: all of a sudden ‘pivoting’ to online teaching, which is probably better called ‘emergency remote teaching’ since few of us have the background, training, and resources to purposefully develop online courses. Fortunately, this response has also catalyzed the open sharing ...[Read More]

Should the pandemic change what we ‘do’ as sustainability scientists?

18th May 2020
Should the pandemic change what we ‘do’ as sustainability scientists?
Reflections and Ripples by David Hawkins-Weeks (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

By: Viviana Re and Tom Gleeson he world will likely never be the same again after the covid-19 pandemic – too much has changed for us personally, socially and culturally. The pandemic is a terrible tragedy that continues to devastate lives and economies while ironically also bearing the possibility of being a much needed global sustainability reset. So as applied scientists focused on sustai ...[Read More]

Groundwater and climate change revisited: informing adaptation in a warming world

27th April 2020
Groundwater and climate change revisited: informing adaptation in a warming world

Recent research has identified the natural resilience of groundwater to climate change and our tendency to deplete this invaluable resource. It’s time we understood, valued, and governed groundwater as the vital adaptation to climate change that it is. roundwater flowing within the geology beneath our feet is the world’s largest liquid store of freshwater. Its volume in most countries in Afr ...[Read More]

Re-thinking watersheds from the bottom up

20th April 2020
Re-thinking watersheds from the bottom up
Condon et al., WRR, 2020

n a recent commentary published in Water Resources Research, a group of us asked the question: “Where is the bottom of a watershed?” Discussions around the role of deeper groundwater in the hydrologic cycle within this group were triggered by a lecture that Jennifer McIntosh delivered at the University of Saskatchewan’s Global Institute for Water Security in 2018. The discussions around this lectu ...[Read More]

underground social solidarity: our #PandemicPlaylist

13th April 2020
underground social solidarity: our #PandemicPlaylist
Social solidarity participators (and musical groundwater nerds).

In our last post, the WaterUnderground community shared our roses, buds, and thorns of our current situations amid the coronavirus pandemic and a picture of our #StayAtHomeAndStaySafe view. As promised, in this post we’re sharing the next installment of this solidarity-building exercise of ours: our ‘pandemic playlist’. Each of the contributors from last post have provided a song ...[Read More]

underground social solidarity: rose, thorns and buds in the COVID-19 pandemic

31st March 2020
underground social solidarity: rose, thorns and buds in the COVID-19 pandemic

Well, the world is certainly in a crazy time – one of the most enlightening tweets that I keep thinking about is: In a longer article, Klein asks a crucial question: can social solidarity replicate faster than the virus? So to encourage social solidarity in our dispersed global community of groundwater nerds, I suggested we share: A picture of our #StayAtHomeAndStaySafeView A song that is wo ...[Read More]

Groundwater pumping poses worldwide threat to riverine ecosystems

3rd October 2019
Groundwater pumping poses worldwide threat to riverine ecosystems
When will critical river flows be reached where you live?

Post by Inge de Graaf, Assistant Professor of Hydrological Environmental Systems at the University of Freiburg. With the climate strikes happening all over the world, I sometimes wish I had a crystal ball that would allow me to look into the future. Or even better, a crystal ball that could show me different scenarios of what will happen if we change, or not. Well, I do not have a crystal ball, bu ...[Read More]

Groundwater and a ‘green drought’

24th September 2019
Groundwater and a ‘green drought’

Post by Andy Baker, professor in the Connected Waters Initiative Centre at UNSW Sydney, Andreas Hartmann, assistant professor in Hydrological Modeling and Water Resources at the University of Freiburg, and Romane Berthelin, PhD student in Hydrological Modeling and Water Resources at the University of Freiburg. Here in New South Wales (NSW) in southeastern Australia, a long-running drought continue ...[Read More]

Shedding light on the invisible: addressing potential groundwater contamination by plastic microfibers

6th September 2019
Shedding light on the invisible: addressing potential groundwater contamination by plastic microfibers
Koh Kong, Cambodia (picture by Viviana Re, 2016).

Post by Viviana Re, researcher at the University of Pisa in Italy. You can follow Viviana on Twitter at @biralnas. Until recently, the topic of plastic pollution was relatively unknown to the general public, although the problem was already under everyone’s very eyes. Indeed, plastic pollution has become one of the most debated issues over the last few years, in some cases even overshadowing ...[Read More]