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There is water somewhere beneath your feet no matter where on Earth you live. Groundwater starts as precipitation, just as surface water does, and once water penetrates the ground, it continues moving, sometimes quickly and sometimes very slowly.

I'm not sure about the other questions tho. But when my parents were building their house they hired a "water witch" and she did the dowsing and found a spring where they put their well house.

I know that water dowsing is controversial but that's just my experience.

Pretty much. Sure there are places where there is no groundwater and you simply hit bedrock, but those are rather rare. Most of the world, if you have soil, you have groundwater. You just need to dig deep enough.

Pretty much just dig, there are hints as to where you are more likely to find underground water so you look for areas where more plants grow; especially deep-rooted ones. There are other hints as well but nothing concrete until the development of ground penetrating radar and other deep scanning techniques.

There is no real controversy to it, it's hogwash. Its walking around with a stick and pointing at a random point on property. It doesn't matter which part of your property you dig, there is or there isn't groundwater to be had, 100m here or there makes no difference. There usually is though, so seemingly the water witch is almost always validated. Nobody digs at all the other places the witch doesn't point to in order to check if maybe those have water at the same depth too.

> water dowsing is controversial

Weird how people say "controversial" when pretending like witchcraft is real in any other situation is immediately laughable.

When dowsers are successful, it's because they take cues from the landscape. Not a funny twig and some magic.

For the most part, though there are no guarantees at what depth you will hit water, the rate of flow, or the quality of the water when you reach it - the level at which the local aquifer exists varies wildly. Wells can go upwards of over a thousand feet down without finding water. In some places, because the drilling can actually clog aquifers, they'll try hydrofracking to increase rate of flow. And sometimes, people are lucky - they have artesian wells that provide an abundance of water that naturally flows to the surface thanks to the rock formations in that area.

Before a driller gets started on a well, they'll check local water tables, the geology of the area, examine previous wells drilled in that neighborhood to determine at what depths water was discovered, what the average well depth is, and ensure that Call Before You Dig has been out to mark the area with possible underground hazards (cable, power, gas, fiber, sewer, etc). On occasion, they'll blast if drilling where the bedrock is particularly thick (such as granite).

My father and grandfather worked in the water well industry for over 30 years and both have agreed that while dowsing is by no means a perfect process, it can work in the correct hands. A lot of times, my father was able to look at an address and determine the approximate depth the well would need to be, take an estimated guess at the quality so that he could then design a pump and storage system to maximize the well's production.

The water table and aquifers can be found underground. Exactly where and how good they are will depend on a lot of things, such as rainfall, underground river flows, types of rocks and how porous they are (how easy it is for water to move through the rocks).

There's a lot that goes into it and the best place to dig would be where the rock or soil is easiest to shift and the most water is closest to the surface.

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No.

Here is a map of groundwater.

https://www.livescience.com/52965-groundwater-resources-map.html

For the light blue, there's less than 1 meter worth of water under ground, and it can be 0, so there wouldn't be any water if you dig a well.

You just have to dig as deep as you get to stones you can't dig through or you get to the water line. Typically, you can dig only through sediments, so if you are somewhere will very little sediments like a shield, you wouldn't need to dig a lot to realize you can't dig more and you can't get a well.

Typically someone will try to dig a well first. If it works, other people will dig well nearby. The water line is typically at around the same level in nearby places.

The West of the US has a lot of groundwater as you can see on the map. That's because there's a lot of snow and rain in the water, and most of it get underground rather than in rivers.

Places that don't have groundwater or rivers or lakes have typically no inhabitants.

I like how you said it was just your experience but everyone is taking it like you are saying that's the only way to go.

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No, they're saying dowsing is a myth, meaning even a single claimed experience is incorrect, and it's in fact something else. Like prior experience in an area (aquifers are rather large, so knowledge works for quite a distance), or knowing common geological patterns.

So that map has pretty good quantities of underground water in California yet California goes through droughts every year

So where is the deviation coming from here? Obviously if there was enough water they would be digging down deep enough to get it? Is it just cost prohibitive to dig down deep enough and clean it

Or does that map only show certain times of the year

You literally just kind of dig around until you find water. It's down there. There are surface markers that will clue you in to where water is. A tree where there are no other trees. A low area. A gut feeling. A place where the plants are different.

