Water Underground

Good groundwater management makes for good neighbors

WaterUnderground 15th July 2017

Photo found on the Charter for Compassion's website.

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]

Of Karst! – short episodes about karst

WaterUnderground 8th July 2017

Dissolved rock in Zhangjiajie, China (Photo by Matthew Currell)

Episode 2: Dissolving rock? (or, how karst evolves). Post by Andreas Hartmann, Lecturer in Hydrology at the University of Freiburg (Universität Freiburg), in Germany. You can follow Andreas on twitter at @sub_heterogenty. Didn’t get to read Episode 1? Click this link here to do so! ___________________________________________________________ In the previous episode, I introduced karst by show ...[Read More]

Groundwater & Education – Part One

WaterUnderground 2nd July 2017

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 one of a two part series on groundwater and education by Viviana. ___________________________________________________________ Education /ɛdjʊˈkeɪʃ(ə)n The process of receiving or giving systematic instruction, especially at a school or univer ...[Read More]

What is the difference between ‘water withdrawal’ and ‘water consumption’, and why do we need to know?

WaterUnderground 24th June 2017

Post by Inge de Graaf, University of Freiburg, Environmental Hydrological Systems group ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Last week I had to teach my first class in global hydrology. When I showed the global trend on increasing demands and withdrawals (see Figure) I needed to explain the different terms as sometimes the ...[Read More]

How prehistoric water pit stops may have driven human evolution

WaterUnderground 17th June 2017

Post by Matthew Robert Bennett, Bournemouth University and Mark O Cuthbert, Cardiff University Our ancient ancestors seem to have survived some pretty harsh arid spells in East Africa’s Rift Valley over five million years. Quite how they kept going has long been a mystery, given the lack of water to drink. Now, new research shows that they may have been able to survive on a small networks of sprin ...[Read More]

How did our planet get its water?

WaterUnderground 26th January 2017

Post by WaterUnderground contributors Elco Luijendijk and Stefan Peters from the University of Göttingen, in Germany. After my first ever scientific presentation, someone in the audience asked a question that caught me off guard: “Where does the groundwater come from?”. “Ehm, from rainfall”, I answered. The answer seemed obvious at the time. However, we did not realize at the time that this is a ...[Read More]

Limits to global groundwater use

WaterUnderground 20th December 2016

Post by WaterUnderground contributor Inge de Graaf. Inge is a postdoc fellow at Colorado School of Mines, in the USA. Groundwater is the world’s most important source of freshwater. It supplies 2 billion people with drinking water and is used for irrigation of the largest share of the world’s food supply. However, in many regions around the world, groundwater reserves are depleting as the re ...[Read More]

The great American groundwater road trip: Interstate 80 over the Ogallala Aquifer

Sam Zipper 11th August 2016

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]

FloPy: A Python interface for MODFLOW that kicks tail!

Kevin Befus 4th August 2016

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]

What caves can teach us about climate, past and present

Gabriel C Rau, Andy Baker, Mark Cuthbert, Martin Sogaard Andersen 4th July 2016

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]