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Archives for April 2015

Large fresh water supply discovered by UH researchers on Hawaiʻi Island

April 19, 2015

University of Hawaii, January 2014.

In March 2013, researchers from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and UH Hilo began drilling at 64-hundred feet above sea level, between the mountains of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea in the saddle region of the Big Island of Hawaiʻi.

UH Mānoa professor Donald Thomas is leading the effort, called the Humuʻula Saddle Hydrologic Study Project.

What they discovered seven months later may radically change conventional wisdom regarding the state’s most valuable resource: fresh water.

“The conventional model that we worked with for years and years is that we have a relatively thin basal fresh water lens, is what we call it,” said UH Professor Donald Thomas, the director of the Center for the Study of Active Volcanoes. “A layer of fresh water saturated rock that rises very slowly as we move inland.”

drilling

According to that conventional model developed decades ago, the research team should have had to drill for 5,900 feet to 500 feet above sea level, before reaching the Big Island’s fresh water supply.

“We found something just completely different,” said Thomas. “The stable water table in the saddle is not 500 feet above sea level. It’s more like 4,500 feet above sea level. So we are almost ten times higher than we could have expected when we started out on the project.”

For the rest of the article see here…

 

Filed Under: Groundwater

Small (Kona) water management area for NPS explored

April 5, 2015

2 April 2015, By Bret Yager, West Hawaii Today

Could the groundwater beneath Kaloko-Honokohau National Historical Park and the surrounding area be placed under the control of the state, while management of the rest of the aquifer stays as it is?

The question is implicit in a new filing by the National Park Service, which asks the state Commission on Water Resource Management to define a “water management area.” While the commission has never designated anything less than an entire aquifer for management, the March 20 petition for declaratory order asks whether a management area could be comprised of the basal — or coastal freshwater lens — groundwater system within the Keauhou aquifer system.

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Filed Under: Groundwater

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