USGS Monthly Groundwater News and Highlights: May 1, 2018

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Featured Product: Most atolls will be uninhabitable by the mid-21st century because of sea-level rise exacerbating wave-driven flooding

In a new study, scientists found that sea-level rise and wave-driven flooding on atoll islands will make their limited freshwater resources non-potable by the middle of the 21st century, directly threatening the sustainability of human populations that live there. The primary source of freshwater for populated atoll islands is rain that soaks into the ground and remains there as a layer of fresh groundwater that floats on top of denser saltwater. Scientists from the USGS, Deltares, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa used a variety of climate-change scenarios to project the impact of sea-level rise and wave-driven flooding on atoll infrastructure and freshwater availability. Based on current global greenhouse gas emission rates, the interactions between sea-level rise and wave dynamics over coral reefs will lead to an annual wave-driven overwash of most atoll islands by the mid-21st century. Such annual flooding would result in the islands becoming uninhabitable due to frequent damage to infrastructure and the inability of their freshwater resources to recover between overwash events. View the news release, or download the journal article.

USGS Groundwater-Related Press Releases

Many Low-Lying Atoll Islands Will Be Uninhabitable by Mid-21st Century (4/25/2018)

New App for Lake Houston Provides Real-Time Data (4/12/2018)

USGS Releases New Web-Based Groundwater Model Visualization Tool (4/12/2018)

Public Invitation: The Scoop on Western South Dakota's Vital Water Resources (4/11/2018)

USGS Groundwater-Related Publications

Bedrock Geologic Map of the Lisbon Quadrangle, and Parts of the Sugar Hill and East Haverhill Quadrangles, Grafton County, New Hampshire (04/27/18)

Bedrock Geologic Map of the Miles Pond and Concord Quadrangles, Essex and Caledonia Counties, Vermont, and Grafton County, New Hampshire (04/27/18)

Most atolls will be uninhabitable by the mid-21st century because of sea-level rise exacerbating wave-driven flooding (04/26/18)

Public-Supply Water Use and Self-Supplied Industrial Water Use in Tennessee, 2010 (04/26/18)

Status and trends of adult Lost River (Deltistes luxatus) and shortnose (Chasmistes brevirostris) sucker populations in Upper Klamath Lake, Oregon, 2017 (04/25/18)

Carbonate system parameters of an algal-dominated reef along west Maui (04/24/18)

Numerical models of pore pressure and stress changes along basement faults due to wastewater injection: Applications to the 2014 Milan, Kansas Earthquake (04/23/18)

Uranium concentrations in groundwater, northeastern Washington (04/19/18)

Groundwater-level data from an earthen dam site in southern Westchester County, New York (04/18/18)

Cyclic heliothermal behaviour of the shallow, hypersaline Lake Hayward, Western Australia (04/17/18)

Effects of groundwater withdrawals from the Hurricane Fault zone on discharge of saline water from Pah Tempe Springs, Washington County, Utah (04/11/18)

GIS database and discussion for the distribution, composition, and age of Cenozoic volcanic rocks of the Pacific Northwest Volcanic Aquifer System study area (04/11/18)

Methane in groundwater from a leaking gas well, Piceance Basin, Colorado, USA (04/10/18)

Springs as hydrologic refugia in a changing climate? A remote sensing approach (04/10/18)

Simulating selenium and nitrogen fate and transport in coupled stream-aquifer systems of irrigated regions (04/10/18)

Water resources science of the U.S. Geological Survey in New York (04/10/18)

Hydrologic assessment and numerical simulation of groundwater flow, San Juan Mine, San Juan County, New Mexico, 2010-13 (04/09/18)

MoisturEC: a new R program for moisture content estimation from electrical conductivity data (04/06/18)

Data analysis considerations for pesticides determined by National Water Quality Laboratory schedule 2437 (04/02/18)

 

USGS Groundwater-Related Software Updates and New Releases

• MoisturEC v1.0: R-based GUI to combine electrical conductivity data with point moisture measurements
• MODFLOW GUI v4.36: Preprocessor and postprocessor graphical-user interfaces for preparing input data and viewing model output
• WellFootprint v1.0.1.0: Visualization of groundwater withdrawals

 

Field Photo

Did you know that USGS groundwater databases include records from about 850,000 wells that have been part of USGS groundwater studies over the past 139 years? In this photo, USGS groundwater hydrologist Bill Eldridge lowers a transducer into an observation well near Jewel Cave National Monument in South Dakota to monitor groundwater-level changes in the Madison aquifer. The data will be used to update previously published groundwater-altitude maps to help better understand groundwater flow. The work is being conducted by the USGS Dakotas Water Science Center in cooperation with the National Park Service. View current groundwater conditions in wells in the USGS South Dakota Active Water Level Network.

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Past monthly summaries are available online.