So we figured out that there's quite a bit of grounwater on the Earth, and we figured we should investigate that. Students came up with three main ways to do so:
1. Go dig in the ground, but that would be expensive and possibly unsafe. Plus, we didn't really know where to look for it.
2. Go to a city that didn't have any visible water and ask around about ground water. But that would be hard to arrange a field trip and we'd assume that whomever we found would be able to talk about groundwater--and it's wrong of us to assume.
3. Do some research to see if there are some groundwater maps. This would be easy to find (hopefully) and free!
So that's what we did. We found the map below and zoomed in on three cities that were relatively close to Chicago, and didn't have a lot of visible water. We were curious if they had other sources of water that could explain how they got drinking water if there wasn't any water in their communities: Galesburg, Champaign, and Rockford.
1. Go dig in the ground, but that would be expensive and possibly unsafe. Plus, we didn't really know where to look for it.
2. Go to a city that didn't have any visible water and ask around about ground water. But that would be hard to arrange a field trip and we'd assume that whomever we found would be able to talk about groundwater--and it's wrong of us to assume.
3. Do some research to see if there are some groundwater maps. This would be easy to find (hopefully) and free!
So that's what we did. We found the map below and zoomed in on three cities that were relatively close to Chicago, and didn't have a lot of visible water. We were curious if they had other sources of water that could explain how they got drinking water if there wasn't any water in their communities: Galesburg, Champaign, and Rockford.
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We figured out by analyzing these maps that these cities have access to groundwater through wells and aquifers. We don't really know much about these things...so we generated some new questions:
1. How does groundwater even end up in the ground?
2. How do they get groundwater out?
3. If they are able to get it out, just how clean or dirty is it?
We'll start with the first question...check back soon!
1. How does groundwater even end up in the ground?
2. How do they get groundwater out?
3. If they are able to get it out, just how clean or dirty is it?
We'll start with the first question...check back soon!