Water Underground

Why so salty? Coastal groundwater quality under threat

WaterUnderground 11th August 2022

View over the Llobregat delta, where groundwater quality suffers from seawater intrusion https://web.archive.org/web/20161015110631/http://www.panoramio.com/photo/33131577

Guest contribution from Daniel Kretschmer, University of Potsdam European groundwater quality is deteriorated by seawater intrusion, the displacement of freshwater by a landward movement of seawater (Custodio, 2010). Just south of Barcelona, the deep confined aquifer at the Llobregat river delta has experienced SWI of several kilometers due to intensive groundwater abstraction in the 20th century ...[Read More]

Our enduring fascination with groundwater springs

WaterUnderground 27th July 2022

The middle zone of the Gerecse Mountains in Hungary via Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.

by David Litwin, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Article: Springs regarded as hydraulic features and interpreted in the context of basin-scale groundwater flow Authors: Tóth, Á., Kovács, S., Kovács, J., & Mádl-Szőnyi, J. O Fount Bandusia, brighter than crystal, worthy of sweet wine and flowers, tomorrow shalt thou be honoured with a firstling ...[Read More]

Celestial groundwater – the subsurface plumbing for extraterrestrial life support

WaterUnderground 25th March 2019

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]

How deep does groundwater go? Mining (dark) data from the depths

WaterUnderground 19th July 2018

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]

A cool new collectible: Water

WaterUnderground 2nd March 2018

Post by Matt Herod, Waste and Decommissioning Project Officer for the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, and Adjunct Professor in Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Ottawa, in Ottawa, Canada. _______________________________________________ I have always been a mineral and fossil collector. It was a hobby that stuck and blossomed into a career. I still collect minerals and fossil ...[Read More]

Crowdfunding Science: A personal journey toward a public campaign

WaterUnderground 26th August 2017

Author Jared van Rooyen's study area.

Post by Jared van Rooyen, MSc candidate in Earth Science at Stellenbosch University, in South Africa. Part one of three in a Crowdfunding Science series by Jared. ___________________________________________________________ When my supervisor, Dr Jodie Miller, suggested to me last year that we should look at crowdfunding as a way to potentially to fund my master’s project, I had no idea of what I w ...[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]

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]

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]