It took my great-grandparents years to find a spot for the well on their property. They used a cistern for many years for drinking and the ravine for watering the animals. Eventually, they found good water. They just had to dig enough holes.

They dig to get the water. That's how they use so much water in California's farms.

California is the state that uses the most water. 9% of the water used in the USA is used in California. (It has 12% of the population, so per capita, it's not that much, but it's still a lot of water that gets used in California.)

https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/total-water-use#overview

Wow, didn't know that.

There is a lot of groundwater in different types of bedrocks, and largest aquifers are usually consist of sediment bedrock like limestones.

And if you do hit bedrock, just keep going. Almost all landmass is opposite an ocean on the other side. There’s only something like 1000 square kilometers of land overlapping with land on the other side of the earth.

You realise that Earth's oceans simply sit on top of the planet? The whole planet isn't made of water with land floating on top of it. If you dig down through the earth, unless you're on top of a cave system or underground reservoir you will keep digging through solid material until you reach the mantle. At that point you would be long dead from heat exposure from the core of the planet which is a molten hot compressed ball of iron

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> You realise that Earth's oceans simply sit on top of the planet? The whole planet isn't made of water with land floating on top of it.

Yes? Maybe you don’t get what I’m saying.

> If you dig down through the earth, unless you're on top of a cave system or underground reservoir you will keep digging through solid material until you reach the mantle.

And then? What will happen if you keep going?

> At that point you would be long dead from heat exposure from the core of the planet which is a molten hot compressed ball of iron

Lol. Yeah. This is an r/whoosh

I’m from rural country land and everyone’s has well water there, pretty rare your in an area where you can’t hit water

I'm autistic, I heavily rely on the /s lol

The comment I replied to was (jokingly) insinuating you could take water from the ocean on the other side of the planet. I understand ground water is plentiful

My bad 😂

Ah I see!

Well that makes sense. Yes, I was saying this “tongue in cheek” — stating the amusing fact that almost all of the earth’s land is opposite an ocean while making light of the humorous idea of digging a well through the entirety of the earth’s crust.

Every experienced driller I've met (many dozens) uses dowsing rods. They use it on conjuction with other tricks of the trade but it used.

Gotta water all those almonds!

It all depends on.. the amount of water you need, the quality of water, contamination by man or natural. If you need clean drinking water it's a good idea to go through a couple aquifers, to find the cleanest possible water. You could driĺ and hit water pit also a methan pocket at the same time, don't want to drink that. Over time local drillers have accumulated knowledge on there local geology and have a very good understanding where water is.

You got to admit, that would be one hell of a well if you pulled it off

Yup, the two sticks are just a distraction, a slight of hand to make you wonder what magic they're using and thus don't have to share the knowledge.

The very early settlers settled where water was actually available, or easily accessed. Along rivers small or large lakes, anywhere that offered or indicated water. Later settlements/settlers and ranchers could take the time, energy and technology to dig, but there are a lot of environmental clues on where that would be. Lower areas and low areas with an unusual amount of long term plants like trees were usually a pretty good place to sink a well and then build a windmill to pump the water out.

they went to the bottom of a valley in wet looking areas and dug.. but yea.. its not always that easy.. where i grew up the ground water was 700 feet down..

Some of these areas have dropped 20+ feet due to wells for the almond groves.

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They didn't (and don't) just dig randomly. You're more likely to find water at a lower spot on the terrain than a higher spot. The type and amount of growth is a tipoff, too. Plants like blackberries love water and are a good indicator of an available source, for example.

You'd definitely be well supplied with water

Is this the rare double woosh?

Should have tried dowsing. Would have found it lots faster.

/s in case it isn't obvious.

Water witching is utter bunk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FftjV7idYLc

Our well is 900' deep. At least in this area, the driller said it wouldn't really matter where on the property he drilled (and it is a pretty big property). I get the impression that around here the geology that would dictate where/how deep the water is is on a much larger scale than property boundaries.

Well done.

There is a lot that goes into it. There's an entire branch of science called hydrogeology that is quite complex. There is a lot of high level math involved in being able to accurately predict groundwater flow.

