community engagement

underground social solidarity: our #PandemicPlaylist

WaterUnderground 13th April 2020

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

WaterUnderground 31st March 2020

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]

Urban water underground: How green infrastructure makes it visible

WaterUnderground 5th July 2019

Post by Theodore Lim, assistant professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Virginia Tech. He researches the socio-hydrology of green infrastructure planning and implementation. In order for people to care about something, to value it, they have to be able to see it and experience it. This point should not be taken lightly. So much about decision-making and policy-making depends on how much public ...[Read More]

Doing Hydrogeology in R

WaterUnderground 25th June 2019

Post by Sam Zipper (@ZipperSam), current Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Victoria and soon-to-be research scientist with the Kansas Geological Survey at the University of Kansas. Using programming languages to interact with, analyze, and visualize data is an increasingly important skill for hydrogeologists to have. Coding-based science makes it easier to process and visualize large amount ...[Read More]

Update on the groundwater situation in Cape Town

WaterUnderground 3rd June 2019

Freeze-frame from the featured IAEA video on drought conditions in Cape Town.

Post by Jared van Rooyen, PhD student in Earth Science at Stellenbosch University, in South Africa. When the Cape Town water crisis first emerged it took almost a year before active contingencies were put in place. Four major ideas were proposed: (1) Intense water restrictions for municipal water users, (2) greywater recycling facilities, (3) groundwater augmentation of water supplies, and (4) des ...[Read More]

Video: Linking water planetary boundaries and UN Sustainable Development Goals

WaterUnderground 7th May 2019

Tom Gleeson talking about doughnut economics and showing great doughnut eating restraint.

Water Underground creator Tom Gleeson prepared this quick research video (with no more than a toothbrush, a file holder, and a doughnut, in one take!) for the Ripples project meeting at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, that was held in April. In this video, he talks about using doughnut economics for linking water planetary boundaries and UN Sustainable Development Goals. Display "Linking wat ...[Read More]

Dowsing for interesting water science – what’s exciting at EGU 2019?

WaterUnderground 5th April 2019

Is that a crowd of geoscientists wandering through Vienna?

Joint post by Sam Zipper (an EGU first-timer) and Anne Van Loon (an EGU veteran). Every April, the European Geophysical Union (EGU) holds an annual meeting in Vienna. With thousands of presentations spread out over a full week, it can feel like you’re surrounded by a deluge of water-related options – particularly since the conference center is on an island! To help narrow down the schedule! ...[Read More]

Groundwater and Education – Part two

WaterUnderground 2nd August 2018

Post by Viviana Re, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Pavia (Università di Pavia), in Italy. You can follow Viviana on Twitter at @biralnas. Part two of a two-part series on groundwater and education by Viviana. __________________________________________________ In my last post (“Drawing out groundwater (from the well)”) I wrote about the reasons why, as groundwater scientists, we shoul ...[Read More]

Socio-hydrology meets Broadway: Can we survive drought if we stop using the toilet?

WaterUnderground 25th April 2018

Post by Samuel Zipper, postdoctoral fellow at both McGill University and the University of Victoria, in Canada. You can follow Sam on Twitter at @ZipperSam. ___________________________________________________________ How can society best cope with water scarcity? With Cape Town on the verge of being the first major city to run out of water (a topic for a future post here on Water Underground), thi ...[Read More]

Crowdfunding Science: What worked and what didn’t, who pledged and how did we reach them?

WaterUnderground 6th March 2018

Jared Van Rooyen (at centre), pictured alongside research group members Yaa Agyare-Dwomoh (left) and Zita Harilall (right).

Post by Jared van Rooyen, MSc candidate in Earth Science at Stellenbosch University, in South Africa. Part two of three in a Crowdfunding Science series by Jared. ___________________________________________________________ During March of 2017, myself and a group of students supervised by Dr. Jodie Miller of Stellenbosch University’s Earth Science department (South Africa) completed a 5-week long ...[Read More]