Lake Doctor | A Lilly Center for Lakes and Streams Podcast

Deep Dive: Investigating Groundwater Systems in Northern Indiana

• Lilly Center for Lakes & Streams • Season 1 • Episode 22

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Water is life, yet most of us take its origins for granted, often unaware of the underlying systems that sustain it. Join us as we dive deep into the world of groundwater and aquifers with hydrogeologist Todd Feenstra. 

Through this engaging episode, we unravel the complexities of aquifers and their crucial role in maintaining our lakes and river systems. Learn about the fascinating journey of water from rainfall through various layers of soil until it replenishes valuable groundwater reserves. Understand the delicate balance required for sustainable usage in agriculture and industry, and discover how aquifers can recharge lakes even from miles away. 

With real-life examples and case studies, Todd sheds light on stewardship in water management, encouraging listeners to become responsible caretakers of this invaluable resource. With contributions from hosts Suzie Light and Dr. Nate Bosch, this episode invites you to think critically about your impact on the water cycle and the ecological systems that depend on it. Subscribe and join us in making sense of the hidden complexities of our water resources, and learn how you can take tangible steps toward better stewardship in your community. 


Engage with us and explore ways to keep our lakes and streams clean and beautiful for future generations!


Learn more about the Lilly Center's work at ⁠⁠⁠https://lakes.grace.edu/⁠⁠⁠.

Have a question we could answer on the podcast? Send an email to ⁠⁠⁠lakes@grace.edu⁠⁠⁠ or submit a comment below.

Help us improve the podcast by filling out this short survey: ⁠⁠⁠https://forms.gle/MzGSXHcnkEQC8T74A⁠⁠⁠.

Learn more about the Lilly Center's work at https://lakes.grace.edu/.

Have a question we could answer on the podcast? Send an email to lakes@grace.edu or submit a comment below.

Help us improve the podcast by filling out this short survey: https://forms.gle/MzGSXHcnkEQC8T74A.


Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to the Lake Doctor podcast. I'm Suzy Light and my co-host, Dr Nate Bosch, a lake nerd.

Speaker 2:

Yes, that's true. I received my doctorate from the University of Michigan in limnology, which is the study of freshwater lakes. In today's episode, we're really excited to welcome Todd Feenstra. He's a hydrogeologist, has an environmental consulting firm called Tridium and he's going to talk to us about aquifers and groundwater and how all of that interfaces with our lakes.

Speaker 1:

I am so excited about today's episode. The doctor is in. Todd Feenstra, thank you for joining us today. I am really excited about this because you are a groundwater and aquifer expert.

Speaker 3:

We try.

Speaker 1:

You do better than try kiddo, so tell us about you and your company and what's bringing joy to your life when it comes to water.

Speaker 3:

So I grew up hiking, camping and all of that, so getting in the environmental field was a total natural for me, never expected to be where I am, which is pretty usual. We plan and God laughs and then he takes us where we're supposed to be. So as I got into groundwater in particular, coming out of college, uh, I got to work for uh, an environmental company engineering slash environmental and we worked a lot with municipal systems. So I learned high capacity water withdrawal work from the engineering perspective and the geology perspective, um, and so I brought that in uh changed companies a couple of times. Um, actually ended up starting our own firm once I got my geology license and the name of the firm. The name of the firm is Tritium Incorporated. Tritium is actually a water molecule that has an extra neutron attached to it, and so those were- so it's radioactive, right it is?

Speaker 3:

yeah, in one sense they're neutrons, so it's not going to hurt us. But yeah, it reflects for when the nuclear testing happened. We can see it in groundwater. So if we see the tritium element in there, we know that it's really recent groundwater 1950s or since it's been recharged. If there's no tritium in it, that's old, historic water that's never seen the ground surface since the early 50s at least.

Speaker 1:

So where do you find old water?

Speaker 3:

Deep, typically Confined aquifers underneath a lot of clay or aquitard material, and so they tend to be deeper. It tends to be. Where does the water come from, which I think is what we're going to be talking about a little bit later as well. Um, but water that has, you know, really long residence times. If you think about the ogallala aquifer, uh, out west everybody knows that one because declining water levels like crazy, but it's because it's such slow recharge, so it takes a long time for the water to get down to the aquifer system, and if it takes a couple hundred years to do that, obviously you're not going to have tritium in that water.

Speaker 1:

So where does groundwater come from?

Speaker 3:

The rain.

Speaker 3:

Okay so look, groundwater is just like streams or lakes. In one sense it's all part of the water cycle, and so when it rains, our soils get wet, it infiltrates through the soils down into the next layer, down into the next layer, down into the next layer, and then my job is to figure out at times how fast does that happen? Where does that water actually come from? We had a really cool test that we ran one time where we pumped a high capacity well and we were testing the aquifer system and right in the middle of the test we had no rainfall at all. And right in the middle of the test, all of a sudden the water levels started coming up like it had rained really hard. So this is a 200 foot deep well and what in the world's going on? We've been pumping it so the water levels should be dropping and now it's rising. Turned out, the source area for that aquifer that we were pumping on was 20 miles away and they had a thunderstorm come through, so it rained 20 miles away, but it recharged the aquifer that we were pumping from even though we had no rain at all at that site. So it's fascinating to figure this stuff out.

