Groundwater makes a splash

My line of work has been hitting the headlines in the last couple of weeks. Suddenly groundwater - usually out of sight and out of mind for everyone except us lucky few hydrogeologists - is splashed all over the place.

First newly published work by some colleagues went viral: they've developed the first quantitative estimates of how much groundwater there is sitting beneath Africa, and the story was the most read on the BBC science webpages for a couple of days, and was all over the radio, TV and newspapers. That was actually bittersweet for me - great to see this story getting publicity, but I was involved in a very small way at the start of that project - helping create the first version of their map of aquifer productivity across Africa - and I've been wishing I was still involved for the last couple of years. But my colleagues were kind enough to include my name on the paper, so I should just smile and ride on the back of their success.

Then this week the wettest drought in history is getting all sorts of airtime, with various of my lovely colleagues trying to get the story across that in areas where three-quarters of water supplies come from deep underground, two weeks of rain in April is not enough to make up for the two dry winters in a row that have meant ever decreasing groundwater levels in aquifers. As my boss put it, making a heroic effort with an economic crisis metaphor, a groundwater drought is like a massively overdrawn bank account. We'll have to both stop spending (aka reduce water use) and keep paying in the cheques (the rain has to keep on falling) for a long time before we get back in the black. I think I'm even more impressed with my other colleagues who tried their best to hype up the drama of a video of the inside of a borehole for a BBC piece - I thought they did pretty well, considering.

Meanwhile, the reality of what I really get up to at work is much less impressive. I could put a photo here of my desk, where I spend 90% of my time, but instead I'll go for the jugular with the best work morning out I've had in a while - here we are this week trying to push back the boundaries of science by collecting data from a borehole in the middle of what must be Scotland's biggest building site, the future Commonwealth Games Village in Glasgow.