What Is an Aquifer Anyway?
We all hear references to aquifers all the time. For example, the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer was, at least at one time, supposed to hold the same amount of water as Lake Erie. So, is an aquifer a giant underground lake, like a huge amount of water filling up a mega cavern? Bill Quinn, Technical Engineer, with Idaho’s Department of Water Resources. “Let me make a comment on the cavern underground. There are misconceptions. You hear underground rivers. With a very few exceptions throughout the world like the limestone caverns, like Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, you really don’t have underground rivers. You have porous rock, think of sandstone, think of fractured bedrock, this is what we have here in the Eastern Snake Plain Aquifer, it’s the volcanic rock, known as basalt, that is fractured and in some areas has inter-bedded cinder zones, that have permeability and porosity that have the ability to transmit water.”