Speaker 3:

You talk about what brings me joy. Every day, I have a puzzle to figure out, and I love puzzles. Every single day, we get a challenge of figuring out what happens when we do this. Why is it doing this? What's the long-term impact of that? And so, getting into this environmental field, especially with clean water, I don't do anything with remediation. I leave that to people much smarter than me. They can deal with the contaminants and the cleanups. We work with clean, high capacity water supplies.

Speaker 2:

So you mentioned a couple of things that I want to make sure our viewers and listeners understand before we move up, move on. So you talked about water as it infiltrates the surface and into the soil and then it percolates down through different layers. You said you also mentioned things like clay or aquitards. So I think a lot of people think of an aquifer, as there's this big underground void where there's, like, this big open cave where the water is, but actually it's different soil particles, gravels or sands. So talk a little bit about why does clay not let water through it, whereas sand or gravel lets water sort of be amongst it, and that's where our sort of aquifer would be.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, the hydrogeology in particular when we're dealing with water. In the geologic system there's certain materials that allow water to flow through them because they have more pore spaces, and those pore spaces the pore spaces is a void. If you think about a pile of marbles, there's gaps between the marbles and water will fill into those gaps, gaps between the marbles and water will fill into those gaps. Now if we pour more water on top and open a spigot on the bottom, water will flow through or past those marbles. Now if I take those marbles and I put a bunch of really fine flour in between all the marbles and I try to pour water through it, that flour is going to slow it down. So I've changed it so the marbles would be like an aquifer where water moves freely and quickly and can recharge or get pumped very freely and quickly. If we take that system, that maybe has marbles in it, but it's got a lot of flour in it.

Speaker 1:

Now the water can't get through it very quickly, so flour would be like the clay.

Speaker 3:

Flour would be like the clay Very fine particles. So flour would be like the clay. Flour would be like the clay Very fine particles a lot of clay and a lot of silt. Silt would be the next kind of grain size up. And so we actually have video that we've taken some of the streams where we've tested the stream bed and we use a shovel to dig a hole and the water is flowing around the hole but there's no water. Even though it's a foot deep, because it's all clay, water can't even that fast get into it, it's just empty. It's there, dry.

Speaker 3:

Well, what you see at the surface we also find subsurface. So when we drill we have all these layers that we go through. Most of them in this area, because we're a glacial geology area are large-scale features that are horizontal and so they lay in like pancakes or stacks, and then the streams are often cut into those, or so is the lake maybe cut into those layers. So it's kind of a pancake layering effect and each layer has its own what we would call conductivity, the rate that water can flow through it both horizontally and vertically. But it also has its own storage. There's water that's stored there.

Speaker 1:

So you mentioned hydrology. Yeah, you are a hydrologist.

Speaker 3:

Hydrogeologist.

Speaker 1:

Hydrogeologist Correct. So did you study geology at Grand Valley and then migrate into flow, into hydrology?

Speaker 3:

Yep, we started with a geology degree from Grand Valley State and then went on to take sedimentology, because I thought I'd be working with rivers, and took sedimentology in grad school at University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. And then, when I graduated, it was right when the must for funds and all the oil fields went off the cliff and there was no jobs to be had and I ended up not working with streams like I wanted to. I ended up working with groundwater and sorry, nate, but that became my passion and I actually enjoy working with the groundwater more than the stream side of it. Now we do both, but my passion is really the groundwater.

Speaker 3:

You can't see it. You can't see these aquifer systems. They're not. They're deep. You know, they're 100, 200 foot down and the only way to get a visual on it is to go out there with the drill rig when they're drilling the hole and watch what comes out of the hole, watch how the rig behaves and and it's a mystery, right, I mean, you can't see it. You're inferring a lot of things. So there's some really unique tests that we do, but it's just so fascinating how they behave, how they interact, and now the connection is. The big thing now is the connection between the groundwater and the surface water side.

Speaker 2:

So you say drill rig, so that data is coming from. Someone's going to dig a new well and a different diameter well, depending on what the application is, and as they're digging that, they're pulling up. If it's clay or silt or sand or gravel, they're digging that. They're pulling up. If it's clay or silt or sand or gravel, they're pulling that up to the surface then, and then you can see, and so you can sort of map then, what those layers are as the well is being dug, right, yeah.

Speaker 3:

Well, and here's a really it's a misconception. That's one piece of the things that we look at during the drilling. If you can imagine drilling a hole 200 feet down into the earth, how long it takes for that cutting to get from 200 feet down up to the ground surface, it's not instant. It takes a minute or several minutes in some cases to come up. So when we drill I'm always looking at the cuttings for sure that come out of the hole, but I'm watching the drill rig the whole time.

Speaker 3:

So if we hit a clay, they tend to be dense and hard, and so the drill rig the whole time. So if we hit a clay, they tend to be dense and hard, and so the drill rig. The hydraulics start to whine and the drilling is slower, but but smooth. Yeah, if I hit a sand, the hydraulics don't. I don't hear the hydraulics as much, and now that it's still smooth, but it's drilling quite a bit faster. And then if we hit gravel, now it chatters and it still moves pretty fast. And then when we hit a rock, we go take a coffee break, so yep.

