The Conversation: Groundwater — not ice sheets — is the largest source of water on land and most of it is ancient
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The Conversation has recently published a short article which really highlights the importance of groundwater in the grand scheme of water resources that are available to humans, and how much we still have to learn about deep groundwater deposits. While the C1W project will not extend the analysis to such great depths as discussed in the article, the project does explicitly take into account the shallow groundwater resources across all of Canada, and how they interact with streams, rivers and lakes.
“While it might appear that the planet is covered in vast lakes and river systems, they make up only 0.01 per cent of the Earth’s water. In fact, we now know there is 100 times as much groundwater on this planet as there is freshwater on its surface.
[N]ew estimates [of groundwater volumes in the 10km beneath the Earth’s surface] mean that groundwater is the largest continental reservoir of water — even more than all the water contained in the continental ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, which were long thought to be the Earth’s second-largest stores of water.
[T]hey add up to nearly 44 million cubic kilometres of water in the upper 10 kilometres of rock, enough to fill more than 10,000 Grand Canyons.”