“. . .The ocean is a desert with its life underground and a perfect disguise above . . .”

from “A Horse With No Name,” Dewey Bunnell, 1971

This book is about the continued relevance of exploration and discovery in improving the water shortages faced by a thirsty world. While the popular press seems mesmerized by ethical debates concerning quantum leaps in our understanding of the human genome and the worldwide blame-game over global warming, equally significant discoveries in the energy and groundwater fields resulting from modern geophysical exploration concepts and technologies have been largely ignored. This is a story of the vital importance of iconoclasm in modern science—a story of how a few people thinking outside the box can make important contributions to the world.

No one knows how many unexplored and unexploited aquifers exist, but the amount of water stored in them is thought to be considerable. The focus of this book is to help exploration geologists around the globe to uncover vast stores of water yet undiscovered. Water exploration must tie itself to the many great advances made by the petroleum industry, which long ago tied itself to computer technology. Today we stand on the launching pad to a journey into high technology groundwater location and development whose foundation has been laid for us through advances in petroleum and other mineral explorations.

In a brilliant article by Jonathan Rauch in the January 2001 issue of Atlantic Monthly (“The New Old Economy: Oil, Computers and the Reinvention of the Earth”), the author paints a most optimistic picture of future oil availability. He predicts “that the demand for oil will peter out well before any serious crimp is felt in the supply” because “something cheaper and cleaner … will come along, and the oil age will end with large amounts of oil left unwanted in the ground.”

Rauch arrives at this belief because he likens the energy industry to the computer industry. He says, “Most people understand intuitively that the essential resource in Silicon Valley is not magnetic particles on floppy discs or hard drives in servers, or lines of code or bits of data; it is human ingenuity.” He concludes, ingeniously, that “knowledge, not petroleum, is becoming the critical resource in the oil business; and though the supply of oil is fixed, the supply of knowledge is boundless.”

In every sense except the one that is most literal and least important, the planet's resource base is growing larger, not smaller. Every day the planet becomes less an object and more an idea.

It is difficult to fully understand why groundwater stands alone as a resource whose cost has risen rather than fallen in the crosshairs of man's ingenuity. It may be that water has almost always been controlled by governments rather than private industry, thereby reducing creative solutions. It may be that too little research funding was afforded groundwater because, although water's intrinsic value was recognized, its true economic value was, and largely still is, maintained artificially low through government subsidies. It is also true that the international hydrology community impeded innovation as much as conformist geologists resisted plate tectonics only half a century ago.

Whatever the reason, we sincerely hope that the information, the concepts, the data, and the achievements we present on the following pages break up the logjam of progress that has held back the optimization of groundwater development the world over.

Robert A. Bisson
Earthwater Technology International, Inc.
www.watermap.com
Jay H. Lehr
The Heartland Institute
www.e3power.com

First and foremost, the authors offer our sincere gratitude to Sabine Bisson and Janet Lehr for their steadfast support and forbearance during the production of this book.

We are most appreciative of the chapter contributions of Mr. Alexander Raymond Love (Chapter 1), Dr. Utam Maharaj (Chapter 4), and Dr. Ewan Anderson (Chapter 6), and also recognize co-authors of primary source materials summarized in Chapters 3, 4, and 6 of the book, including Dr. Roland B. Hoag (original technical reports on Somalia, Sudan, and Trinidad), Joseph Ingari (original technical reports on Somalia and Sudan), Dr. Farouk El-Baz, David Hoisington, Dennis Albaugh (original technical reports on Somalia and Sudan), and Dr. Mohamed Ayed and Dr. Farouq Ahmed (original technical reports on Sudan). Special thanks are extended to James Jacobs for his technical review and editing of the book manuscript and to Richard Cooper for his on-target Dewey Bunnell quotation.

