by Brian T. Lynch, MSW
Wetlands along the Lamington River (Black River) in Randolph, NJ, not far from the Alamatong Well Field. Photo by the author.
Smack in the middle of the New Jersey Highlands is a long glacial valley that starts at Picatinny Lake in Morris County and stretches south to Califon in Hunterdon County. The valley and drainage basin surrounding it covers nearly 100 square miles. It served as an ice channel for glaciers in the distant past. The Wisconsin glacier was the most recent, but luckily, this one didn’t extend as far south. It stopped a few miles north of Kenvil, where Rt. 46 crosses the flats from Mine Hill to Kingstown Mountain.When the Wisconsin glacier melted, it disgorged massive amounts of water and material collected along its way. The melt-water filled the valley with boulders, rocks, gravel, sand, and silt. Some material got deposited in jumbled conglomerations. Some material settled at different rates as it flowed, generally depositing heavier material first and carrying the lightest material further away. This process created stratified layers of sediment along the valley floor, each with varying degrees of water permeability.
The particulars of deposition are complex, but suffice it to say, the way the outwash filled the valley created what geologists call valley-fill aquifers. These are essentially a series of underground glacier lakes. They are literally under everyone’s feet who lives or works in the valley. This process created the Succasunna plains as well. Today, the valley-fill aquifers below it are primary water sources for thirty-five-thousands residents who rely on the Alamatong and Flanders well fields operated by the Municipal Utilities Authority (MUA) of Morris County. In addition, thousands of more residents and businesses tap directly into the aquifers with private wells.
Note: This map and the geological information informing this article are from a 1996 U.S. Geological Survey Water-Resources Investigation Report. https://pubs.usgs.gov/wri/1993/4157/report.pdf
Imagine this, every drop of rain that falls in the valley’s basin that doesn’t reach the sea or evaporate in the ocean of air flows underground to replenish the water we pump from the aquifers below. The undeveloped land and forests in our valley’s basin are “recharge” areas where the ground is still porous. Plants and trees slow the water flow, giving it time to soak deep into the soil before it evaporates or drains away. Wetlands through which our streams pass also slow the water’s movement allowing time and space for it to seep down and refill the glacier lakes below.
Time and space! Both are essential to capture all the water we need every day. Every parcel of land we develop, every new road or driveway that we pave, and every swampy area that we drain or fill means less water reaching our aquifers. All this speaks only to the volume of water available to us, not its quality. The inescapable truth about our water quality is that everyone who drinks from the valley-fill aquifers will eventually be exposed to most of what we, the basin dwellers, spread on our lawns and roads or discharge into our streams.
Addendum: We have turned our little streams and tributaries into giant causeways to carry away hundreds of millions of gallons of rain running off our rooftops, driveways, parking lots, and streets. Some of this excess runoff tops off our reservoirs, but much of it just rushes out to sea. We fail to capture it for human use or for environmental benefits. The water rushing below this bridge in Mendham is from 3 to 4 inches of rain in the area. The normal flow in this stream is approximately 4' wide and 16" deep.
If you consider all of the challenges to the future of human civilization there is a common multiplier -- human population. The carbon footprint of a nation, the world, is the sum of all the individual human footprints. So too for water usage, whether it's the acreage of lawns to be watered, or the extent of macadam application so the population can easily get to wherever it wants to be for a time. It's the elephant in the room the no one wants to acknowledge. Did Mao have something right? There were unanticipated negative consequences of his one child mandate, but where would China be had its unfettered population explosion continued unabated? Where would the world be? There are just too many f&*^in people alive for sustainability of our population. Water accessibility and distribution is but one of the many manifestations of the population dilemma. Maybe it's time to look at the cause, not just the effect.
ReplyDeleteThank you for responding, “bobdid.” You are correct, of course. Human overpopulation is the predicate (the multiplier, as you put it) to almost all of the looming environmental disasters we face. Human intelligence, coupled with our massively interdependent and complex social structures has allowed us to inhabit and thrive in nearly every corner of our planet’s biosphere. We do this by exploiting and extracting every local resource essential for the web of life in the areas we colonize. In this sense, the observation of the machine intelligence portrayed in the movie The Matrix seems appropriate. Our species sudden appearance in the natural order models that of a novel parasite that quickly overwhelms its host. In the blink of an eye, geologically speaking, we have already destablized the entire global ecosystem. It is as if we are at war with the biosphere into which we came. We must be at one with our home planet. We will never have the last word if we don’t reform ourselves. We have the power to become self-sustaining partners of all living things if we choose, but this requires seven billion conversions to a new way of living. Where do we begin?
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