Speaker 1:

Stewardship. You know when you're talking about this and your eyes light up. Creation is such a wonderful thing. Tell us about your journey in this as it relates to stewardship.

Speaker 3:

Well before I answer, if I can, I would. I'm always interested in hearing this. I would love to hear from both of you. How would you define stewardship?

Speaker 1:

find stewardship, oh, flipping it back on us, oh. I believe stewardship is taking good care of those things that God has entrusted us with, and that includes the environment, that includes our relationships with each other and our relationship with God.

Speaker 2:

Okay, yeah, I would answer that very similarly, I think, of steward. Another synonym for that would be caretaker. So when God made this world that we live in now, one of the first things that he told those very first two humans, adam and Eve, to do was to be a steward of this world, to be a caretaker, to keep to cultivate Lots of different words could be used there. So it's something that you don't necessarily own yourself, but you're stewarding it, you're managing it on behalf of the owner. Bible says the earth is the Lord's and everything in it. So we would see him as the owner and creator, and we are now caretakers, stewards of that natural world around us. And I agree with Susie stewardship is not just environmental things, although that's kind of what we're talking about in this podcast. We can steward finances and relationships and other things too.

Speaker 3:

Well, there's a reason why I ask to make sure we're on the same page, because I run into people who for stewardship to them means we can't pump any water at all. We shouldn't be doing any farming. We shouldn't be harming or even not necessarily harming wrong word we shouldn't be using the environmental resources the way that I would define stewardship. If I work with a farmer who wants to irrigate a crop that's beneficial for him, his crop yield will go up by 30%. His land value now is more valuable because it's a bigger earner, right? If he leases the land, the value goes up 30%, 40% now as well. So it's a smart thing for him to go ahead and do that. It's not smart for him to do that if he depletes the aquifer system and he harms it. So if he pumps the water let's say he pumps the water for 24 hours, a high capacity, let's say 500 gallons a minute for 24 hours and he irrigates his field, I would expect that within 24 hours that water level should be fully recovered. So he draws the water down, pulls it out, puts it on the field. I would expect one day later that that should be recovered. Now, if he doesn't, and it takes 10 days to recover and in three days he pumps again. Not good stewardship it's not. And I would say that because now he's depleting the system over time and he's not letting it recover, the aquifer can actually physically collapse. They've pumped so hard at a location in Texas that I know of that the land surface is 14 feet lower than when they started irrigating. Now that's over a number of years, but the land surface has actually, as the aquifer, collapses because the water is not there holding it anymore. So I would define that stewardship, then, as responsible use where we're not damaging the environment.

Speaker 3:

And so to me, when I talk to growers I work a lot with agriculture, a lot with irrigators, crop irrigators Well, we live in some of the most irrigated counties this side of the Mississippi River, you know, in northern Indiana here.

Speaker 3:

But when I talk with them before they join our Midwest Water Stewards group, I tell them okay, if I find out, and if I measure this and find out that you're depleting the aquifer or you're depleting that nearby stream by what you're doing, what are you going to do? And then they kind of kick the dirt and they're like, because they want to irrigate, there's a reason for it or they wouldn't do it. But every one of our members I ask them all every one of our members has said to me that I'm going to have to stop irrigating the way that I am and I'm going to have to manage it differently. I'm like well, welcome to the group, come on in, because you've got the same mindset that we have. We want to use this in a responsible manner that doesn't harm the environment, and you hear terms thrown around a lot in today's media of sustainability or renewability. Those are catchphrases, buzzwords, and they have multiple different definitions, which is why I wanted to know what's your definition of stewardship, and I think we're exactly on the same page.

Speaker 1:

And most of the farmers that I know take stewardship very seriously.

Speaker 3:

Very seriously. You know I've got to work with these guys. We do a lot of monitoring for them on the groundwater system. We put monitoring wells in. We also monitor the local streams and lakes that are around them. These guys, they care deeply about the environment, it would you know. They care deeply about their community, the streams, their hunters, their fishermen. They're embedded in the community. These aren't businesses that bought a building. They go out of business, they just go away. You bought land, you live on that land, you're part of the community.

Speaker 3:

We have growers who donate a portion of their field and turn it into a football field for rocket football, and then they pay for the uniforms for the kids every year. You don't hear about that, they just do it. You know, I've got story after story of how they give back to their communities and how valuable the community is to them. These are just great people. But I would maintain that these are probably the best stewards that you know. They're deeply concerned about it. Now, that's not to say there's a few stinkers. There are a few stinkers no matter where we go in any industry and unfortunately those are the ones that we tend to hear about the most. So most of these guys are very quiet. They're very private. They're very comfortable being alone in their field, but they love being out on their farm fields.

Speaker 2:

One of the things I remember when I first moved to the area here to take this role at the Lilly Center for Lakes and Streams. When we realized that much of the land around our lakes and streams was agricultural, that became very obvious then, okay, we're going to need to partner with the agricultural community. And so started connecting to a lot of both on the animal side as well as on the crop side, of our agricultural producers. And what was so interesting to me is as I got to know them and understand their goals. They did not want to waste water. They didn't want to see topsoil eroding off their field. They didn't want to see topsoil eroding off their field. They didn't want to see excess pesticide or fertilizer or these sort of chemicals running off their field.