We applaud the visionary leadership of Warren and Lisa Wiggins of the New Transcentury Foundation (NTF) and former USAID East and Southern Africa REDSO Director and Sudan Mission Director John Koehring in daring to apply new technologies to solving Africa's chronic water-related catastrophes. The authors offer special recognition to Trinidad water well-drilling entrepreneur Lennox Persad, who risked millions of his own money to help ensure the security of his country's future water supply. We also acknowledge former chairman Nazir Khan, former CEO Kansham Khanhai, Water Resources Agency Director Dr. Utam Maharaj, and Tobago Regional Manager Oswyn Edmund of the Water and Sewerage Authority of Trinidad and Tobago (WASA), for their leadership in opening the way for breakthrough water discoveries employing modern groundwater exploration methods, along with current CEO Errol Grimes for his dedication to exporting WAS'As new knowledge base to other Caribbean states. The megawatersheds projects implemented by NTF, USAID, and WASA represent the bookends of major groundwater discoveries over the past twenty years.

Robert Bisson wishes to thank his many other mentors, teachers, partners, employees, and clients, who collectively made possible the advancements of techniques and development of new concepts that led to the fresh body of knowledge reflected in the case study summaries of this book, including Col. Reginald Bisson, Adrienne Bisson, Dr. Roland B. Hoag, Jr., Joseph C. Ingari, Peter D. Hofman, Gary Armstrong, Larry Whitesell, Hon. John H. Sununu, William Goldstein, Dr. Hasan Qashu, Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Dr. William K. Widger, Jr., Dr. Olaf R. McLetchie, Dr. Lincoln R. Page, Robert M. Snyder, Alan Vorhees, Donald Gevirtz, Robert Kaufman, Kermit Roosevelt, Jon Armstrong, Dr. Tony Barringer, Robert Porter, Dr. Compton Chase-Lansdale, Donald Jutton, Frank Kenefick, Hon. Kevin Harrington, Judge J. John Fox, James Lee, Douglas Lee, Arthur Lipper, Ian Sims, and Dr. Dennis Long.

Jay Lehr wishes to thank posthumously Dr. Joseph Upson, his first boss and mentor at the U.S. Geological Survey in 1955. When asked “what are the working hours” by this young scientist, he responded by saying, “We start promptly at 8:30 am and we leave when the job is done.” Happily, because of Joe I learned that the job is never done and, as this book reflects, the job in groundwater science is still ongoing.

It was only in the last quarter of the twentieth century that the subject of groundwater was transformed from its nineteenth century place as a popular topic of mystical origins to a key economic commodity and political issue scrutinized by modern exploration scientists. As a consequence, the world in general knows little more now about the nature and extent of its fresh groundwater resources than it did at the turn of the nineteenth century. At the same time, governments and the scientific community do today agree on one point—that groundwater can no longer be considered a resource to be freely and blindly extracted and subjected to contamination with impunity, but rather must be “managed” and “protected” as an endangered resource.

The fatal flaw in this well-intentioned action plan is lack of data. Even basic water-related data, from precipitation to runoff, are sparse and often inaccurate, and far less is known about the water-related properties of underground environments. This holds true as much in developed countries as in the third world. “If you can't measure water, you can't manage it,” observed Arthur Askew, director of hydrology at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in the August 9, 2002, issue of Science. Unfortunately, while ill-planned and poorly documented water well-drilling schemes have proliferated worldwide, governments and international development institutions have not historically supported scientifically designed hydrogeological surveys and groundwater data logging, and private sector profit incentives to perform those tasks have been sorely lacking. As a consequence, very little data-driven published or archival material exists about measured quantities of global groundwater resources, and critical water-related decisions are being made behind a curtain of ignorance that adversely affects the global economy and the lives of all of us.

The coincidence of space-age technological innovations and scientific advancements has opened a window of opportunity to bring the groundwater knowledge base up to par with other strategic minerals in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. Governments and financial institutions are turning fresh water into a market-value commodity by privatizing water utilities. This being the case, fresh water stored and flowing beneath the ground should rightly be classified as an “economic mineral” and be thoroughly investigated by economic geologists using modern geologic concepts and all of the space-age exploration tools that revolutionized the minerals industry over the past forty years.

