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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Overpumping Leads To California Groundwater Arsenic Threat, Ryan G. Smith, Rosemary Knight, Scott Fendorf
Overpumping Leads To California Groundwater Arsenic Threat, Ryan G. Smith, Rosemary Knight, Scott Fendorf
Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works
Water resources are being challenged to meet domestic, agricultural, and industrial needs. To complement finite surface water supplies that are being stressed by changes in precipitation and increased demand, groundwater is increasingly being used. Sustaining groundwater use requires considering both water quantity and quality. A unique challenge for groundwater use, as compared with surface water, is the presence of naturally occurring contaminants within aquifer sediments, which can enter the water supply. Here we find that recent groundwater pumping, observed through land subsidence, results in an increase in aquifer arsenic concentrations in the San Joaquin Valley of California. By comparison, historic …
Estimating The Permanent Loss Of Groundwater Storage In The Southern San Joaquin Valley, California, Ryan G. Smith, Rosemary Knight, J. Chen, J. A. Reeves, H. A. Zebker, T. Farr, Z. Liu
Estimating The Permanent Loss Of Groundwater Storage In The Southern San Joaquin Valley, California, Ryan G. Smith, Rosemary Knight, J. Chen, J. A. Reeves, H. A. Zebker, T. Farr, Z. Liu
Geosciences and Geological and Petroleum Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works
In the San Joaquin Valley, California, recent droughts starting in 2007 have increased the pumping of groundwater, leading to widespread subsidence. In the southern portion of the San Joaquin Valley, vertical subsidence as high as 85 cm has been observed between June 2007 and December 2010 using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR). This study seeks to map regions where inelastic (not recoverable) deformation occurred during the study period, resulting in permanent compaction and loss of groundwater storage. We estimated the amount of permanent compaction by incorporating multiple data sets: the total deformation derived from InSAR, estimated skeletal-specific storage and hydraulic …