Speaker 2:

And those were the same goals that the folks living along our lakes and streams had as well. They didn't want to see those things. They don't want to see the flooding coming in. They don't want to see the fertilizer or the we'd call it sediment in an aquatic system coming in from the topsoil. And so we've all got the same goals, and so I've noticed that as well. A lot of good stewardship. I'd agree with you, there are some that could do better, but for the most part they're good stewards of the land and, more than probably other career paths, these producers are looking to pass this on to the next generation, often in their own family, and so they have a built-in notion of stewardship, because they want to pass it to a son or daughter or grandson or granddaughter in as good a shape or better than when they got it from their parents.

Speaker 1:

So groundwater impacts the aquifers and groundwater impacts the lakes. How do you work together?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so when we look at a lake, we look at both surface water as well as groundwater, right, and so we could have surface water which would be like a stream, or it could be direct surface runoff coming off the land directly into the lake, on the surface of the soil running off, but we also have groundwater which is coming from internal to the lake.

Speaker 1:

Like a spring in the lake. It could be a spring.

Speaker 2:

Okay, yeah, and those springs can be really interesting. Looking at groundwater because we learned this a few years back with a study that we did Springs are areas where you have that going back to that connectivity idea that you were talking about before, where it's gravel, gravel or sand, where water can come in when there's greater groundwater pressure outside of the lake, sort of pushing water in. But if the water table starts to go down, those springs can become drains and water can actually leave the lake through the springs, which is really interesting yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:

So no, there's a lot of uh influence and and you see that too in your work, because you're doing both the stream work and the groundwater work. So what sort of connections do you see?

Speaker 3:

connection between everything, and then we have folks that would like to believe there's no connection between them all. The truth of the matter is our creation, his creation. It's incredibly complex and every lake is its own animal, and I say that very strongly. We've worked with a lot of lakes. Every lake is unique, but also every farm field that I go to to drill a well is also unique. So how do those wells, or how do the wells, interact with the streams? How do the streams interact with the lakes? How do the wells interact with the lakes? A lot of it comes back to that layering that I talked about the different sediment layers.

Speaker 3:

Groundwater and aquifer are not synonymous with each other. Groundwater and aquifer are not synonymous with each other. An aquifer is just a sediment layer that has groundwater that we can extract at a higher rate for a house well or for a high-capacity well. But there's also groundwater in what we call aquitards. An aquitard is one that moves very slowly. An aquifer moves really fast. An aquitard moves very, very slow, Still has groundwater in it. We just can't extract it and it doesn't recharge very quickly at all. It takes a long time and then we have what we call aquacludes. Aquacludes means there's no water getting through that at all.

Speaker 2:

So it's like occluded? Oh yeah, absolutely it's impenetrable. So it's like occluded?

Speaker 3:

Oh yeah, absolutely it's impenetrable yeah it's typically a really, really dense clay, or it's a hard rock.

Speaker 2:

Is that what people call? Like a clay lens I've heard people talk about Not really no.

Speaker 3:

Clay lens because some of the clays leak or they have leakants. They're aquitards, they let water leak through them, but some of the clays, like I said, are rock hard. When we drill it it comes up as like pieces of gravel. It just chips and breaks and when I take a piece and I break it open, it's dry inside. Wow, even though it came from 150 feet down and there may be an aquifer full of water above it and an aquifer full of water below it, but that clay layer is completely dry. So that's a dense, dense, hard clay.

Speaker 3:

This is part of that complexity that I'm talking about. We tend to generalize things and get in our head that this is the way it is. Reality is not that way, and so that's what makes it so fascinating to be on a drill rig or to study a lake or a stream or that connection, when we have done seven or eight years worth of work on a lake in Niles, michigan, called Barren Lake. They had struggling with water levels going up and down, so they wanted to augment it. They wanted to pump groundwater, put it into the lake. Well, they did. They put the well on a side of the lake, which unfortunately didn't have a clay layer, and so they pumped water in, but a lot of that water was going right back into the aquifer system. It was draining right back out of the lake.

Speaker 2:

So they're just making a circulation system?

Speaker 3:

They were recirculating that water yes, so we've been working with them for a long time. We put the well on the other side of the lake and now that recirculation is almost completely gone because that side of the lake has a lot of clay layers to it, and so now that water's not recycling when they put it into the lake.

Speaker 2:

Streams. A couple of things more to say about streams. So I remember reading about streams. Can either be gaining streams or losing streams, right?

Speaker 1:

And a gaining stream.

Speaker 2:

If you have the stream channel going, you have higher water tables and so water is actually pushing into the stream and so the flow of the water is increasing as the water is going down because of coming into the stream bank. So a losing stream then would be where water table is lower and so water is actually leaving the stream as it's flowing down, right, Yep.

Speaker 3:

Yep, Okay. So, and it's even more complicated than that. Here's the complexity again what's the stream bed made of? If the stream bed is a clay, the water is not going to move through the clay, it's going to flow across the clay. So that would be a gaining stream the whole way down, even though the groundwater level may be lower, because it's surface water draining and feeding that stream, but none of it's going out the bed of the stream. So even though it should be hydraulically a losing stream, it's not because the clay is keeping the water in there. If it's sandy, you know, think of any of the creeks around here and you walk them. If they have a sandy bed now we may have.

