Post by Kevin Befus, Assistant Professor at the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Wyoming, in the United States. __________________________________________________ We’ve all been asked (or do the asking), “where does your water come from?” This is a fundamental question for establishing a series of additional questions that can ultimately help define strategies for va ...[Read More]
Socio-hydrology meets Broadway: Can we survive drought if we stop using the toilet?
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]
Happy birthday plate tectonics!
Post by Elco Luijendijk, a junior lecturer, and David Hindle, lecturer and head of geodynamic modelling, both at the Department of Structural Geology and Geodynamics at the University of Göttingen, in Germany. _______________________________________________ As we’ve firmly moved into 2018, we can say happy 50th birthday to one of the most revolutionary scientific theories of the last century: plat ...[Read More]
An alternate career path for Groundwater Science-Engineering PhDs
Post by Jim Roy, Research Scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada. _______________________________________________ A recent editorial in Nature highlighted the relative scarcity of academic positions available to graduating PhD students (Many junior scientists need to take a hard look at their job prospects; 25 October, 2017). It notes that “it has been evident for years that internatio ...[Read More]
Humanitarian groundwater projects; notes on motivations from the academic world
Post by Margaret Shanafield, ARC DECRA Senior Hydrogeology/Hydrology Researcher at Flinders University, in Australia. You can follow Margaret on Twitter at @shanagland. ___________________________________________________________ What led me down the slippery slope into a career in hydrology and then hydrogeology, was a desire to combine my love of traveling with a desire to have a deeper relations ...[Read More]
Good groundwater management makes for good neighbors
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. ___________________________________________________________ Dedicated Water Underground readers know that this blog is not just about water science, but also some of the more cultural impacts of groundwater. Keeping in that tradition, today’s ...[Read More]
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]
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]
Baseflow, groundwater pumping, and river regulation in the Wisconsin Central Sands
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]
Nature Geoscience digging into water underground this month!
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]