Instructional

If you're planning to drill a well, you need to learn about aquifers and how they work. Here's everything you need to know about these underground bodies of water. Keep reading!

What is an aquifer?

An aquifer is the set of rocks that allow water to permeate and accumulate in their pores. The water retained in the rock structures is known as "groundwater".

Stones that facilitate water permeability have common values, but they are not the same; thus, we find sedimentary rocks such as sandstone, clay and limestone, or small ones such as the well-known gravel.

Aquifers have two distinct parts: the saturated zone , which retains water and prevents it from circulating or filtering through, and the unsaturated zone , which lies above the saturated zone and is free of retained water.

Types of Aquifers

• According to Its Structure

These are known as unconfined and confined aquifers. Unconfined aquifers are the physical space between groundwater and the surface, also known as the water table. Confined aquifers , on the other hand, store groundwater under pressure.

• According to its texture

This category includes porous aquifers and fractured aquifers. Porous aquifers , as their name suggests, have many small pores that connect to each other, although with slight permeability.

Fissural systems have small fissures that are also interconnected, but in this type, their distribution helps groundwater to flow heterogeneously.

• According to Their Behavior

Based on their behavior, we can view them from a hydrodynamic point of view, that is, from the perspective of water mobility: Here, we find different bodies of water such as:

• Aquifers store and transmit groundwater.
• Aquitards store groundwater but are poor transmitters.
• Aquicludes, only warehouses.
• Aquifuges do not store or transmit water.

How is an aquifer formed?

Water that falls as rain, in addition to raising the level of rivers, lakes and other surface water bodies, also filters through permeable rocks to reach aquifers.

Groundwater in these aquifers emerges to the surface in the form of bodies of water such as springs and others that can discharge into rivers or lakes and serve as their sustenance.

Groundwater, on the other hand, is of great importance as it improves the flow of freshwater, which represents 3% of all water on Earth.

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