Great Beaver Summit meeting yesterday, God willing it is the last we will need before April 7th. Everything seems to be humming along, and our biggest problem might be keeping folks from droning on past their very brief time. Mussolini will do what he can to keep the trains running on time and it should be a fantastic learning opportunity.

Hey maybe after something like this we will finally get Phys.org to stop writing articles that are about beavers without mentioning their names?

Researchers reveal the extent to which rivers across the country are losing flow to aquifer

Water is an ephemeral thing. It can emerge from an isolated spring, as if by magic, to birth a babbling brook. It can also course through a mighty river, seeping into the soil until all that remains downstream is a shady arroyo, the nearby trees offering the only hint of where the water has gone.

The interplay between surface water and groundwater is often overlooked by those who use this vital resource due to the difficulty of studying it. Assistant professors Scott Jasechko and Debra Perrone, of UC Santa Barbara, and their colleagues leveraged their enormous database of groundwater measurements to investigate the interaction between these related resources. Their results, published in Nature, indicate that many more rivers across the United States may be leaking water into the ground than previously realized.

“Gaining rivers” receive water from the surrounding groundwater, while “losing rivers” seep into the underlying aquifer. Scientists didn’t have a good understanding of the prevalence of each of these conditions on a continental scale. Simply put, no one had previously stitched together so many measurements of groundwater, explained Jasechko, the study’s co-lead author.

Gee don’t you wonder which category beaver streams fall into? I’m sure curious whether if a river has all it’s tributaries ponded into dams and those dams are forcing groundwater back into the stream through hypoheic exchange that ultimately puts the river they feed into the ‘plus’ column.

“Our analysis shows that two out of three rivers in the U.S. are already losing water. It’s very likely that this effect will worsen in the coming decades and some rivers may even disappear” said co-lead author Hansjörg Seybold at ETH Zurich.

Hey you know what would be kind of fun. To take the beaver depredation may for California and overlay it for the rivers that are losing or gaining. Gee I wonder what we would find. Don’t you? Well at least Placer isn’t on a loosing river YET, That’s something.

“The phenomenon, set in motion decades ago, [When trappers destroyed the beaver population in the 1800’s] is now widespread across the U.S. There are far more streams draining into underlying aquifers than we had first assumed,” Seybold continued. “Since rivers and streams are a vital water supply for agriculture and cities, the gravity of the situation came as a surprise.”

But why focus on the past when there are yet more beavers to kill and streams to destroy. We have to keep are on on the future.

Rivers were particularly prone to losing water in arid regions, along flat topography and in areas with extensive groundwater pumping, they observed. A prime example of this would be flat agricultural land in semi-arid regions like California’s Central Valley. “We are literally sucking the rivers dry,” Seybold said.

Yep. That sounds about right,.

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“If we have a better understanding of how widespread this phenomenon is, then we can influence future policy in positive ways,” added Perrone. Because society is past the point where it can talk about prevention; we’re now talking about response.

Seems to me a healthy beaver population is both.