We investigate the behavior of farmers who share an underground aquifer. In the case where seepage may occur the resource is nonexclusive, giving rise to a spatial externality whereby pumping by one user affects others nearby. Theoretically, these externalities are potentially important causes of welfare loss. Using a unique spatial data set of groundwater users in western Kansas, we are able t...

Standard economic models of groundwater management assume perfect transmissivity (i.e., the aquifer behaves as a bathtub), no external effects of groundwater stocks, and/or homogenous agents. In this article, we develop a model relaxing these assumptions. Although our model generalizes to an arbitrary number of cells, we are able to obtain key insights with a two-cell finite-horizon differentia...

BACKGROUND Hazardous waste sites are major environmental concerns, but few studies have quantified their expected utility loss on health. OBJECTIVES To evaluate the health impact of groundwater pollution by an electronics manufacturing factory, we conducted a health risk assessment based on expected utility loss from liver cancer. METHODS Based on measurements of major pollutants, we estima...

Microbial communities in deep subsurface environments comprise a large portion of Earth’s biomass, but the metabolic activities in these habitats are largely unknown. Here the effect of CO2 and carbonate on the microbial community of an isolated groundwater fracture zone at 180 m depth of the Outokumpu Deep Scientific Drill Hole (Finland) was tested. Outokumpu groundwater at 180 m depth contain...

Riparian forests can remove large amounts of nitrate from the groundwater discharges of adjacent uphill croplands. We review the mechanisms that could account for NO3 removal. Denitrification is hypothesized to be important, but measurement problems limit the relevant field data. We used large chambers (1-20 mZ) and tunable-diode laser infrared spectrophotometry to measure nitrous oxide (NzO) e...

Continued excessive extraction of groundwater may lead to significant land subsidence, which causes economic loss. The aim of this research is to investigate ground subsidence in several Australian capital cities using the Persistent Scatterer Interferometry approach. Such studies may help improve our understanding of the deformation of terrain and built structures, and evaluate the effectivene...

A field investigation of a TCE plume in a surficial sand aquifer shows that groundwater-surface water interactions strongly influence apparent plume attenuation. At the site, a former industrial facility in Connecticut, depth-discrete monitoring along three cross-sections (transects) perpendicular to groundwater flow shows a persistent VOC plume extending 700 m from the DNAPL source zone to a m...

The study deals with physico-chemical characteristics of groundwater in the environs of Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation (GVMC), Visakhapatnam district, Andhra Pradesh. The study area covering about 1143 km2 is famous for major industries, often called as Industrial City or Visakha Steel City. Haphazard urbanization, industrialization and improper disposal of solid wastes leading to ...

Nutrient contamination of surface waters and groundwaters is an issue of growing importance as the risks associated with agricultural run-off escalate due to increasing demands on global food production. In this study, the influence of surface water–groundwater interaction on the nutrient flux in a lowland karst catchment was investigated with the aid of alkalinity sampling and a hydrological m...