Accessing the Shallow Aquifer Under Pune City

The second phase of the monsoons which normally hit Pune by mid July early August may fail. I read a few days ago that the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) fearing a water shortage has plans to tap the shallow ground water aquifer by sinking 500 odd tube wells all across the city. Ground water is available at depths as shallow as 20 odd feet under many parts of Pune city. This shallow aquifer occurs in the basalt lava flows of the Deccan volcanic province. The aquifer has different characteristics which vary laterally and with depth. Dug wells which were an important source of water several decades ago offer the best view of this basalt aquifer and its variability. The image below is of one of the few remaining dug wells in my neighborhood. I have fond memories of this well. During the annual Ganesh festival the family used to come here to immerse the Ganesh idol on Ananta Chaturdashi day. Great to see it still flourishing, providing water for a local garden. The well is located on the talus slope surrounding small hills. The contact between the talus and the basalt is sharp and unfortunately cannot be seen as the upper talus portion is lined. Just below the lined portion of the well, is the basalt which has a slab like appearance. This is due to horizontal sheet joints. Water is stored and transmitted along these joints.


These days you can see the rocks properties of the aquifer at construction sites which excavate huge holes in the ground to put building foundations. The image below is taken at a construction site on flat ground and shows a very different profile than the first example.



The image shows a thick mature soil grading into a highly weathered basalt at the base. This highly weathered basalt forms the upper part of the aquifer. The weathered basalt grades into fresh basalt which may have horizontal joints like the one in the first photo or may be a more dense compact basalt with vertical joints. Its hard to find a location which shows the entire sequence and I have started taking my camera with me in the hope that a big construction site will show the entire aquifer profile. Meanwhile the figure below depicts the typical shallow aquifer system seen in the Deccan volcanic province.


Source: ACWADAM

I think its a lousy and dangerous idea to use this shallow water resource in the manner PMC is proposing to. The corporation simply intends to sink tube wells and install hand pumps and let citizens especially those living in slums access to this water without making any provisions for checking its quality. Unfortunately we know very little about the quality of this water. Likely sources of contamination are leaking and broken sewage pipes and seepage of surface pollutants.The section on groundwater in the environmental status report of the PMC shows that the water has not been screened for the presence of metals, microbes and even fecal matter which is very likely present especially in the groundwater underneath slums which often have no sanitation facilities. Without proper treatment any use of the water in the shallow aquifer constitutes a health hazard.

Pune is luckier than most big cities in India in having an adequate water supply during normal monsoon years. The PMC claims to supply about 200 liters per capita per day. This is much more than most cities in India. There are several big surface reservoirs with capacity to meet projected demands over the next few decades. Pune is growing fast and the problem in recent years has been the delays in setting up water supply infrastructure. Construction of water supply pipelines lags behind buildings, sometimes by years. Suburbs and shanty towns come up either without piped water facilities or with pipes too narrow to supply adequate water, leaving citizens dependent on groundwater which they extract from the deeper aquifer (100 feet or more) or buy from providers who tap it.

But the wild card in coming decades is the reliability of the monsoons. If rains become erratic due to climate change then Pune may be forced into tapping the shallow groundwater system to supplement surface water. This should not be done haphazardly like the current proposal. There needs to be a science backed plan which regulates not only the quality of water taken but also strikes a balance between extraction and replenishment. The deeper aquifer is already showing signs of degrading as unregulated extraction has resulted in an overdraft of several meters over the last decade. That means extraction exceeds natural replenishment with the result that ground water levels are falling year after year. The shallow aquifer if similarly exploited will also diminish quickly as a water resource.

My Five Minutes of Fame As Citizen Activist

I have been profiled in the Times of India, Pune edition. Check out this piece in Times e-paper. You may have to navigate to page 6 of July 25th issue once the e-paper downloads: Switch off at signals, save fuel


Almost a year ago I wrote a series of posts on air pollution and environmental problems facing Pune City. At that time my blog was virtually anonymous. A few friends knew I had started blogging, but the site meter counter moved only occasionally. Still, I like writing about science and I was curious about air pollution in Pune and I kept writing. I really had no expectations about the reach and effect those posts might have. I had underestimated badly the power of the Internet search:

how much CO2 emitted during vehicle idling
bus pollution graphs
comparing diesel and CNG emissions
forest CO2 sinks

These search phrases I can say changed the profile of my blog. I have had several thousand hits on those Pune City posts and hundreds of clicks on the images of the graphs and tables, which have most likely been downloaded. If at least part of the role of a science blog is outreach and education, then I am satisfied with the role my blog is playing. Last month a reporter from Times of India stumbled upon those posts and interviewed me. The article was published today. I don't expect editorial control over the content of the article, but I wish a draft had been sent to me before publishing. The article covers only one of the posts I wrote and I felt a broader coverage of my posts would have helped highlight the entire series. I think its best readers refer to my posts on these topics. Links below:

Part1. Idling and Pollution
Part2. PMT buses and Pollution
Part3. Rickshaws and Pollution
Part 4. Urban Forests and Clean Air
Part 5. Sensing Corruption Remotely
Part 6. Diets, Consumption and Global Warming

I like writing about the city I live in and the neighborhood I grew up in. Being profiled like this is always welcome but I will keep writing about local issues regardless.

