Groundwater is one of our most important water resources. It provides drinking water for about 50% of the population worldwide and represents 70% of the total water used for irrigation. Despite its importance, groundwater remains one of the most overlooked natural resources. It is literally out of sight. It moves slowly. And the consequences of over-extraction, contamination or poor land-use decisions may take decades to become noticed. That invisibility has consequences.
“We don’t have a holistic view of our freshwater system or our terrestrial water resource,” says Dr. Beth Parker, Professor in the College of Engineering and founding director of the Morwick G360 Groundwater Research Institute at the University of Guelph. For Parker, one of the most important shifts needed in water management is recognizing that groundwater and surface water are not separate systems.
“Groundwater and surface water are actually one resource. While this is a fundamental concept in hydrology, it is not well understood and incorporated into policies or management decisions.”
Groundwater sustains flows in streams, rivers and lakes during periods without significant rainfall or snowmelt. It is also a direct source of drinking water for many communities, including Guelph, Fergus, Elora and the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, while most rural residents across Ontario depend on private wells for their water supply. Yet compared with rivers and lakes, understanding what is happening beneath our feet remains difficult. With the right monitoring, data, and scientific tools, however, we can understand these systems and manage groundwater effectively.
A Vast Resource Beneath the Surface
Groundwater does not generally move through “underground river channels,” as it is often described or imagined. Instead, it moves through innumerable fractures and pore spaces throughout the soil and rock, and sometimes larger conduits when karst is involved. Scientists collect information where they drill boreholes, install monitoring wells, or where groundwater emerges at the surface, but much of what happens between those points remains unseen.
“It’s everywhere beneath our feet. Our fresh groundwater reserves locally may be thick or thin, fast or slow moving, but nevertheless present. What we often lack, however, is enough monitoring data to understand them.” Parker says.
In many cases, wells are drilled to access water without knowing enough about the abundance of the reservoir from which it is being taken. Understanding that reservoir requires monitoring the system, not simply taking water from wells. How groundwater systems respond to pumping, rainfall or snowmelt, among other things, informs the system’s capacity to supply water throughout the seasons and its vulnerability to contamination. That uncertainty becomes particularly important when conditions change.
Communities may not fully understand the sustainable limits of a groundwater resource until supply becomes constrained. Likewise, groundwater tainted by a contaminant may not become apparent until the impact has been realized, when it reaches a drinking water well, spring or stream.
The challenge, Parker and Dr. Ferdinando Manna, Assistant Professor in the College of Engineering and principal investigator with Morwick G360, emphasize, is not simply a lack of scientific capability. Better tools and approaches already exist, but they are rarely used at the scale or resolution needed to understand the capacity of the groundwater system. “The conventional monitoring wells don’t have the resolution that is necessary to understand the complexity of the subsurface,” says Manna. That is where the Morwick G360 Institute comes in.
The Institute focuses on the development and application of advanced tools and methods to quantify the rates of the physical and chemical processes happening underground, whether they relate to sustaining flows to water supply wells or understanding impacts on water quality from human and industrial activities. The Institute’s work is field-based, rooted in real-world problems.
“We’re a research institute that’s founded on industry and municipality funding that is often matched by federal and provincial grants seeking solutions to real-world problems in the groundwater space,” says Parker.
A defining feature of the Institute is its field-based approach, particularly its expertise in characterizing and monitoring fractured-rock environments, the most complex and common aquifer type in Canada. In fractured rock, groundwater flows through a highly variable network of cracks called fractures. Some fractures are large, well connected and highly transmissive, allowing groundwater and, potentially, contaminants to move relatively quickly through the rock. Others may be poorly connected or have very little capacity to transmit water. In other words, not all fractures are equally important.
Without measurements at the right scale, it is difficult to identify which fractures actually matter. Understanding these controls is essential for many practical applications, from designing effective groundwater monitoring systems to developing reliable strategies for contaminant remediation. “If you don’t have measurements at the right scale, using the right tools, it is difficult to understand and quantify what is happening in the subsurface,” says Manna. “And if you cannot quantify those processes, your predictions will inevitably be less reliable.”
At Morwick G360, researchers are developing and applying novel field-investigation methods to generate higher-resolution data to better characterize the subsurface. By capturing processes at the scales that matter, these approaches can reduce uncertainty and provide a stronger scientific foundation for numerical models, forecasting, and science-based decision-making.
Importantly, the work does not stop with fundamental research. By working directly with contaminated sites, municipalities, industry partners and communities around the globe, the Institute can demonstrate new approaches in practice and help move them quickly into professional use. “Everything we do at Morwick G360 really is centered on that relationship between research and application, and collaboration with those that are owning problems and looking for solutions as it pertains to groundwater and linkages,” says Parker.
The applications for groundwater data are broad and growing, from providing water and food supplies to supporting energy and mineral extraction and ecosystem functions.
Morwick G360’s expertise has been applied to remediating complex contaminated sites and protecting municipal water supplies. Emerging issues such as the discovery of new contaminants like PFAS or microplastics in our water supplies, as well as extreme weather events causing more frequent droughts or flooding, all have connections to sustaining and protecting our surface and groundwater resources. There is also growing relevance for sectors that depend directly on the subsurface, including mining and geothermal energy.
Manna points to groundwater inflow in mines as one example of why getting the subsurface right matters. Poor hydrogeological characterization and insufficient monitoring can result in significant surprises when actual conditions differ from predictions. These unexpected conditions can affect worker safety and, particularly at remote mine sites, can have consequences for downstream water quality, which is often the only source of drinking water for First Nations communities.
Similarly, as society transitions to carbon-neutral energy systems, geothermal technologies are becoming increasingly popular. Understanding the potential impacts on groundwater quantity and quality will be critically important.
Climate variability adds another dimension to the challenge. As droughts become more frequent or prolonged, communities may increasingly turn to groundwater when surface-water sources become scarce, including in areas where groundwater has not historically been considered a primary water source. This makes it increasingly important to understand how precipitation replenishes aquifers and how groundwater resources can be managed sustainably.
Connecting Innovation with Real-World Challenges
But developing better science is only part of the equation. Innovation also depends on connecting researchers and their capabilities with municipalities, companies and other organizations facing real-world water challenges, a core mission of Morwick G360.
This is where the Ontario Water Consortium (OWC) plays an important role. As a connector and enabler within Ontario’s water innovation ecosystem, OWC helps bring together research expertise, industry, municipalities, government and other partners around shared water challenges and opportunities. That role can help create new collaborations, identify practical applications for research and connect organizations with specialized capabilities they may not otherwise know exist.
Morwick G360 is a strong example of why those connections matter. The Institute has developed highly specialized expertise and infrastructure for understanding complex groundwater systems and their connections, while municipalities, industries and other sectors continue to face increasingly complicated questions about water supply, contamination, resource and waste management and the hidden impacts of activities that occur below ground.
Helping connect those challenges with the people capable of addressing them is an essential part of enabling innovation. As demands for water resources continue to grow, groundwater can no longer remain an afterthought or an invisible component of the broader water system. The science and tools to quantify groundwater processes are well advanced but underutilized. The challenge now is ensuring that knowledge, expertise and innovation reach the people making decisions. For groundwater, that means making the invisible visible.
And organizations like Morwick G360, supported by a broader ecosystem of researchers, partners and connectors such as OWC, will have an increasingly important role to play in helping ensure that the decisions made above ground are informed by a much better understanding of what is happening below it, locally and globally.