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groundwater
Groundwater is extremely important to our way of
life . Most drinking water supplies and often
irrigation water for agricultural needs are drawn from
underground sources. More than 90 percent of the
liquid fresh water available on or near the earth's
surface is groundwater.
Hot groundwater can also be a source of energy.
Groundwater is derived from rain and melting snow
that percolate downward from the surface; it collects
in the open pore spaces between soil articles or in
cracks and fissures in bedrock. The process of
percolation is called infiltration.
Porosity
Permeability
The ease with which fluid is transmitted through a rock's
pore space is called permeability. Although a rock may
be very porous, it is not necessarily very permeable.
Permeability is a measure of how interconnected the
individual pore spaces are in a rock or sediment .
Water flows downward through soil and bedrock because of the force of
gravity. It continues in that direction until a depth of about 5 kilometers (3
miles) is reached, where porosity and permeability cease.
The pore space above this level begins to fill progressively upward with
groundwater.
The saturated zone. The rock and soil in which all the open spaces are
filled with water is called the saturated (or saturation) zone. As the top of
the saturated zone rises toward the surface, it reaches a level of equilibrium
with the overlying unsaturated zone.
The unsaturated zone. The unsaturated zone (or zone of aeration) is the
rock and sediment in which pore spaces contain mostly air and some water
and therefore are not saturated . The unsaturated zone typically starts at the
surface and extends downward to the saturated zone. The contact between
the saturated and unsaturated zones is called the water table.
Migration of groundwater
The movement of groundwater is generally slow and ranges from 1
inch to a 1,000 feet per day.
In addiion to moving vertically downward for hundreds of feet, it
also flows laterally, roughly parallel to the slope of the surface of the
water table .
Springs
A spring is a natural flow of groundwater from a
rock opening that results when the water table
intersects a sloping land surface
Aquifers
Aquifers are porous, permeable, saturated formations of rock or
soil that transmit groundwater easily.
The best aquifers are coarse-grained sediments such as sand and
gravel .
A confined aquifer is overlain by a less permeable bed that keeps
the water in the aquifer under pressure;
An unconfined aquifer does not have a confining bed that
separates the zone of saturation from the unsaturated units above it.
Aquifer
If more water is removed from an aquifer through pumping than
is introduced through recharge, the water table drops.
This often results in wells that go dry or a surface that sinks
because the ground surface is no longer as supported.
This subsidence inflicts expensive damage on buildings, roads, and
pipelines .
Heavy use of an aquifer can be balanced through artificial
recharge, a process by which treated industrial wastewater or
floodwaters are stored in infiltration ponds.
The water soaks into the ground to replenish the groundwater or is
pumped back into the aquifer.
Wells
. Wells are drilled into the water table to tap aquifers for
domestic, industrial, and agricultural use .
The level of the water table fluctuates with changing
climatic conditions.
In artesian wells, which tap water from confined aquifers, either the water
level in the well simply rises above the aquifer (nonflowing artesian
wells) or it spouts at the surface (flowing artesian wells) .
Whether a well is flowing or nonflowing depends on the amount of
pressure that is exerted on the groundwater in the confined aquifer.
When water is pumped from a well, the water table is generally lowered
around the well . This local lowering of the water table is called
drawdown. Centered on the stem of the well, it has the shape of an
inverted cone called the cone of depression .
The drawdown decreases with increasing distance from the well .
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