Speaker 3:

Is it sandy the whole length of the bed or is it sand and then it goes to clay and then it goes back to sand. What are the groundwater levels? Those are the things. It's really, really difficult and I don't know a good word to put on it. It's a complete misunderstanding to think that, okay, I'm say on the Tippecanoe River and I know what it behaves like right here, so therefore the entire Tippecanoe River behaves like my backyard. That is not the case, and so that's where we come in and we're like listen, we can take measurements and tell you where does the stream gain and lose? And then we know that now we've got to figure out why. Yeah, does it stop losing because it's now flowing over clay, or does it stop losing because there's a tributary? Or does it start losing now because of a crop irrigation? Or is there a diversion or a direct withdrawal, or is it a geology thing?

Speaker 2:

And in those streams some of the most interesting biology is happening in what we call the hyperreic zone, which is that sort of layer below the stream bed Maybe it's gravel or sand, and so there's the water that we see flowing on the top, the surface water, but there's groundwater in the hyperereic zone that's also flowing, and insects and bacteria, and so there's so much more going on in a stream than what you see when you just look at it at the surface water. It's really a complex system.

Speaker 3:

So we're sitting here trying to give you simple explanations for things that don't have a simple explanation, that's kind of the point. The complexity is amazing, which is we're scratching the surface of. Why is this a puzzle? Why is this so fun to work with? If you like figuring that stuff out and you care about stewarding it very well, that's a natural shoo-in to do this type of work so we are on the Great Lakes Aquifer. Yes, is there such a? Thing?

Speaker 1:

Well, I'm asking you. Because my impression was I have a well at my house and my well goes down 250 feet and I'm tapping into the Great Lakes Aquifer. I'm not.

Speaker 3:

You're not. There's not a Great Lakes Aquifer Really. Look, we have a regional. It depends on scale, I guess. If you want to, I would say you know, in the other parts of the Midwest we have the Ogallala Aquifer. Goes all the way to Texas. Everybody kind of knows what that is. That is not. We don't have a Great Lakes aquifer like that.

Speaker 3:

What we have is we have glacial geology, where glaciers came in and just made a mess and we've got glaciers going different directions, one after another over the top of each other, chewing everything up, depositing things back down. Then it's complicated because you have streams in the middle of that at all these different times and it's just a web of stuff that's down there. There's not a single aquifer that underlies it all. There's multiple different aquifers and they have multiple different areas that they cover. And so Kosciuszko, or the excuse me, the Kankakee outwash plain Well, it's an outwash plain. It's a very extensive, very fine sand pumps, really good water, because it's really well sorted, but it's only about 50 feet thick, 40 feet thick. So that's great there.

Speaker 3:

That's not what you have here in Kosciuszko County, it's not part of that and that's different than what we have in St Joe County in Michigan which is different than what we have in DeKalb and Steuben County. So they're all unique and they're all different and they're really not all connected to each other. Just like you have watersheds at the surface that you've talked about before in your podcast, there's groundwater sheds as well, and so, but typically, what happens? Very generally, of course? Look at your major river systems. So name one of your favorite big river systems in Indiana the Tippecanoe. Okay, so you've got the Tippecanoe River. There's groundwater that flows to the Tippecanoe River. That's not the same groundwater that flows to the St Joseph River system to the north.

Speaker 1:

Because of the watershed, because of the watershed Because of the groundwater shed.

Speaker 3:

Ah so the groundwater is also moving in different directions, just like the surface water does.

Speaker 2:

And often would move in similar directions as the surface watershed but not always.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, the major surface watersheds do start to reflect the major groundwater sheds, but it's very, very similar. It flows in different directions. The streams can be deflected by something.

Speaker 1:

Like a clay deposit.

Speaker 3:

Or a lot of forested area, or clays at the surface rather than sands. It's the same thing in the subsurface. So we have features where groundwater is deflected around, flows around, just like we have at the ground surface. So there's not a single system. And I want to be really clear there's not underground lakes and underground rivers. Those are very extreme exceptions, especially here when we're talking about sands, gravels and clays.

Speaker 1:

I was so worried that we're going to deplete the Great Lakes Aquifer.

Speaker 3:

I guess I don't need to worry about that. You do not need to worry about that, no.

Speaker 1:

So we talked a bit about agriculture and the impact agriculture has on groundwater and aquifers. What about industry?

Speaker 3:

There's a lot. We work with anything high capacity wells and we approach every one of the problems essentially the same way. Everybody's worried about the impact. You are worried about the Great Lakes aquifer being impacted. Everybody's worried about that. We don't get to see it. We've got the LEAP project going right now.

Speaker 2:

What is that? Is that an acronym? What does that stand for? Yeah?

Speaker 3:

Don't put me on the spot with that one.

Speaker 3:

I don't remember. Off the top of my head it's a development for basically an industrial and technology complex down near Indianapolis and where they wanted to build it they don't have the water that they need and so they want to pipe it from another municipality and pipe it to that location across the watershed boundary, and so there's a lot of people concerned about what the impact of that would be. The Machindo Aquifer in northeast Indiana that is shared with also Ohio and Michigan, so you have a tri-state going on there a large user, whoever it may be.

