GEOL-1010 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Hard Water, Phreatic Zone, Surface 3
5 Feb 2018
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Document Summary
Geology in the news: alaskan volcano has erupted 36 times in the past 4 months, result: the island it"s on has tripled in size. Source: precipitation (rain, snow, ice) falling to the ground and soaking in is the source of groundwater. This is why it survives in the desert subsurface. Chemical tracers (water itself is piped in from distant geologic units, hormone molecules, etc. : might look nice but the infrastructure could be far from perfect, groundwater works different in cities because of the amount of hard surface. Groundwater can occupy: pores within a rock or sediment (open spaces between cemented sediment particles, etc. , fractures- cracks cutting through otherwise solid rock, which represent a small amount of open space. Something: two terms for area in the subsurface where all pores/ fractures are completely filled with water, 1. Phreatic zone: necessary to access these areas when drilling for water wells.
