Groundwater for Dummies

It's not unusual for our staffers to run across an "informational" post that has been ruined by a minimum word count (MWC). Many's the time we've found a nominee, particularly in the eHow.com pantheon of niche sites, who answered a question (more or less) correctly in the required introduction, but then went on to completely destroy all credibility – not to mention accuracy – in the additional hundreds of words needed to meet the MWC. Of course, some of the "contributors" just plain get it wrong: witness eHow.com's Michael E. Carpenter and the Sciencing.com post, "The Difference Between an Aquifer and the Water Table."¹ 

Right up front, let's get the facts out of the way: an aquifer is a layer of porous rock or unconsolidated soil or sediment that can hold water in the pore spaces between grains, especially a layer that allows movement of the fluids. The water table is simply the top surface of the portion of the aquifer that is water-saturated. An aquifer is a three-dimensional body, the water table is a two-dimensional surface. It's that simple.

Well, it's apparently that simple unless you're an real estate agent-slash-insurance agent...
According to Carpenter, then, an aquifer is,

"An aquifer is a body of saturated rock through which water can easily move..."

Nice: he parroted a definition written by another freelancer. Fortunately, it's more or less true, although the bit about "easily" is both superfluous and inaccurate. Speaking of inaccuracy, here's some of Mike's padding:

"A confined aquifer sits below a unconfined aquifer and layer of nonporous rock."

Ummmm, no, a confined aquifer lies between two impermeable layers (i.e., aquitartds). Carpenter got that by misinterpreting a generalized picture. Sigh... scientific illiteracy at work. But wait, there's more:

"The depth of an aquifer can also vary from a few feet to hundreds of feet of available groundwater."

We think he was trying to describe thickness, not "depth." But what the heck: Carpenter got paid for this crap, even if he didn't understand it before he wrote it and his readers didn't understand the difference between aquifers and the water table after they read it. Such is the damage a Dumbass of the Day can do.

¹ The original has been sent to the rewrite team by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/info_8509843_difference-between-aquifer-water-table.html

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