Scientists have uncovered a massive reservoir of water in Oregon’s Cascade Range mountains. Researchers from the University of Oregon studying volcanic terrain mapped the amount of water stored beneath the crest of the central Oregon Cascades, discovering an aquifer significantly larger than previously thought.
Measuring around 19.4 cubic miles — or 21 trillion gallons — the aquifer has three times the capacity of Lake Mead, which supplies water along the Colorado River to California, Arizona, and Nevada. However, Lake Mead is dangerously overdrawn, a fact which all three states have struggled with.
In addition to shaping scientists’ understanding of volcanic hazards in the area (the primary focus of the study), this finding offers hope and opportunity to rethink how water is drawn in the Western United States.
“We initially set out to better understand how the Cascade landscape has evolved over time, and how water moves through it,” said study co-author Gordon Grant, a geologist with the Forest Service. “But in conducting this basic research, we discovered important things that people care about: the incredible volume of water in active storage in the Cascades and also how the movement of water and the hazards posed by volcanoes are linked together.”
Grant and his team set out to the mountain range to study how water flowed through different volcanic zones. Following in the footsteps of previous projects undertaken in the 1980s and 1990s, the team drilled holes deep in the mountain’s crust to measure temperatures at different depths. Normally, the deeper one looks, the greater the geothermal temperatures. However, the presence of water changes the temperature gradient. Scientists were able to use this disruption to determine how deep the aquifer went. Water availability in the Cascades has historically been based on measuring river and stream discharge, but the new study is able to account for water sources that were previously overlooked. Of course, since the researchers weren’t originally planning to map groundwater, the finding don’t include every possible area from which data could be drawn. As such, the aquifer could prove to be much larger than the study estimates.
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