Water Always Wins

Fogg thinks that airborne EM will be “game changing” for finding the rest of the paleo valleys in California. But after getting a general idea of where they are, people will still need to map detailed information about them either with higher-density airborne surveys or the old-school way, with data from drilled wells. The latter should be easier now too. That data used to be proprietary. Whenever the legislature tried to submit a bill to make the information public, it met an implacable wall of resistance from industry, Fogg tells me. Now, thanks to a recent law, it’s available to everyone; but he’s found it to be in disarray. “It needs a fair amount of analysis and triage” to be more useful for groundwater science and management. Fogg would like to see a state agency sort this data into categories of “good, bad, and ugly.” In recent years, he has been advocating for the California Geological Survey to take up mapping for water resources, shifting from its historical focus on mining, oil, and gas to the preeminent resource today.