Did you drink water today? If the answer is yes and you drank that water
from anywhere in the United States, there's a 50% chance that water came from underground. Although it may seem invisible, groundwater
is everywhere. We rely on groundwater for the water that
we drink, water to grow our food, and to maintain the ecological habitats that we enjoy. Unfortunately, groundwater is in trouble. Humans use a lot of groundwater and groundwater
loss is connected to all kinds of problems, including dr
inking water contamination and
even the sinking of the ground itself. Groundwater is such an important resource,
states are fighting over it in the Supreme Court. So how can we sustainably manage groundwater? In environmental science, we tried to look
to the past in order to better predict the future, but in the case of groundwater, this
has been a real challenge. Most records we have of groundwater in the
United States only go back to the 1940s, but by then we had already been using groundwater
for at least 70 years. So I was wondering how can we manage groundwater
for the future if we don't even know what it was like when we first started to use it? This inspired me to dive into the US Geological
Survey archives where I discovered that early groundwater measurements actually exist. I led a team of five students over the course
of six months to help me hand transcribe and digitize over 10,000 early groundwater measurements. Here's what I found out. Groundwater was a lot different in t
he past
than it is today. There was a time when groundwater would gush
out of wells onto the land surface like a fountain. In the same places where groundwater was so
abundant that it would shoot out of the ground, today, wells are going dry. Out of all the wells we examined prior to
1910, 61% of them were these flowing wells. But post 2010, only 5% were flowing. This historical information can give us an
idea of the amount of groundwater there might have been in the past, but more importantly,
these flowing wells show us how groundwater was moving underground, which is actually
connected to the problems that we face today, like contamination and the sinking of the
ground surface. Using these measurements, we can make better
informed decisions about how to manage groundwater for the future so we can protect the water
that comes out when you turn on the tap. Thank you.
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