This book presents readers with solid data supporting a new paradigm that vastly increases estimates of groundwater balance along with a description of the modern exploration and development methods required to measure and access these untapped resources.

In humid regions, primitive humans paid little attention to water. It was always present and, like air, was taken as a matter of course. However, in semiarid and arid regions, the occurrence of water controlled the activities of humans. Villages were originally built on perennial streams or around water holes. Our early movements consisted chiefly of migrations to perennial water in the dry season and ventures into new pastures or hunting grounds in the wet season.

Primitive humans learned to dig for water, possibly by observing the actions of wild horses and wolves in search of water. As soon as we learned to domesticate and rear cattle and sheep, the water well became the most important possession.

The Bible described many incidents illustrating the importance of groundwater supplies to the tribes of Israel. Abraham and Isaac were renowned for their success at constructing wells. The Father of Modern Hydrology, O.E. Meinzer once said that the twenty-sixth chapter of Genesis read like a water-supply paper. Most people recall from the Old Testament how the Jews suffered for want of water in their 40 years of wandering in the deserts. To quell a near revolt by his people, Moses smote a rock with his rod and a fountain of water burst forth.

The ancient Greeks in the early seventh century BC told the story of Tantalus, Zeus' favorite mortal son who stole the ambrosia and nectar from the gods that gave the gods endless lives. Tantalus tried to share the heavenly food with mortals to give humans immortality. Zeus punished Tantalus by hurling him to Tartarus, a prison of darkness where Tantalus currently stands, trapped in the pool of water that is chin-height. He cannot drink it, though, for anytime he lowers his mouth to take a drink, the water recedes. The ancient Greeks knew the value of water, for Tantalus was sentenced to an eternal life of thirst, the most terrible punishment available. Hence, the word, tantalize.

The Romans depended on many shallow wells and springs before they built their first aqueduct in 312 BC. The soil was so rich in springs and underground streams that wells could be sunk successfully at any point, and the average depth necessary was only about 5 m. Such wells were common from the earliest period, of the Roman Empire Excavations in the Roman forum have uncovered more than 30 wells dating back to the Republic.

The drilling rather than digging of artesian wells in France and Italy began in the twelfth century and created considerable popular and scientific interest on the occurrence of underground water. The art of drilling and casing wells was actually invented, perfected, and extensively practiced by the ancient Chinese. They used bamboo poles and patience to penetrate hundreds of feet. Wells were started by the grandfather and completed by the grandson.

The most extraordinary works of ancient humans for collecting groundwater are the qanats and karezes of the Persians and Afghanies. The qanats and karezes are tunnels that connect the bottoms of shafts, which were dug by humans working as moles over long periods of time and are conspicuous over all the high central valleys of Iran. Thirty six of these tunnels supplied Teheran and the highly cultivated tributary agricultural area.

In ancient times, springs were considered the miraculous gifts of the gods; they wrought miracles and consequently were places where temples were built. These superstitions continue today with those who optimistically overestimate the therapeutic value of medicinal springs.

Prior to the latter part of the seventeenth century, it was generally assumed that the water discharged by the springs could not be derived from the rain, first because the rainfall was believed to be inadequate in quantity and second, because the Earth was believed to be too impervious to permit penetration of the rain water far below the surface. With these two erroneous postulates lightly assumed, the philosophers devoted their thought to devising ingenuous hypotheses to account in some other way for the spring and stream water.

Two main hypotheses were developed: one to the effect that sea water is conducted through subterranean channels below the mountains and is then purified and raised to the springs and the other to the effect that in the cold dark cavern under the mountains, the subterranean atmosphere and perhaps the Earth itself are condensed into the moisture. The sea water hypothesis gave rise to subsidiary ideas to explain how the sea water is freed from its salt and how it is elevated to the altitude of the springs. The removal of the salt was ascribed to processes of either naturally occurring distillation or filtration.

