aquifer
noun
Did you know?
Aquifer and Agriculture
The vast but relatively shallow Ogallala Aquifer lies beneath the Great Plains, under portions of eight states. Its thickness ranges from a few feet to more than a thousand feet. The Ogallala yields about 30 percent of the nation's groundwater used for irrigation in agriculture, and provides drinking water for most of the people within the area. But for many years more water has been extracted from the Ogallala than has been returned, and the situation today is of great concern.
Example Sentences
Mark Eddington, The Salt Lake Tribune, 27 Aug. 2022 This facility sits right above an aquifer that supplies 25% of Oahu's drinking water, according to the Honolulu Board of Water Supply. Kathleen Wong, USA TODAY, 26 Aug. 2022 This water would eventually corrode the waste canisters, according to Long, and would ultimately flush leaking waste into a regional aquifer. Howard Lee, Ars Technica, 17 Aug. 2022 But the tank was built directly above an aquifer responsible for 20% of Honolulu's drinking water, according to the Associated Press. Zoe Christen Jones, CBS News, 7 Mar. 2022 The company has said that its bottling plant uses less than one-tenth of one per cent of the total water extracted from the aquifer. Allison Keeley, The New Yorker, 3 Aug. 2022 This differs from indirect potable reuse, where water spends time in a substantial environmental barrier such as an underground aquifer or in a reservoir. Amy Hubbard, Los Angeles Times, 23 July 2022 But concerns the oil might migrate through the aquifer and get into the city’s wells prompted the Honolulu Board of Water Supply in December to shut down a key well serving some 400,000 people. Audrey Mcavoy, Anchorage Daily News, 1 July 2022 John Gauthiere, a former city water engineer who leads the citizens' group opposed to the aquifer, is skeptical. Arkansas Online, 21 Aug. 2021 See More Word History
borrowed from French aquifère "water-bearing," from aqui- (from Latin aqua "water" + -i- -i-) + -fère "bearing" — more at aqua, -fer
Note: The term was introduced into English by the geologist William Harmon Norton (1856-1944) in "Artesian Wells of Iowa," Iowa Geological Survey, vol. 6, Report on Lead, Zinc, Artesian Wells, etc. (Des Moines, 1897), p. 130: "The sand represents the permeable water-bearing layer, the aquifer, to revive a term of Arago's, and its outcrop between the basin rims the area of supply." "Arago" is the French physicist François Arago (1786-1853), whose essay "Sur les puits forés, connus sous le nom de puits artésiens, des fontaines artésiennes, ou de fontaines jaillissants" (Bureau des Longitudes, Annuaire pour l'an 1835 [Paris, 1834], pp. 181-258), is cited earlier in Norton's paper. As noted by Alfred Clebsch ("Analysis and Critique of 'Aquifers, Ground-Water Bodies, and Hydrophers' by C.V. Theis," Selected Contributions to Ground-Water Hydrology by C.V. Theis, and a Review of His Life and Work [U.S. Geological Survey Water-Supply Paper 2415] [Denver, 1994], pp. 39-43), Norton is not strictly speaking "reviving" anything used by Arago, who only uses aquifère as an adjective in the collocations nappe aquifère and couche aquifère (both meaning approximately "water-bearing layer"). Note that in an English translation of Arago's article ("On Springs, Artesian Wells, and Spouting Fountains," Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, vol. 18, no. 36 [April, 1835]) there is no direct equivalent of aquifère, as couches aquifères is rendered by "water bearing beds" and nappe aquifère as simply "water."
1897, in the meaning defined above