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April 25, 2018
Socio-hydrology meets Broadway: Can we survive drought if we stop using the toilet?
With Cape Town on the verge of being the first major city to run out of water, this is a question on the minds of many water managers and scientists within the emerging fields of socio-hydrology and socio-hydrogeology.
March 16, 2018
Happy birthday plate tectonics!
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: plate tectonics. Here we discuss the birth of plate tectonics and what it means for hydrogeology.
March 2, 2018
A cool new collectible: Water
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 fossils, although I’ve now added rocks from my field sites to the collection. One …
December 12, 2017
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 international science is training many more PhD students than the academic system can support”. Firm …
November 28, 2017
Hydraulic fracturing close to groundwater wells
By Scott Jasechko and Debra Perrone _______________________________________________ In December, 2016, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized a report [Ref. 1] on hydraulic fracturing and drinking water resources that, among other conclusions, states: (a) Quote from [Ref. 1]: “scientific evidence that hydraulic fracturing activities can impact drinking water resources under some circumstances” (b) Quote from [Ref. 1]: “When hydraulically fractured oil and gas production wells are located near or within drinking water resources, there is …
January 27, 2017
How did our planet get its water?
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 actually a profound question in hydrogeology, and …
August 11, 2016
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, across Nebraska, on the …
August 4, 2016
FloPy: A Python interface for MODFLOW that kicks tail!
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, running, and managing MODFLOW groundwater models seems to be a step backwards. Oh, but it …