First Bird: Another Stupid Science Headline From TOI

From Times of India (TOI) science section another stupid misleading headline: World's First Bird Discovered. Here is an excerpt

In the landmark study, published by the Paleontological Association, experts unveiled an extraordinary prehistoric lizard-like "flying" reptile which lived 235 million years ago. The scientific community believes that birds descended from reptiles 50 million years later making the kuehneosaurs the world's first "bird".

The long-extinct species, which inhabited the warm late Triassic period from 235 to 200 million years ago, was first discovered in the UK.

According to experts, the kuehneosaurs, which grew up to 2 feet, used extensions of their ribs to form large gliding surfaces on the sides of their body.

What has been discovered is not really a creature with true powered flight, but one which used extensions to form gliding surfaces, similar to the present day "flying" squirrels. True powered flight in vertebrates first evolved in the Pterosaurs, which really are true flying reptiles. But that is not what is deeply wrong with this report. This is a classic example of the much discredited but still popular thinking about evolution as a linear process. This mistaken view goes as follows; This creature is a reptile and it flew. Birds evolved from reptiles about 50 million years later than this creature lived. Therefore this creature is the first bird. But evolution generates not a ladder but a tree like structure. Kuehneosaurs and birds occupy widely separate branches on the reptile tree. All branches of the reptile tree did not transform into birds. Below is a phylogenetic tree of the diapsids, the group of reptiles that contain birds.

Source: Tree of Life Web

Kuehneosaurs or the "flying"reptiles which are the subject of this study are an extinct group within the Lepidosauromorpha. Birds on the other hand are a group within the Archosauromorpha. Although they lived and "flew" before birds evolved, Kuehnosaurs do not occupy an ancestral position with respect to birds. The best evidence indicates that birds evolved from within the maniraptors, a group of small carnivorous dinosaurs on a branch evolutionarily distant from the Keuhneosaurs. Every reptile that flew is not a bird. Flight, as has been the case many times in the history of life, evolved independently in the Keuhnosaurs , Pterosaurs and in birds.

I saved for the last another really silly aspect of reporting that is becoming quite common in the Indian media eager - or maybe desperate is a better word - to portray Indian achievements. This is how the report in TOI begins;

A group of scientists, including one of Indian origin, has discovered "world's first bird" that lived 235 million years ago.

The emphasis is mine. Did we need to know that? Does it make the report more believable? Does it make every Indian reading this puff up their chests with pride? I don't know about you but I find it plain irritating and infantile of the media to keep slipping these "Indian" achievements down my throat. I checked the abstract to find out about this "Indian" connection. The paper title reads: “The aerodynamics of the British Late Triassic Kuehneosauridae” by Koen Stein, Colin Palmer, Pamela G. Gill and Michael J. Benton and is published in the July 15th issue of Palaeontology. Ms. Gill comes closest to being the Indian origin candidate most likely having a Punjabi ancestry, but I mean who cares?? Not the author I bet. Instead why not spend a little more time understanding reptilian evolution? TOI just might come up with a more readable news report.

My New Blog Banner Image is Glacier Park

A week ago I started thinking about giving my website a new look (subscribers please click through to the site), more in tune with my geology oriented writings. I started rummaging through my picture collection and found some of my trip to Glacier National Park, Montana. I trekked there a few years ago with friends from my graduate student days. Oh, its going to be quite a leisurely trip I was told. Having not read A Walk In The Woods, having not educated myself on what humans have to endure during a sustained wilderness trek I recklessly accepted the invite. Okay, so I am complaining, I went through pain, but in the end it was a glorious experience.

The picture I have displayed on the banner was at the end of the wilderness section of the trip. Six days before I took the picture I was on the other side of the craggy peaks, and you get an idea of what I am talking about. 70 miles in six days and having crossed Stoney Indian pass at around 8000 feet (see map below) we were at Goat Haunt waiting for the ferry to take us to Waterton. We could have trekked that last section too, but a hot shower was too much to resist and I jumped on the ferry.


Source: National Park Service

Glacier National Park is one of the underrated jewels of the American National Park system. Maybe its the remote location in Montana near the border with Canada, but even in the height of holiday season, there is no sign of the bumper to bumper traffic that plagues Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Smokies. There is a new threat though of climate change and receding glaciers. There were 150 of them in 1850. Today only 26 remain and shrinking fast. The National Park service has some podcasts of climate related research which are worth a listen. I recommend a visit to the park, preferably soon to catch the last of the glaciers. I want to go there again. Maybe on this future visit I will take the time to look at some of the geology.

An Astrologer Issues a Challenge

Sometime back I slammed an article about astrology and earthquake prediction that was published by DNA. Mr. Amit Dave who made those predictions works for the Mumbai municipal corporation. He read my post and sent me quite a courteous reply along with a list of probable earthquakes for the month of September.

Here is the list:

8 th sept 2008 - 7.2 on Richter scale
10 th sept 2008 -7.3 on Richter scale
15/ 16 th sept 2008 - 7.5 Richter scale

He is not able to give locations but is apparently working on fine tuning his predictions. As September rolls along I will keep you posted :-)

Update: Was September 08 Earthquake Month?