Beginning with the middle of the sixteenth until the close of the seventeenth century, numerous publications appeared that contained discussions of groundwater, but the two ancient or classic Greek hypotheses chiefly occupied the field, although an infiltration theory was explained in 1580 by Bernard Palissy. In the later part of the seventeenth century, Perrault, Mariotte, and Halley abandoned the theories of the past and actively undertook experimental work to determine the source and movements of groundwater, and thus was born the science of groundwater. Perrault made rainfall measurements during three years and roughly estimated the area of the drainage basin of the Seine River above a point in Burgundy and of the runoff from this same basin. He computed that the quantity of water that fell on the basin as rain or snow was about six times the quantity discharged by the river. Crude as his work was, he definitely demonstrated the fallacy of the old assumption of the inadequacy of the rainfall to account for the discharge of springs and streams.

Mariotte computed the discharge of the Seine at Paris by measuring its width, depth, and velocity at approximately its mean stage and by doing so verified Perrault's results. About the same time, Halley made crude tests of evaporation and demonstrated that the evaporation from the sea is sufficient to account for all the water supplied to the springs and streams, thus removing the need for any other mysterious subterranean channel to conduct the water from the ocean to the springs.

Centuries were required to free scientists from superstition and wild theories handed down from earlier generations regarding the unseen subsurface water. To a certain extent, we still live at a time when great misunderstanding if not superstition exist with regard to the occurrence and movement of groundwater. The elementary principle that gravity controls motions of water underground as well as at the surface is still not appreciated by all engaged in the development of the world's vast groundwater supplies.

Many people still believe that the magical forked witch stick is able to point to underground water streams and will actually twist in the hands of the operator in its endeavor to do so.

These popular superstitions are examples of the ability to believe without the foundation of facts, and this peculiar ability exists in the minds of both educated and uneducated men and women. Inasmuch as the movements of underground water cannot be observed at the surface, they have been subject to wild speculation. Even an American judge in a court case once ruled that “percolating water moves in a mysterious manner in courses unknown and unknowable.”

Little by little in the last decades of the twentieth century, groundwater hydrologists dragged the water supply fraternity and the public at large kicking and screaming into a twenty-first century. Now groundwater resources are appropriately valued as often the best hope for enabling society and commerce to move forward unhindered by water shortages. Forty-seven percent of the U.S. population now depends on groundwater for its drinking water. In the Asia-Pacific region, 32% of the population is groundwater dependent; in Europe, 75%; in Latin America, 29% and in Australia, 15%.

The authors of this book played their role of ardent enthusiastic scientists during this period battling ever-present opposition to belief that significant quantities of groundwater supply could be sustained. Although we approached success in our efforts, it was still a small victory as our intent has been to reveal to the world the vast quantities of groundwater yet hidden deep within the Earth, often beneath arid lands. Thus far, there has been little confidence in our conceptual model or paradigm.

We have long believed that a planet whose surface is covered by water should not be facing water shortages. Admittedly, 97% of the Earth's water is too salty for humans and agriculture, and glaciers and ice caps put another significant portion out of reach. But we have long believed that a significant portion thought to be out of reach under the ground is not.

Energy-intensive desalting of seawater is currently too expensive except in wealthy but dry areas near seacoasts. Our fresh surface water has been allocated in most of the developed world, with Canada being a rare exception.

Although humans have learned well over the past century to conserve water in such that water use per person has actually declined, the addition of the final two billion people on the planet in the next 40 years before its population stabilizes (in accordance with most sound demographic projections) will require considerable additional water supplies. If we fail to develop additional water supplies, international strife will remain. Half of our continental land lies within river basins shared by more than one country. Multinational water claims have not and likely will not provoke war, but local and regional conflicts have occurred over inequitable allocation and use of water resources. International diplomacy commonly encourages opposing countries to cooperate, but not always before lives are lost. Most recently, apartheid battles in South Africa in 1990, Iranian and Iraqi disputes in 1991, and intrastate conflicts in India in the mid 1990s cost thousands of lives.

