A few years back, the fall before The Plague, Dr. Ben Schwartz of the Edwards Aquifer Research and Data Center invited me to join him and Peter Sprouse to write a short blurb for a world encyclopedia on the status of spring ecology. I knew exactly where to go for a quick stat on the status of springs in Texas because I had done it many times before: Gunnar Brune’s 1975 report for the Texas Water Development Board. In Brune’s report of a statewide survey of the state’s major (greater than 1 cubic foot per second) and historical springs, he notes how many of the 281 springs in the book went dry.
As I wrote my brief contribution, it struck me that it had been 50 years since someone had systematically revisited the status of theses springs (much of Brune’s field work was completed by 1971). Since I had learned some tricks in researching the history and location of long-gone springs for a study on Comanche Springs, I decided to work with a talented undergrad to “revisit” Gunnar’s springs using satellite imagery.
The biggest issue was figuring out where these damn springs were. Gunnar noted (in either his report of his later 1981 Book, The Springs of Texas Volume 1, I forget which) that he did not provide lat-long locations because most people would have no idea how to use them. Oops. Where he did report lat-longs, he only reported the degrees and minutes, meaning that his coordinates provided a +/- 2 mile error in location. Yikes.
As a result, Mimi (my student) and I sleathed locations using various sources of information, including historical information. For the dozen or so springs we couldn’t “see” flow status, we visited them. The sleuthing was fun, like a rat pressing a lever for a hit of dopamine!
In the end, we wound up using information from both the report and the book on springflow status some 50 years ago (the book was published in 1981) after discovering the information in the book more reliable. After compiling and analyzing all the information, we found, depending on how you look at the data, between 2 to 3 times more springs having gone dry from 50 years ago, not surprising given that we’ve pumped about 3 times more water from the state’s aquifers over that time period.
Another cool thing about the study was that we found that spring flows follow a power law relationship, that is, a fractal. That allowed us to (cough, cough) estimate the total springflow in the state at about 2 million acre-feet per year as well as estimate the number of springs larger than any given size. Pretty cool.
Need to next work on the academic papers for this work, but it sure felt good to finally get this out!
so secret, occult, and concealed 