WorldWide Drilling Resource

71 WorldWide Drilling Resource ® APRIL 2015 Learning About Water’s Journey in Wyoming Adapted from Information Provided by Wyoming’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research Breakthroughs are happening in science near Laramie, Wyoming. A drill rig standing several stories tall, cut through granite to remove long cylindrical core samples offering the University of Wyoming’s (UW’s) Wyoming Center for Envi ronmental Hydrology and Geophysics (WyCEHG) unlikely clues about groundwater. Drilling will continue until four, 262- foot boreholes are drilled in the Blair- Wallis area. Once core samples are gathered, the drill crew will move to the Red Buttes area south of Laramie. Researchers hope the Red Buttes area cores will extend to over 900 feet. "Understanding groundwater in mountain regions is crucial so that we can estimate how much water will be available for use downstream," said Brady Flinchum, a geophysics graduate student and WyCEHG member at UW. But groundwater can be tough to measure, especially in the Laramie Range. The type of granite rock in the Laramie Range makes quant i fying groundwater a challenge since ground- water flow is concentrated into small fracture zones. Information gathered from boreholes wi l l al low WyCEHG geo- physicists to measure properties con- trolling groundwater flow and storage Granite cores offer clues about groundwater movement. Drilling began last fall. Photos by Brady Flinchum are courtesy of Wyoming NSF EPSCoR (National Science Foundation’s Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research). in the subsurface, and determine the source of groundwater. Water samples will be extracted from different depths, and geochemistry will be used to see if water in the subsurface is the same as rainwater or stream water. According to Dr. Steve Holbrook, this project is very important for WyCEHG, whose main focus is using geophysical imaging methods to infer subsurface material properties, including hydrolog- ical properties like porosity and fractur- ing. With geophysical methods, a lot of ground can be covered quickly, but for researchers to have confidence in their interpretations, they need to have some ground-truth data to compare with geo- physical images. "Holes currently being drilled in the Laramie Range will give us that ground truth and enable us to extrapolate known subsurface properties over the larger landscape," said Holbrook. Flinchum agrees with Holbrook on drilling’s significance. He said geochem- istry can help scientists learn about the source of deep groundwater from sam- ples, “which is all part of the story of how water travels from the high moun- tains to the oceans.”