WaterUnderground

Research

Protecting springs from groundwater extraction: is a ‘drawdown trigger’ a sensible strategy?

Matthew Currell 15th June 2016

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]

Human Drought?

Anne Van Loon 8th June 2016

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]

The new and exciting face of waterunderground.org

Tom Gleeson 25th May 2016

by Tom Gleeson I started waterunderground.org a few years ago as my personal groundwater nerd blog with the odd guest post written by others. Since I love working with others, I thought it would be more fun, and more interesting for readers, to expand the number of voices regularly posting. So here is the new face of the blog… What is the new blog all about? Written by a global collective of ...[Read More]

Just in case you weren’t sure…groundwater flow around a fault zone is complex!

admin 19th April 2016

By Erin Mundy – a plain language summary of part of her Masters thesis Groundwater is the water that collects underground in pores and cracks in the rock. Understanding, protecting and sustaining groundwater flow is critical because over two billion people drink groundwater every day. The flow of groundwater can be impacted by geologic structures, such as fractures and faults. A fracture is ...[Read More]

Can we use an infrared camera to tell us how much groundwater is coming out of the side of a cliff?

Erin Mundy 29th March 2016

By Erin Mundy – a plain language summary of part of her Masters thesis Groundwater is an important resource, with approximately 2 billion people around the world using groundwater everyday. Although most groundwater is beneath our feet, sometimes groundwater leaks out of stream-banks, hill sides and cliff faces – this is called groundwater seepage. Current scientific methods are not ab ...[Read More]

Baseflow, groundwater pumping, and river regulation in the Wisconsin Central Sands

Sam Zipper 15th March 2016

By Sam Zipper, postdoctoral fellow at Madison and author of tacosmog.com We often think of groundwater as a nonrenewable reservoir, deep underground, and with good reason – less than ~6% of groundwater globally entered the ground within the past 50 years. However, where a river or stream intersects the water table, water is able to move from the aquifer to the stream (or vice versa). This supply o ...[Read More]

Tracking the Fallout and Fate of Fukushima Iodine-129 in Rain and Groundwater

Matt Herod 1st March 2016

This post is written by Matt Herod, and reposted here with permission… A recently published paper (by myself and colleagues from uOttawa and Environment Canada) investigates the environmental fate of the long lived radioisotope of iodine, 129I, which was released by the Fukushima-Daichii Nuclear Accident (FDNA). Within 6 days of the FDNA 129I concentrations in Vancouver precipitation increas ...[Read More]

Nature Geoscience digging into water underground this month!

Tom Gleeson 4th February 2016

Nature Geoscience is digging hard into water underground – the February issue is part of a special focus on groundwater. The cover this month is a gorgeous (groundwater-filled?) waterfall by Glen Jasechko, Scott’s brother. The groundwater focus includes: commentary on drought in the Anthropocene, led by Anne van Loon news and views pieces by Ying Fan and Tamara Goldin our paper on the ...[Read More]

How easily does our understanding of ‘CRUSTAL PERMEABILITY’ flow ? A new Geofluids special edition…

Tom Gleeson 3rd September 2015

Permeability is a crazy parameter: heterogeneous on many spatial scales, highly variable over up to 20 orders of magnitude, and transient on many temporal scales. Yet, for better or for worse it is essential to our understanding of numerous earth processes, as well as how human impact and interact with the earth. I have had the honor of guest editing a special issue of Geofluids called ‘Cru ...[Read More]

A new data portal for permeability!

Tom Gleeson 5th August 2015

Permeability data is tucked many dusty corners of the web and in even dustier reports, books and thesis. The purpose of the Crustal Permeability Data Portal is to ‘unearth’ (pun intended!) permeability data by providing links to online, peer-reviewed permeability data that is open to anyone around the world. This data portal collates links to other data sources rather than hosting data and is a co ...[Read More]

About

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 and led by Tom Gleeson, is the first blog hosted on both the EGU blogs and the AGU blogosphere.