Looking Under the Surface

Groundwater and the Chesapeake Bay

Most of us don’t think about groundwater that much. But maybe we should.

 Groundwater —the water beneath Earth’s surface—feeds our streams. It feeds us, too. About 30 percent of Marylanders tap into it for their drinking water. But it also contributes significantly to the pollution loads in the Chesapeake Bay.

This issue looks at how groundwater moves through the  different geographic regions  in Maryland, and at the coming threats to our water supply from legacy industry pollution, saltwater intrusion due to climate change, and growing demand from farmers as they grapple with more extreme weather conditions. 

Editor Rona Kobell in the field. Photo, Nicole Lehming / MDSG

The stories in this issue examine how  nitrogen from septic tanks  can enter waterways, how researchers have pinpointed its sources, and how they are trying to determine if denitrifying processes have unanticipated harmful side effects. We visit a corn field for a  closer look at the nitrogen cycle  with doctoral student Jake Hagedorn, who commutes between a farm site on the Eastern Shore and University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science’s Appalachian Laboratory in the far western corner of Maryland to run his experiments.

We also visit scientists at the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore, to check in on their  on-the-ground research projects  that test various ways of reducing nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer from entering water supplies, and take a look at the Maryland Department of Planning’s efforts to bring together a group of researchers and managers to  limit saltwater intrusion  in the future as the climate continues to change. Finally, we talk to modelers at the Chesapeake Bay Program who incorporated  lag times for groundwater  into their model, enabling managers to gauge the effectiveness of best management practices, and how long it would take for those practices to show results. We show  how groundwater moves  through aquifers and ultimately reaches our seas. We introduce readers to  Eric Buehl , a Sea Grant Extension specialist who is working hard to keep the water clean on the Eastern Shore.

There is a lot to look at here, even if we physically can’t see the subject so well. We hope you enjoy it, and we’ll be back to print for future issues of Chesapeake Quarterly!


Header image: Some freshwater ponds on Assateague Island are fed from an unconfined aquifer beneath the island. Photo, Lisa D. Tossey / MDSG

Editor Rona Kobell in the field. Photo, Nicole Lehming / MDSG