Speaker 3:

There was a fish farm. There's a municipality system that was there to replace Toledo's system. There's agriculture there. There's worried about cross state lines, about if I pump in Indiana, does that impact Ohio or Michigan?

Speaker 1:

Or does it deplete Indiana?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, can I pump in Ohio and deplete Indiana? I mean, that was a concern. There was a developer that wanted to put a fish farm in in Ohio and there was a lake group, a lake association or people that lived on a lake about 30 miles away in Indiana who were worried that his fish farm would dry out their lake 30 miles away. That's the type of kind of fear and so the data collection will help with that. But you I know Pisgah Marsh is close to your heart, that's right here so there could be server farms in La Porte quarries when a new quarry goes in what server farm?

Speaker 2:

how does that impact water?

Speaker 3:

Server farms require a lot of water to keep things cool. Okay, and so they'll pump the water and then cool everything down and then discharge it.

Speaker 1:

Computer servers. They need to be cooled Well municipality is very similar.

Speaker 3:

If you look at the city of Warsaw or Elkhart or Goshen or South Bend, they would draw groundwater, treat it, pipe it to their residents. Their residents use the water, put it on their lawn, take a shower, use the toilet, you know, clean their dishes and then that water gets back into the system. Okay, great. So South Bend takes water from X number of wells, but they're servicing how big of an area and where's the discharge for all that going? And can South Bend over pump to a point where they run out of water? Arizona faces that right now. They put a ban on new subdivisions in portions of Arizona because there's no water to support them. That's not us. We're not Arizona. You know we're very different here. It doesn't mean we can't impact it, so we still need to be be be mindful of that.

Speaker 1:

Be good stewards.

Speaker 3:

We have to be good stewards, but whatever the system is, that's withdrawing the water to use it the question remains for all of them how much water are you taking? How much impact do you have locally? Are you depleting the system? Are you going to dry neighbor's wells out, or are you going to deplete the water over time, or are you going to deplete the nearby lake or the nearby stream? And so there's typically, by the time I get a phone call, typically there's full-blown panic. Facebook is blowing up, social media is blowing up, and people are throwing gasoline on the fire. We have a lot of the NIMBY principle the not in my backyard happens. And then what I have found, though, is, when we approach those, I think this is where you're going with it. How do we know?

Speaker 1:

Exactly, and you talk about collecting data, something that the Lilly Center does. That's something you both have in common. How do we know?

Speaker 3:

So Nate could probably talk a whole lot more about the streams than I can. We dabble in it and we do a good job with that. But essentially there's two ways currently that are recognized ways to know what the impacts are going to be. One is modeling, so we can build a theoretical model, put it together based on our understanding and then do predictions and we can change variables and predict. We could also measure it, and so it used to be. With a scientific method. I would collect some measurements, I would do some field work, then I would take that, I would kind of analyze it, solidify what I think my interpretation is. I would build a model to reflect that and then that's what I would present. But the model is based on the data and would match the data. In the computer age we've gotten more now to where people are very comfortable building a model at their desk. I think this is the way this is. I'm going to build a model. I'll let the model tell me whether this is valid or not valid.

Speaker 2:

Without any ground. Truth thing of actual data.

Speaker 3:

Yep. So what we tend to see is kind of some hedging, where an entity will say I'm going to take the well logs from the DNR database and that's my data. Well, that's not field work. You weren't the one that drilled the well. You don't know if the lithology is right. You don't know if the well location report on the well log is right. So you don't know if the elevation is right. You don't know if the water level is right or not. If you're off by 5, 10 feet, that makes a big difference in a model. You don't know unless you go out and you actually check that and measure that. And so the approach that we've taken is I understand where the industry is at. I understand and fully believe that models are necessary. What I don't agree with strongly is that we can just build a model based on what we think is out there without checking against the real world.

Speaker 3:

And then there's this whole discussion that happens what is the real world that you're checking in against? And then the complexity issue comes up and then we start talking in circles and we get really unclear even in this conversation really quickly.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, because even just a model. In my PhD work at University of Michigan we did a lot of simulation modeling with watersheds and stuff like that and the modeler can bring bias into building their model right. And if there's no ground truthing of actual data in the real world, that bias then could make the model function in a way that's not actually reality and then we can make bad decisions on that as well.

Speaker 1:

So how do you collect data? And you were talking about monitoring wells. Is that a data collection point?

Speaker 3:

Absolutely, and that's why we do it. We got started really heavy in this with ag because of some new state law that happened in Michigan in 2009. They have a model based on well logs that says we're running out of water, well, okay. So the model says that, okay, the next step will be if we're running out of water, we've got to stop using water. So now farmers are going to need to stop irrigating or irrigate less, or manage it differently or do something to stop using as much water. So the question immediately is are we? How do we know? How do we know?

Speaker 3:

Look, if I said that to you and it was your well, and I said you have to give up your well, you would say prove it. Ok. If I could prove it to you, then you'd say you know what? I am depleting the aquifer, like our members in Midwest Water, and I need to change something. But if I just come to you and say I built a model that predicts that you're depleting water. You need to stop, your first question is going to be I'm not so sure your model is right yeah.

