 Here we go. We're live. It's a research in Manoa. We are so excited to have Don Thomas on the show. He's an old friend and an old guest, and he's a research professor at HIGP, the Hawaii Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, which is part of the School of Ocean Earth Science, and at Manoa. However, Don has been all over the state. I mean, there's no corner of the state, which he hasn't researched. Right. Well, although my focus has been dominantly work on Hawaii Island, and that's, I have an office there that I work out of. And he's a volcanologist. Yes. My specialty is volcanology, but that covers a multitude of sins, and I've done research work on everything from the gas discharges of Kilauea to groundwater supply in the Kilauea east-west. So that's why we can talk about different things at different times we've done. And the title of our show is Amazing Freshwater Discoveries in Hawaii. Really, really important. I didn't know about this until 10 minutes ago, and it came up at the Science Cafe in Kaski a few weeks, a couple of weeks ago. Right. And we are lucky to have Don here to tell us about it. It's an EPSCOA project. Don, what's going on? Okay. Thank you for the opportunity. And really what I wanted to do was summarize really a long sequence of research that I've been involved in here, or not here on Oahu, but actually on the big island, and talk a bit about the implications for Oahu and for the other islands. Basically, my specialty started out in volcanology and did a lot of work on geothermal resources. But with time, I became involved in a project in Hilo. It was a research project to try to document the history of a Hawaiian-style volcano. And this was a bit unique in that our documentation was not to cover the surface, but actually go into the interior of Mauna Kea and try to understand its history, how the eruption cycle had changed over time, going back as far into the history of the volcano as we could. And so we drilled a borehole down near the shoreline, and it turns out the shoreline was Mauna Loa, Mauna Loa rocks, but we drilled through Mauna Loa where it's encroaching onto Mauna Kea, and drilled 11,540 feet into Mauna Kea while we continuously sampled the rocks. So we have basically samples of every rock or every lava flow that Mauna Kea has produced, more than two miles back into the history. We think in terms of time, we were back about 600 to 700,000 years into the history of Mauna Kea. That's really interesting. And when we started, actually, I was kind of a member of the research team. More by convenience, I describe my role as the mechanic because I actually knew what a drill rig looked like. And so I managed the drilling, and my interest was the groundwater. But when we started the project, it was not too, it didn't look too exciting. We figured that, well, we were just going to drill through a few tens of feet of fresh water and then be into saltwater saturated rocks. Below, what we know is that most people are maybe familiar with as the basal freshwater lens, and down near the shoreline, we figured we'd drill through 50 feet of that, and then we'd be in saltwater, and nothing much interesting would happen from there. And usually, when you hit saltwater, that's the end of it. That's it. That's basically all the water is in there. No fresh water below that. And that model, I mean, we've been using that model now for about 75 years in Hawaii. Actually, some very good scientists back in the 30s and 40s. Harold Sterns, Gordon McDonald. Working for the orientation. They were, well, they were working for geological survey territory of Hawaii. Ultimately, Dr. McDonald became a professor at the University of Hawaii. And actually, I was one of the fortunate few still around that actually took classes with Gordon. I took probably the next to the last sequence of courses that he presented at the University before his passing. But they did some brilliant work back in the 30s and 40s, and they developed a model for groundwater that said, well, okay, the groundwater is going to collect inside the island from rainfall. And as you drill wells, as you move inland, the elevation of the water table is going to rise only about a foot per mile. And the bottom of that fresh water system is only going to be going downward at a few tens of feet per mile inland. And so based on that, we were within a kilometer of the shoreline. We figured, well, we drilled through, you know, a few feet of fresh water and then being salt water. Well, it turned out that as we drilled down and we were collecting rocks, rock samples all the way down, we hit the transition from Montelua into Monacaia. And it turns out there were a bunch of soil and ash layers there. And below that, the soil and ash layers was more fresh water. More fresh water. A remarkable discovery. It was, it was very exciting and actually exciting in a couple of different ways because it was fresh water that was under artesian pressure. Now, this is one of the things that we knew when we started the project. There was no artesian water on the big island, except when we drilled into this fresh water layer, the well began producing about 2,000 gallons a minute of fresh water. That would have been fine, except we were down in an old quarry and it just about flooded out our drilling. So it was, it was quite exciting. But that, that layer of fresh water was about 400 feet thick and it wasn't fossil water. We were able to determine its age and we were able to determine where it came from on Monacaia. And we know it was on Monacaia because it was below that transition from Montelua to Monacaia. It's potable water. And it's potable water. Have wonderful water. We actually let it flow for a while and that's where we got our drinking water for a while. But the water came from an elevation of about 7,000 feet on Monacaia and the age of the water above sea level. In the mountain. In the mountain. That's halfway up the mountain. Halfway up the mountain and it took about 2,000 years to get from where it hit the ground down to where we drilled into it in Hilo. We were able