A new simulation tracks the underground journey of water across the continental United States, revealing surprising depths and distances traveled by rainwater and snowmelt.
Researchers from Princeton University and the University of Arizona have created a simulation that maps underground water on a continental scale. The result of three years' work studying groundwater from coast to coast, the findings plot the unseen path that each raindrop or melted snowflake takes before reemerging in freshwater streams, following water from land surface to depths far below and back up again, emerging up to 100 miles away, after spending from 10 to 100,000 years underground.
The simulation shows that rainfall and snowmelt flow much farther underground than previously understood and that more than half the water in streams and rivers originates from aquifers once thought to be so deep as to be walled off from streams. These unexpected findings have major implications for tracking pollution and predicting the effects of climate change on groundwater, which supplies half of all drinking water in the United States. Spanning the continental United States and parts of Canada and Mexico, the simulation tracks the flow of groundwater and measures the vast distances and depths it travels before discharging into streams across more than 3 million square miles (7.85 million square kilometers). The researchers accomplished this with a high-resolution hydrological simulation that allowed them to track the water moving through underground system
GROUNDWATER SIMULATION HYDROLOGY WATER FLOW CLIMATE CHANGE
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