Watering the Land from Below: Groundwater Influence on the Terrestrial Environment - Livestream

Much of the water on land is groundwater, which moves through the Earth’s crust at time scales of days near the surface to billions of years kilometers down. I will focus on the shallow and actively circulating groundwater which facilitates many near-surface processes that directly influence water, energy and biogeochemical cycles on Earth. I will examine the modern-day patterns and drivers of continental water storage and drainage, and their influence on land plants such as plant rooting depths and seasonal plant water sources. Then I will pose some hypotheses on how the shallow groundwater may have functioned through the geologic past, with the last deglaciation and land plant evolution as two examples.

Speaker: Ying Fan, Rutgers University

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