May not be very scientific but dowsing works. I've seen it done but can't explain how it works. If you're someone with the ability you can take a forked branch, or some people use L shaped metal rods. A douser or waterwitch walks along and when they cross water the rods cross or the branch rotates to point down. I've personally witnessed someone find a triple well by dousing. When the people came to drill and hit the first stream they continued and hit second stream, kept drilling and hit the third stream.

After that geothermal energy cooks you, you’d definitely be well done

AKA job stability

You guys are really driving this thing into the dirt, its getting boring. Oh well.

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FYI, I'm not autistic and typically have a pretty dry sense of humor, and I still had no clue that was a joke.

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What's dowsing?

Holding two "dowsing rods" in your hands and letting them "lead" you to groundwater. It doesn't work, of course. The reason that it looks like it works is the fact mentioned in other comments that there is groundwater pretty much everywhere.

Ahh, I see. I'm sure this works, and if you can't find "dowsing rods," you can grab a tree branch that has a "Y" shape, and this can function as "dowsing rods"

The answer I was looking for.

No, don’t dig after bedrock or you’ll fall under the map brainiac

Some areas of California the land has dropped 30 feet due to water and oil wells.

Where I live 6-8 feet is plenty deep most of the time.

It demonstrably doesn't work.

Well, it "works" in the same way that a Ouija board works. There's a person in control of when the rods cross, just like there are human(s) in control of the planchette on a Ouija board. It's very easy for a person to influence the movements of both, without necessarily being conscious that they are doing so.

Inevitably, the person who is holding the rods has some idea of where to find water. Like others have pointed out, there are hints on the surface, like trees and plants, even the shape of the terrain. Once they have an idea of where to look, it's very easy to make the rods cross at that point.

And if there's not water there, then there's always an excuse. "The energy was not good that day." "There's an underground stream, but it's dried up now." "There is water, but you didn't dig deep enough." etc.

And of course, they almost always find *some* water because there's water nearly everywhere if you dig deep enough. And confirmation bias being what it is, they will always point to their successes as evidence that dowsing works, and their failures are just times where they did it wrong.

Again, they may not even realize that they're doing this. They may really believe it's magic.

Some don't of course. Some people are just charlatans. But there are plenty of true believers too.

Whichever they are, they don't have a real ability. Every time we run a properly controlled experiment, they do no better than random chance.

The James Randi Foundation used to do these tests, offering a million dollars to anyone who could demonstrate any one of a number of abilities (dowsing included). No one has ever successfully passed even the preliminary tests.

and here i was think 5.3 feet was enough...

It is worth noting that underground water isn’t necessarily a renewable resource.

Large amounts of water can be found underground in aquifers but that water can be old. Potentially hundreds of thousands of years old, deposited during the Pleistocene and it’s impressive ice age.

We can, and do, pump ancient water out to use today. But that water may not be able to recharge. Worse is if we experience subsidence of the aquifer. By withdrawing water we shrink the size of the container (the aquifer) and it potential volume cannot be increased. In some places in California the ground has subsided due to water extraction at a rate of a foot annually.

MOM! MOM COME QUICK!

Sounds like something I need to learn then never get to use, my favorite hobby.

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The deepest anyone has ever been able to dig is about 8 miles. Every team that has tried has hit an impenetrable barrier keeping them from digging beyond this.

“Brainiac” haha haven’t heard that in forever I love it

They did try hiring a water witch. That didn't work.

There’s a bit of confirmation bias there. Rural areas developed where there was water and didn’t where there wasn’t. So where there is a long farming history there is generally surface or ground water, and the bits that ended up in national parks/reserves it’s either deeper or not there.

I know a guy who drilled almost 500 meters without hitting water.

It's not so much an impenetrable barrier but it just gets way too hot down that far. The rock starts acting more like a liquid at higher temperatures and fills in the hole. The drill breaks down faster too.

While you can learn it as a hobby, I did go to college for it and worked more or less for 90 hours a week for 2 years straight.

Lol

Oh man. Sorry. It was hilarious

They would hire a water witch who would walk around with a forked stick AKA dowsing. It's basically a superstitious practice to try to find ground water ... which just doesn't hold water.

It's not where to dig for water, but how deep you have to dig to find water at any given place.

Not and get results.

