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April 20, 2020
Re-thinking watersheds from the bottom up
Despite a few decades of progress on groundwater-surface water interaction and the advent of integrated groundwater-surface water models, it was clear that very different conceptual models of how groundwater fits into the hydrologic cycle were held by different communities within hydrology.
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.
September 28, 2017
Western water wells are going dry
We recently mapped groundwater wells across the 17 western states [1], where half of US groundwater pumping takes place.
June 27, 2017
How prehistoric water pit stops may have driven human evolution
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 springs. The …
September 28, 2016
Socio-hydrogeology: bridging the gap between science and society
Authored by Viviana Re, Marie Curie Research Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy Sustainability, integrated water resources management, climate change, groundwater governance. These are some of the currently trending topics in hydrogeology, as reflected by their widespread use as keywords in recently published literature. Indeed, hydrogeologists are at the forefront of guaranteeing the long-term sustainability of aquifers worldwide. But how can they assure that the outcomes of their investigations are …
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 …
July 4, 2016
What caves can teach us about climate, past and present
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 a hot summer’s day? Or perhaps you have experienced the soothing …
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 …
