David Hyndman, professor and chair of the Department of Geological Sciences, said the primary focus not only is to determine how groundwater can be better managed, but how this research can be disseminated worldwide where a lack of fresh water is a problem.
Hyndman also is a hydrologist and will lead the project at MSU.

“When you go to this area, people are intensively interested in water — more so than we are here in the Great Lakes,” he said.

“In many cases, (this aquifer) is the main source of the economy.”

Locations within the aquifer system have enough water to last anywhere from 20 to 100 years if water is pumped at its current rate. With available tools — such as those that study climate and land change — developed at MSU, researchers hope they can be applied to the nation’s heartland, Hyndman said.

Data in the study will be presented to local municipalities for them to decide how water can be better retained at tolerable levels, he said.

A separate team at the Kansas Geological Survey, or KGS, will take ground samples of the aquifer and provide a physical representation of how the sediment contains water and then make judgements on what occurs underground in the years to come.

“Any modeling that’s going to be done or any policy decision that needs to be made with the remaining water has to be based on the best information possible,” said Jon Smith, an assistant scientist in stratigraphic research and principal investigator of the project at KGS.

Researchers at KGS were awarded a $381,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct its own research.

Although the aquifer has been thoroughly mapped and studied during the last 50-plus years, it is difficult to conclude the best course of policy action, said Nathan Moore, an assistant professor of geography at MSU and a researcher in the study.

“No one has really tried to put these pieces together, and that’s the real innovation,” he said.