>can you dig a well anywhere and hit water

Just about. Usually just a question of how deep. This is how "water dowsers" usually work just FYI. They don't actually do anything it's just kind of hard to fail.

And if you dig deep enough you can jump in the hole and the momentum will carry you into the air in China, then you fall back though over and over again until someone slides a trampoline over the hole when you pop out

In the 1940s, my grandfather used a divining rod (dowsing rod) to find the location to drill a well on his property in South Dakota. Yep, he hit water.

Underground streams are a myth (except those that are literally rivers in caves). Water just kind of permeates everywhere underground and slowly moves towards lower elevation openings to leave as surface waters. Dowsing works as well as asking a frog to jump toward the direction of underground water, and then flipping a coin on whether or not you'll agree to it.

There are toooooons of places where you hit bedrock before water. You can dig a well anywhere and get to water but it's not economical to do it in places that you have to drill through hundreds of feet of rock.

The guy you are responding to is joking, but the whole planet is kind of made of water with land floating on it. It's not just water though; it's rock that is saturated with water. There is a lot of water in the crust, then the upper mantle is pretty dry, but 400 km deep there is a lot of water, possibly more than in all the oceans combined. It's the boundary between the outer mantle and the inner mantle. That transition zone is about 7% of the Earth's mass and probably between 1 and 3% of it is water. That puts it at 1.5 to 4.5 times as much water as there is in the crust.

This is also true in the Ogallala Aquifer which underlies large areas of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas (and other aquifers around the world as well). This isn't a problem unique to California.

In many places, the groundwater withdrawals are outstripping the rate at which these groundwater reservoirs can be replenished by precipitation. Dryer and warmer climates are exacerbating this problem as well. As the interstitial spaces in the aquifers are depleted of water, they lose the structural strength that the water provided and subside. The worst thing is that these losses of interstitial space are likely permanent, so even if the aquifer is re-watered, it will have a lower capacity than it used to have.

We are heavily reliant on groundwater in the US for agriculture and municipal water, and unsustainable groundwater use is a serious problem that is largely overlooked by the media and unfamiliar to most Americans.

Nobody wants a salt water well.

Not really true. In the 19th century people in Congress believe that" rain followed the plow" and God would bring rain to the west if people turned it into farms. They let people homestead places like Arizona and it went terribly for the homesteaders. Later they spent lots of money on water projects to bring water to the places that needed it. But by that time the holdings have been consolidated and the homesteaders who survived had sold their holdings for next to nothing.

You are partly correct, large amounts of water do move through the pore spaces in rock. However, in addition to that type of flow, almost all rock formations have a network of cracks and fractures, and water often moves preferentially along these pathways. How much porous flow vs fracture flow you get in an aquifer depends on the nature of the rock and the degree of fracturing in the aquifer. In wells, intersecting a few good fractures can be the difference between a productive well and one that does not produce sufficient flow to be useful.

Dowsing is as legit as tarot cards, astrology, and palm-reading. They hit often enough to fool the gullible.

From ranching/farming folk and can confirm that this method works.

Flat earthers hate this trick!

True but not necessarily useful since most groundwater tables, especially where most humans live, is significantly higher than bedrock.

Not true. I've worked at houses where five different wells were drilled to 1500 feet and never got more than 0.10 gpm flow rate in any of them, which isn't really enough to support a home. That's when you get into the complicated stuff - a system that draws from each well to a point, creating a storage reserve, switches that sense lack water and turn off so the pump motor doesn't burn out.

I said hard, not impossible. I have no doubt there are individual places that have had difficulty getting a well going. That doesn't change the fact that most of the time you can drill wherever and likely hit something. Historically speaking especially.

Oh, it's flat. China and Australia are on the other side

That just up and stops periodically, like last week. Stanley Tucci to the rescue!

How anyone thinks this is sustainable is beyond me.

Please tell me you dont actually think there is an impenetrable barrier

… and how much was already removed by humans

You need to be observant of the land and the vegetation.

You see some trees, there's probably water closer to the surface than anywhere else.