There has been an explosive development of groundwater in several major deserts of the world in the last half of the twentieth century. Preliminary results of activity in the Sahara and throughout the Arabian Peninsula substantiate the occurrence of vast amounts of water stored beneath desert lands. This development is due to efforts of groundwater geologists and engineers, well construction crews, and political leaders who had the courage to launch the investigations against accepted water resources paradigms.

Several factors make water development programs in arid regions feasible:

1. The deserts offer uncrowded space
2. Favorable climate for nearly year-round crop growth
3. Large areas of reasonably good soils and food-fiber requirements for persons in mineral and petroleum resource industries in desert areas.

Throughout most of the world, aquifers have not been regarded as true water resource reservoirs. Rather, they are simply viewed as holding tanks for annual contributions of what is unfortunately thought of as safe yield. The annual increment of groundwater is skimmed off the top when the basin below is depleted in any significant way. But in fact, the surface-water reservoir that remains full is obviously as poorly managed as that which remains empty; so too is the groundwater reservoir poorly managed when it is not allowed to rise and fall in contrast to the vagaries of the natural cycle and the demands of the human population.

Good water management is the optimum manipulation of the available water resource to serve the greatest common good. It includes the coordination of both the natural aspects of the hydraulic cycle and every artificial operation that can be performed upon it, save, in most cases, the drastically expensive and uneconomic interbasin transfer of surface water.

The concept of the hydrologic cycle has become so generally accepted that it is difficult to appreciate the long history that lies back of its development and demonstration, from the dawn of history until comparatively recent times, barely a quarter of a century ago. The central concept in the science of hydrology is the hydrologic cycle, a convenient term to denote the circulation of the water from the sea, through the atmosphere, to the land and thence with numerous delays back to the sea by overland and underground routes and in part through re-evaporation and transpiration from vegetation, lakes, and streams. It involves the measurement of the quantities and rates of movement of water at all times and at every stage of its course through multiple reservoirs, from a height of 15 km above the ground to a depth of some 5 km beneath it. The reservoirs include atmospheric moisture, oceans, rivers, lakes, icecaps, soil, and groundwater. The transport mechanism from one physical state or aquifier to another is either gravity or solar energy over periods that range from hours to thousands of years.

The pioneer of intensive groundwater investigations was Germany's Adolph Theim who introduced field methods for making tests of the flow of groundwater and applied the laws of flow in developing water supplies. Under his influence, Germany became the leading country in supplying its cities with groundwater, and it still derives over 80% of its needs from wells.

Because we can see surface waters and because such tremendous amounts of money have been spent in building visible dams, levees, artificial reservoirs, aqueducts, and irrigation canals involving surface water, it is openly natural that we tend to think of that water as the major source of the world's needs. Actually less than 3% of unfrozen fresh water available at any given moment on our planet Earth occurs in streams and lakes. The other more than 97%, estimated at eight trillion acre-feet, is underground.

The total amount of water on our planet has almost certainly not changed since geological times. Water can be polluted, abused, and misused, but it is neither created nor destroyed; it only migrates.

Groundwater is tracked by remote sensing and tracer techniques, but the water movement is exceedingly difficult to follow. It is known that groundwater migrates slowly. Sometimes groundwater moves only a few millimeters a day, although occasionally it is a few meters per day. Near the water table, the average cycling time of water may be a year or less, whereas in deep aquifers, it may be as long as thousands of years. It is easier to measure water tables. Through test wells and controlled pumping, it is not difficult to measure the recharge rate and flow behavior around a particular site. The difficulty comes in sensing movement in the aquifer as a whole. Water can be stored in the pores of rocks, but it can also be stored in cracks and fractures, and sometimes these fissures can provide conduits to allow water to travel quickly and over great distances.