Speaker 3:

So that's what the monitoring wells started to do. We started putting monitoring wells in right near the irrigation wells and that way, anytime the irrigation well turned on, the water level would drop in the monitoring well. Now we can run an aquifer test and we can take the drawdown data and I can tell you how fast water moves through the aquifer system. I can tell you how fast water moves through the clay layer above it. I can tell you how much water is stored in the aquifer system. I can tell you how fast water moves through the clay layer above it. I can tell you how much water is stored in the aquifer system. So those are great. About how it moves through my model, I'm not guessing anymore At that point. I know how it moves through my model. But I also then know hey, the guy pumped the well for a day and I have water level readings that show it recovered in a day. So if the model says it takes 10 days to recover, something's wrong, and it's probably not the data, that's probably the model is wrong.

Speaker 1:

So you both have data in common. How do we get data geeks? How are you at Lilly Center helping us get the people who are going to be the monitors in the future paying attention to this stuff?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, being part of Grace College is a wonderful place for the Lilly Center to be housed, and so we have this natural pipeline of talent coming in to Grace and to our environmental program, and naturally, many of those students want to work at the Lilly Center for Lakes and Streams to gain internship experience, build their resumes while they're still in college, and so, for example, right now we have 46 students working as college student interns for us at the Lilly Center, and one of those students in fact quite a superstar student interned with you and just recently got hired by you.

Speaker 3:

He did. Quentin Hunsberger, I knew him from church. His mom and my wife were camp cooks together for a youth camp for like several years and Quentin was going into meteorology and decided he didn't like that, wasn't sure what to do, and his mom said, well, why don't you call Todd? You might be interested in what he does. And so he actually transferred to Grace and then came to work for us as a summer intern, did a great job and I think he absolutely fell in love with streams, just fell in love with them, and at least that's my interpretation from the look on his face when he's doing the work.

Speaker 2:

I've seen it too in class. We've been out in chest waiters and streams collecting data.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. So he worked for us for two years as an intern and then went back and we just brought him on full time in December we hired him full time. So for us, look, I know I've got passion about this, but I also know I'm on the downhill side of life. Now I've passed that 50 mark. So I see it as part of my job, also as stewards stewarding I need to train up that next generation, and so we hired two college grads this year. Quentin was through our internship. We hired two college grads this year who both have the same definition of stewardship and have a passion for what we do, and we're starting to train them and teach them. So then, on the private side, we've got these. We're multiplying what we do through that program.

Speaker 2:

I love that word that you used multiply or multiplication. That's a theme for the Lilly Center that we have this year in thinking about how, when we invest in these young people, whether they're interns or whether they're college students in classes, whether they're college students and classes, and then we think of them going on in graduation and they're going into environmental law or environmental consulting, as you've been talking about, or different government agencies or nonprofits, they are taking that stewardship idea and they are taking that into their own careers and so they can accomplish so much more than you or I can. They now go to new geographic areas, new fields of study, and there's many more of them than there's just the two of us. Right, and that's such a rewarding part of being at Grace College and being at the Lilly Center and you being at Tritium and with the stewards group that you're part of. It's really remarkable.

Speaker 1:

It is. You know. I hope our listeners are listening with an ear to the future. If you're a parent or a grandparent that's listening and you have a child who is sparked by being excited about getting out on the lake or being excited about fishing or being excited about the science of life, consider pointing them in the direction of Grace College Lilly Center for Lakes and Streams and environmental sciences.

Speaker 3:

Well, and we still have two intern positions open open too, so I'll put that plug in.

Speaker 1:

Todd, I so appreciate you being here today and explaining the wonderful work you're doing and the stewardship heart that you're bringing to the table. Thank you so much for being here.

Speaker 3:

It was a privilege and I appreciate coming on. It's my first official podcast, so I'm excited about that.

Speaker 1:

You did a really good job, yeah, thanks for being here.

Speaker 3:

It's been a lot of fun.

Speaker 2:

Hey, I'm Dr Nate Bosch, director of the Lilly Center for Lakes and Streams, and today we're talking about the water cycle. And we're in a perfect spot to talk about the water cycle. We're by one of our 14 live stream sensor locations here throughout Kosciuszko County in northern Indiana. And the way these stream sensor locations work is it starts with a stream sensor. They use Doppler radar to look at particles as they pass over the sensor. The sensors sit down on the bottom of the stream. I happen to have a side looker here which would sit on a bridge abutment along the side of the stream looking into the water from the side angle, but the one behind me is sitting down at the bottom, but since it's under the ice, I'm going to show you this one instead. So we've got some sensors there and those sensors are sending out Doppler signals and it's bouncing back and we're getting an indication of how fast the water is moving, how much water is moving. We're measuring water temperature, barometric pressure, lots of different things. There's then a cable that connects up here to the data logger system. The data logger system is really where a lot of the electronics work of our stream sensor technology. So all the data is coming in here, it's being stored here, and this is where the data then gets sent to our website, where you can go any time of the day or night and see exactly what's going on in the streams around our county. There's also a battery that's in there, and we have a solar panel up here, and so that's charging the battery, and so it continues collecting data even in the nighttime hours, as well as during several cloudy days, like we might have here in Indiana in the wintertime, for example.