And oddly enough 'divining rods' do work. I saw this guy from the water dept walking across the lawn with this bent coat hanger in his hands. I asked WTF he said he was looking for water leaks from the main. when I asked him what the hell that does, he had me walk around the yard with it loosely in my hand, sure enough it moved, he pointed out that I was standing between the house and the water meter, that would be where our water pipe comes in....again I walked back and when it moved again, he said that's where SFEK... that's where Damnit again.... that's where the sewer pipe would be.

Have you tried digging through the bedrock of your humour?

If your sense of humour is that dry, maybe you should keep digging for water.

Technically you would not pop out the other end. You would have just enough momentum to barely reach that point, even less due to air resistance, so you would need something to grab you out.

We called them “witching sticks” too. And yes they work. If the hands of a skilled person they would lead the user to land that was disturbed or not solid- usually because of water. I have a dear friend who has taught people how to use them. It’s awesome to watch.

It’s not finite, it gets put back through the water cycle.

There are people out there who believe in this shit so much that they'd trust their job with it. I worked with a foreman who believed he could locate buried utilities like phone lines, power lines, water pipes, etc... with some dowsing rods he made out or #4 copper wire. Sometimes he would even second guess the locators markings & dowse them just to make sure. Those guys use specialized machines to locate buried utilities. I never had the heart to tell him & I just played along with it.

>can confirm that this method works.

No you can't. Unless you dug wells everywhere the dousing rods didn't indicate, so that you could check that there wasn't water there, then all you've done is dig wells roughly at random, or with some intuition based on geography and flora.

Most people I know say "bless you" after someone sneezes. Do you think that keeps the sneezing person healthy?

Did he also drill wells everywhere that the rod didn't indicate? You know, to demonstrate that there was no water there and that the rod actually worked?

>We called them “witching sticks” too. And yes they work.

No they don't.

Yes, closer to a geologic timescale. Some of the groundwater we’ve extracted won’t be returning in our lifetime, especially where compaction is a factor.

Mm, true. And it isn't as if you limited it to 'potable water,' strictly speaking.

It worked on our lands, for sure. We don’t own the land anymore, but on the 4000+ hectares we had it sure as shit did. Up until the early 2000s, we still paid a water witch and he sure AF helped us dig our wells.

No, it didn't. You dug wells and found water, but you could have dug them in the places that it didn't indicate, and you probably would have also found water. It's nonsense.

I drill wells for a living from time to time and not every time is water gaurenteed. Our company has been drilling in the same area for 50 years or so, so we know roughly where we have no chance of hitting water and there are fairly large patches of land we wont waste our time on. Each company will have their own limits based on the rig and equipment, we can drill 620ft or so before we wont drill anymore.

Yes, we did.

You did what?

Edit: You've blocked me. I get it. But truly, dousing doesn't work. Dig a hole, and you'll usually hit water. Yes, a douser can tell you "dig here", and lo and behold you'll hit water. You would also be likely to hit water if you dig the places where they don't tell you to dig.

And then what? It’s just a pocket of water? Is it in the dirt and you have to extract it? Do you need a pump? Does it replenish? Is it not packed with bacteria?

The concept of an underwater well just doesn’t make sense to me

Ideally the water is coming from a free-flowing aquifer. You dig down a few hundred feet. Sometimes the water is sitting on top of the rock. Sometimes it's below. Sometimes it's in a mix of gravel. It could be 100 feet down, it could be 1,000 feet down. It depends on where the water is.

If the water is from an artesian well, it could be coming from a thousand miles away through the bedrock from the mountains. It could be refilled from rain water that leaks down through the water table. It could be from underground streams.

Unless the water is very shallow, there shouldn't be any bacterial contamination. You test the water to see that it's safe to drink. You're looking for bacteria, heavy metals, pesticide runoff, that sort of thing.

My parents well is about 400 feet down. Through the bedrock. The water is from an underground stream and comes up through the cracks in the rock and keeps the field next door always wet, even in a dry year. The water is high in iron but doesn't have heavy metal contamination to speak off. The copper/nickle is closer to the surface in the clay. The clay is full of iron too. At about 6 feet down, the clay has enough iron in it that a magnet sticks to it. Below that, it's a neutral gray clay that goes down to pea gravel, then bedrock. You can get water out of the gravel, but the refill time would be ridiculous so you pull from below it.

All that clay and rock acts like a filter to keep contaminates out of your drinking water.