Wednesday January 15, 2025
PhysOrg —
Oregon’s Cascade Range mountains might not hold gold, but they store another precious resource in abundance: water. Scientists from the University of Oregon and their partners have mapped the amount of water stored beneath volcanic rocks at the crest of the central Oregon Cascades and found an aquifer many times larger than previously estimated—at least 81 cubic kilometers.
That’s almost three times the maximum capacity of Lake Mead, the currently overdrawn reservoir along the Colorado River that supplies water to California, Arizona and Nevada, and greater than half the volume of Lake Tahoe. The team report the findings in a paper published Jan. 13 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The finding has implications for the way scientists and policymakers think about water in the region—an increasingly urgent issue across the Western United States as climate change reduces snowpack, intensifies drought and strains limited resources.
It also shapes our understanding of volcanic hazards in the area. Magma interacting with lots of water often leads to explosive eruptions that blast ash and gas into the air, rather than eruptions with slower-moving lava flows.