No one knows how many unexplored and unexploited aquifers exist, but the amount of water stored in them is thought to be considerable. This is the focus of this book, to help exploration geologists around the globe to uncover vast stores of water yet undiscovered. Water exploration companies have not yet made a major impact on the stock markets of developed countries, but they would not be a bad bet for adventurous investors.

Water exploration must tie itself to the many great advances made by the petroleum industry, which long ago tied itself to computer technology. The petroleum industries need for processing power is insatiable, and it has resulted in many computer technology advances. Today we stand on the launching pad to a journey into high technology groundwater location and development whose foundation has been laid for us through advances in petroleum and other mineral explorations. The oil industry itself has been a driving force in the computer industry where Texas Instruments began as a company in 1930 known as Geophysical Service. Seismic imaging now available for groundwater studies led to the development of computer programs to assess sound waves generated in rock to infer the nature and location of rock layers capable of trapping oil. From initial two-dimensional images, computers ultimately were taught to process gigabytes of data that would result in three-dimensional images.

In 1985, more than a day of computing time was required to analyze a square kilometer of subsurface structure; by 1995, computers could do it in 10 minutes, and the cost to survey 10 km² dropped from millions of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.

Concurrently, computer-assisted drilling technology advances include saw drill bits that have direct sensing tools to evaluate physical channels, and electrical characteristics of what they were drilling through while transmitting their exact location to the surface and enabling the implementation of immediate course corrections. In some ways, it is truly amazing that this book is only being written at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Advances to be described in the following chapters regarding groundwater development were recognized in the parallel fields of geologic science and engineering, more than two decades ago. This is why, with the exception of water every mineral resource on Earth has become less and less expensive than it was in our youth. Technologic- and knowledge-based advances have reduced the costs of location, development, and refinement of every other mineral in the Earth, without exception.

Mines and oil fields once abandoned have been reopened for redevelopment of formerly uneconomic resources. Groundwater, however, has been saddled with a century old paradigm. We place a straw in only the upper portion of our water-filled glass (or aquifer) ignoring its deeper regions because of our inability to discern deeper rock structures. Or we are misguided by beliefs that recharge could not continuously replenish the deeper portions of that or any aquifer. So leave it there lest we become dependent on a nonrenewable resource. A similar philosophy would have left us in the Stone Age, never to develop an Iron Age or use any other minerals in the Earth's crust.

At the same time, commitments are being made by the United States and other governments that could severely damage independent efforts to discover the realities of deep groundwater environments. For example, in recent years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and similar agencies worldwide not only missed an ideal opportunity to advance the understanding of deep groundwater resources, but delayed its advancement by demanding instant competence of an unprepared scientific community. In addition, U.S. EPA spent billions of dollars on groundwater “cleanup” and “protection” without first performing the due diligence required to critically evaluate the actual knowledge base. The origins of this unfortunate situation are of recent vintage. In the 1980s, it was disconcerting for exploration scientists to observe the U.S. Congress balk at a request from the world's pre-eminent institution of basic geological research and knowledge, the U.S. Geological Survey, for modest funding to update decades-old, low-resolution, pre-space-age geological maps (upon which groundwater studies are usually based); and it was even more bewildering in the 1990s to witness Congress funding a multi-billion-dollar nationwide groundwater cleanup effort without benefit of the requisite knowledge base they failed to develop a decade before.

Spending those billions of dollars have not only failed to advance the knowledge base about deep groundwater, but also have induced a surfeit of numerical models largely based on anachronistic concepts of groundwater occurrence. Such elegant, but ill-conceived models have been combined with sophisticated computer visualization programs and published as factual representations of global groundwater occurrence in professional journals and the popular press, leading engineers, economists, and political leaders to premature and erroneous conclusions regarding groundwater balance and the Earth's fresh water balance as well.