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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 …
June 15, 2016
Protecting springs from groundwater extraction: is a ‘drawdown trigger’ a sensible strategy?
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 ignores a fundamental principle of hydrogeology, known …
June 8, 2016
Human Drought?
By Anne Van Loon – a water science lecturer at the University of Birmingham Recently I published a commentary in Nature Geoscience with the title ‘Drought in the Anthropocene’. In that commentary, my co-authors and I argued that in the current human-dominated world, we cannot study and manage natural drought processes separately from human influences on the water system like water abstraction, dam building, land use change, water management, etc. To fully integrate …
March 15, 2016
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 of shallow groundwater …
October 2, 2015
Fantasy Bottled Water Brands of Tomorrow: Ogallala Water
We are peering into the not-so-distant future to imagine what the brand geniuses of the future will be serving up for discerning water consumers! The Brand: Ogallala Source: Great Plains Why? Deep down, you know you love it. Promotional Copy: Ogallala Water: GET PUMPED. Swill waters run deep so we go deep, deep, deep into the Great Plains water table to pipe this ancient, undisturbed water to your table. No …
September 22, 2014
Is groundwater depletion keeping California fruit and veggies cheap during the severe drought?
Food prices in the United States are increasing slightly but not as significantly as one might expect given the severe drought in California. Margret Munro, a science journalist with Postmedia, recently asked me a great question: is groundwater depletion keeping California fruit and veggies cheap during the severe drought? Following up on her article, here is what I found and what it means for the Central Valley aquifer system in …
June 3, 2014
One in four of world’s big cities water-stressed
From the McGill Newsroom As more people move to urban areas, cities around the world are experiencing increased water stress and looking for additional water supplies to support their continued grow. The first global database of urban water sources and stress, published online this week in Global Environmental Change, estimates that cities move 504 billion litres of water a distance of 27,000 kilometers every day. Laid end to end, all …
May 30, 2014
Groundwater extraction can move mountains
Contributed by Pascal Audet (webpage or email) Next time you eat food grown in the San Joaquin Valley of California, think about this: the water used for growing them probably came from under ground. Farmers do not really have a choice because the amount of water from rain and snow can’t keep up with the needs for growing food. Every year more water is drawn out of the ground for …
