• It is a water located beneath the earth's surface in soil
pore spaces and in the fractures of rock formations. • the upper layer of the soil is the unsaturated zone, where water is present in varying amounts that change over time, but does not saturate the soil. • below this layer is the saturated zone, where all of the pores, cracks, and spaces between rock particles are saturated with water. • the top of the surface where groundwater occurs is called the water table. How groundwater occurs
• most of the water in the ground
comes from precipitation that infiltrates downward from the land surface. • Groundwater supplies are replenished, or recharged, by the rain that seeps down into the cracks and crevices beneath the land's surface. As these charts show, even though the amount of water locked up in groundwater is a small percentage of all Earth's water, it represents a large percentage of total fresh water on Earth. the pie chart shows that about 1.7 percent of all of Earth's water is groundwater and about 30.1 percent of freshwater on Earth occurs as groundwater. - Groundwater is stored in, and moves slowly through, moderately to highly permeable rocks called aquifers.
- Groundwater occurs in aquifers
under two conditions, unconfined and confined. The unconfined aquifer is where water only partly fills an aquifer, the upper surface of the saturated zone is free to rise and decline. While, the confined aquifer is where water completely fills an aquifer that is overlain by confining bed. • Water in aquifers is brought to the surface naturally through a spring or can be discharged into lakes and streams • Under natural condition, ground water moves down until, in the course of its movement, it reaches the land surface at a spring or through a seep along the side or bottom of a stream channel. • Groundwater can also be extracted through a well drilled into the aquifer. • Gravity is the dominant driving force in groundwater movement • Subsurface runoff is the water that infiltrates in the vadose zone (unsaturated zone), from rain, snowmelt, or other sources, and moves laterally towards the streams. Vadose zone extends from the top of the ground surface to the water table. It is one of the major components in the water cycle. Subsurface runoff can be expressed in water volume (or mass) per unit of area per unit of time. • In the saturated zone, all interconnected openings are full of water. Movement in saturated zone may be either laminar or turbulent. In laminar flow, water particles move in an orderly manner along streamlines. In turbulent flow, water particles move in a disordered, highly irregular manner, which result in a complex mixing of the particles. Groundwater contributes to surface water