Speaker 2:

All right, now we're down here closer to the stream channel. We're going to talk a little bit more specifically about the water cycle, so I've got a diagram here in front of me. This is the same diagram that we use for a lot of our K-12 field trips in our community here, as we're encouraging our citizens to be more water literate in northern Indiana. So I want to point out some different parts of the diagram here. So, first off, we've got precipitation. That could be in the form of rain, it could be in the form of snow.

Speaker 2:

We've got water that's coming down to the surface of the ground, and then there's two different things that can happen to that water. It can either run off the surface. We can have surface runoff, where the water will directly get to a lake or a stream, like we're by here today. You can also have infiltration, where the water will infiltrate into the soil, and then you can have percolation of water going to deeper layers of the soil, kind of like maybe you've used the word percolation with coffee as water moves through the coffee grounds. We then, once we have water in the water body itself like a stream or a lake, we have evaporation. And evaporation where the water goes from that liquid form back to a vapor form again and up into the atmosphere, maybe to condense in a cloud and come back again as precipitation, or maybe it stays there for a while. We also can have plants interact with the water cycle and so, as is pictured here, we have trees with their deep roots pulling water from deeper layers of soil up into the trunk, branches out the leaves, then, as those tree leaves are, doing photosynthesis, and that water then gets back into the atmosphere and again completes the cycle Within the soil. We also have another sort of transition that water can take it can run off the surface, it can percolate down deep, and when it's percolating down into the soil, it can either come through as a lateral flow or subsurface flow we can call that, or it can go into some of those deeper aquifer or groundwater layers and it can start to move through the groundwater, through those aquifers, and that can either recharge a stream like this or a lake back behind us, or water can move from the creek or the lake directly into those groundwater, those aquifer sources of water. Regardless of how the water is going, it's called a water cycle because it keeps cycling around it's coming down, it's moving around in the landscape and then it's going back up into the atmosphere once again. Let's now talk about these different changes in the water cycle, specifically with this creek that's right beside us. All right, let's focus in on the water cycle with this stream as an example. So here we're at Cherry Creek, which flows into Winona Lake, which is back behind us over there, and this stream is a great example of a lot of these different things that we've been talking about.

Speaker 2:

First off, let's start with precipitation. You can see snow that's on the ground here, right around my feet, right Coming from the atmosphere, from up high, from clouds down to the water or down to the ground surface Now, because it's frozen, even if this snow starts to melt, we're not gonna get infiltration into the soil it, we're only gonna have the surface runoff here in this particular case at this time of year. Same thing if we were to have rain at this time of the year. Since the ground's frozen, we're just going to have surface runoff. That surface runoff is going to move across the surface until it gets to a body of water in an urban environment, until it gets to a storm drain or a gutter or something like that, and then into into a pipe and then moving out towards a water body. As that water moves across the surface it can pick up things. It can pick up sediments and nutrients, and those things can actually have some negative impacts then on downstream water bodies.

Speaker 2:

If we were in warmer months of the year here in northern Indiana, we could have infiltration and the water would actually go into the soil surface right here and we could have percolation as it starts to go down to deeper layers of the soil and that water then can still move into the stream rather than across the surface. It can move in from underneath the surface of the soil. We call that lateral flow or subsurface flow, where we're still charging up, we're recharging that stream, the water in that stream, but it's not across the surface, it's just under the surface. Sometimes we have tile drains or storm drains that can also move water just beneath the surface, directly into our streams or in our lakes as well, and then that groundwater, those aquifers, that deep water, can also come into our stream. We call that a gaining stream, where we have water coming from deep underground into the stream, or we can have a losing stream.

Speaker 2:

We can have certain times of the year where the water table drops enough around the stream where the water is actually moving out of the stream into the groundwater and recharging the groundwater and the stream water is starting to subside a little bit.

Speaker 2:

We also have some trees around us here along the stream bank and in warmer months when we have leaves on those deciduous trees, those trees would be pulling up water from those deeper soil layers into the trunk and then into the branches, into the leaves, and then through photosynthesis, that water is going to be expelled through the leaves and up into the trunk and then into the branches, into the leaves, and then through photosynthesis, that water is going to be expelled through the leaves and up into the atmosphere Another way that water moves from the ground level back up into the air around us.

Speaker 2:

Obviously, that's not happening at this time of the year, although we have a few evergreen trees kind of spotted around here and they can still be pulling up some water, even in the winter months. The water cycle is always cycling. The same water that we see in this creek here running by us right now might be the water that we're drinking or brushing our teeth with in the future. We all have a vested interest in keeping this water clean. At the Lilly Center, our mission is to make our lakes and streams clean, healthy, safe and beautiful. If you want to learn more about how you can help us with that, go to our website, lakesgraceedu, and learn about some specific things that you can do to help keep our lakes and streams cleaner. It might just be the water that you're going to be drinking someday.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Lake Doctor podcast. Please like, subscribe and share, and make sure to join us next time. It's bound to be fun.

Speaker 2:

Listening to this podcast is just the first step to making your lake cleaner and healthier. Visit lakesgraceedu for more information about our applied research and discover some tangible ways that you can make a difference on your lake.

Speaker 1:

If you have a comment or a question that we can discuss in future episodes, leave a comment or send an email to lakes at graceedu. We'll see you next time. The doctor is in. Thank you.