Post by Kevin Befus, Assistant Professor in Civil and Architectural Engineering at the University of Wyoming. Have you ever taken a walk on the beach during a lowering (ebbing) tide and see mini-rivers grow and create beautiful drainage patterns before your eyes? These short-lived groundwater seepage features (Fig. 1A) are tiny (and fast) analogs of how groundwater has shaped some parts of Mars! ...[Read More]
Water: underground source for billions could take more than a century to respond fully to climate change
WaterUnderground post by Mark O. Cuthbert, Cardiff University; Kevin M. Befus, University of Wyoming, and Tom Gleeson, University of Victoria Groundwater is the biggest store of accessible freshwater in the world, providing billions of people with water for drinking and crop irrigation. That’s all despite the fact that most will never see groundwater at its source – it’s stored naturally below gro ...[Read More]
Groundwater and Education – Part two
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]
How deep does groundwater go? Mining (dark) data from the depths
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]
Data drought or data flood?
Post by Anne Van Loon, Lecturer in Physical Geography (Water sciences) at the University of Birmingham, in the United Kingdom. __________________________________________________ The basis for (almost) all scientific work, at least in the earth and environmental sciences, is DATA. We all need data to search for the answers to our questions. There are a number of options to get hold of data; we can ...[Read More]
Crowdfunding Science: What worked and what didn’t, who pledged and how did we reach them?
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]
A Tanzanian groundwater safari through the last 2 million years
Post by Mark Cuthbert, Research Fellow and Lecturer at Cardiff University, in the United Kingdom, and by Gail Ashley, Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University, in the United States. _______________________________________________ During the dry season, Lake Masek in Northern Tanzania (see map) is a lovely place to be if you’re a hippo or a flamingo, but for humans it’s an inhospitable environ ...[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]
Hydraulic fracturing close to groundwater wells
Post by Scott Jasechko, Assistant Professor of Water Resources with the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and by Debra Perrone, non-resident Fellow at Water in the West and an Assistant Professor, also at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the United States. _______________________________________________ In December ...[Read More]
Community advice to young hydrologists, Part 1
We at Water Underground loved reading Young Hydrologic Society’s post titled “Community advice to young hydrologists” – an advice column written by a network of established scientists in the field. We appreciated the column so much, in fact, that we have decided to re-blog the post to you (with YHS’s consent, of course). We’ve split up their post by question, and have added in hyperlinks to all co ...[Read More]