Tag Archives: groundwater

The water beneath our feet

Subterranean caves in the Blue Mountains have been

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Measuring infiltration water in the Wombeyan Caves, New South Wales. Credit: Andrew Baker

converted into observatories to quantify how water moves through buried rock structures into groundwater.

Groundwater forms the world’s largest active repository of fresh water—more than a hundred times larger than rivers and lakes combined.

To use that groundwater resource sustainably, we need to know that we are only using as much water as is being continually replaced, mostly via rainfall and underground leakage from rivers.

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Fresh water bounty under the sea

Future global water shortages could be alleviated by huge freshwater reserves discovered beneath the ocean floor, according to a team of Australian and international scientists.

Vincent Post. Credit: National Centre for Groundwater Research and Training

The scientists from Adelaide, the Netherlands, USA and the UK have found half a million cubic kilometres of fresh water in undersea aquifers located off Australia, China, North America and South Africa.

These aquifers are similar to the groundwater used in much of Australia and the rest of the world for drinking water and irrigation, and so could come in handy as existing supplies dwindle.

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