GROUNDWATER FROM GLASGOW TO THE GREAT LAKES

Glasgow, Missouri is a small river town in central Missouri. In 1974, I was lucky enough to have the visionary Jack Sharp as my advisor, who encouraged me to conduct the field study portion of my Master’s thesis on groundwater/river interactions in the river floodplain at the Glasgow bend of the Missouri River. In the 43 years since then, I have built upon the experience gained from this study by applying the lessons learned to the Great Lakes Basin. When we began this journey, Jack knew, as I did not, how critical the understanding of groundwater/surface-water interaction would become to the groundwater profession. It was counter-intuitive in 1974 to study groundwater in places where surface water dominated the landscape. As unusual as the Glasgow study was, this type of study was even more unusual in the Great Lakes, which constitute nearly 20 percent of the earth’s fresh surface water. The thick alluvial deposits of the Missouri River floodplain correspond in some ways to the thick glacial deposits of most of the Great Lakes Basin. The lessons learned at Glasgow are easily applicable to the groundwater of the Great Lakes Basin, where more than half of the streamflow discharging to the Lakes originates as groundwater, and the volume of groundwater in storage is estimated to be equal to the volume of Lake Huron. Recent work in the Basin has focused on a better understanding of the relation between groundwater and habitat, groundwater issues in the urban environment (such as green infrastructure planning), and the effects of groundwater discharge on the Lake’s water quality. All of these issues harken back to an understanding of the groundwater/surface-water interactions that Jack Sharp championed when we first drove onto the Glasgow floodplain in 1974.