to determine the age of that water about 2,000 years. And we estimated that because we don't really know how, how wide that aquifer is. It was about 400 feet thick. And based on the rate of flow though, we're estimating it's about 200 million gallons a day of fresh water is flowing through that system and actually discharging as deep submarine freshwater springs. Under artesian pressure. Under artesian pressure. This is a major discovery of water. It was a very significant discovery for us. I mean this was the first time we'd ever seen artesian water on the big island. And the first time we'd ever seen that kind of a volume of fresh water below sea level. So that was quite exciting. But eventually we had to continue drilling. It gets better. It gets way better. This was kind of the enticement to think differently about groundwater. And we continued drilling. And we drilled through some more rocks that were actually quite dense. They were very compacted and didn't have any fractures in them at all for about 4,000 feet. Then we hit some rocks that were fractured and we found more fresh water. A whole new layer. A whole new layer of fresh water. And actually we went through multiple layers because the type of rock that we encountered, it's referred to as pillow lovis. These are lovis that have been actually erupted below sea level and they're fairly solid, but they are also fractured. And the fractures were open. And when we allowed the water to flow from the well, we found fresh water being produced. Again, potable. And we continued drilling. We actually set a string of casing into the hole down to a depth of about 9,900 feet. And once, and we got it in place, we allowed the well to flow. And it was still flowing fresh water from about 10,000 feet. I got an interesting picture that I'd like to show. This would be slide number 20 because that water was also artesian. And this is a picture taken on the rig floor. These are a couple of our drill hands. The piece of pipe sticking up is part of the drill pipe. And they've just disconnected our driving mechanism to do the drilling. And you can see water spouting out of the hole. In fact, when we shut that water in and put a pressure gauge on it, we were seeing pressures of as much as 160 pounds per square inch. So very high pressures down there. And this was the first time anybody had, certainly no one had conjectured that there would be fresh water at those depths when we started the project. So right there, you had a source of fresh water that's coming off of its own power, the artesian power. And you could send it anywhere in the Big Island, actually. Well, you could pretty much send it anywhere. But the most important thing, though, and a lot of people ask, well, gee, could you develop that water? You can. But I guess the appropriate cliche is that for Hilo, it's kind of bringing coals to Newcastle. Because Hilo has plenty of fresh groundwater. But one of the important implications of that deep freshwater was that it told us that inside of Montecaya, fresh groundwater had to have accumulated at much higher elevations inside the volcano than the old Stearns and McDonald had projected. And so that was telling us that, okay, we're seeing water collecting inside the mountain at much higher rates than we ever realized. So this discovery at 9,000 feet, the second layer of multiple layers, deep freshwater under artesian pressure led you to begin an inquiry up overseas level, up the mountain. Yes. And right after this break, Don Thomas, we're going to find out what you discovered halfway up the mountain. Wow, it gets really interesting now. Hi. I'm Chris Leitham with The Economy and You, and I'd like to invite you each week to come watch my show each Wednesday at 3 p.m. Aloha. I'm Kaui Lucas, host of Hawaii is my mainland every Friday here on Think Tech Hawaii. I also have a blog of the same game at kauilukas.com where you can see all of my past shows. Join me this Friday and every Friday at 3 p.m. Aloha. Aloha. My name is Danelia, D-A-N-E-L-I-A. And I'm the other half of the duo, John Newman. Welcome. We are co-hosts of a show called Keys to Success, which is live on the Think Tech live network series weekly on Thursdays at 11 a.m. We're looking forward to seeing you then. Aloha. Bingo, we're back with Don Thomas, a research professor at HIGP. We're talking about water, which is an offshoot from his volcanology, you know, science, and discovery on, was it Monacaia? Monacaia, yes. So what did you find? Okay, so there were a number of people that took an interest in this very deep water, and a few of them realized that it meant that fresh water was accumulating at high elevations inside of Monacaia. And so they asked me if I would be willing to do a couple of test holes up in the saddle region. And again, part of the really the valuable science that comes out of the type of drilling we're doing, they say we're collecting a continuous sequence of rocks. And so in part we're drilling for water. We want to know where the water is. But because we're also collecting samples of the geology, we can say why it's there. And this is different than regular water drilling. Regular water well drilling, they just want to grind up the rocks and get them out of there. Because what they're interested in is the hole in the water. And what I'm interested in is the hole and the water in the rock. Because that rock will then tell us, okay, is this what's special about this area that we have water present here. And then when you learn that, you can apply that knowledge to other locations and find similar phenomena. Exactly, exactly. And so what we did is near the middle of the saddle, in actually one of the driest areas in the state, we had done, and we talked about this in an earlier show, we had done a process, a survey called Magnitotillurix, and we can look down into the ground and measure the electrical conductivity. And wet rocks are more conductive than dry rocks. And so based on the results of that survey, we identified a location near the center of the saddle that indicated that there were conductive rocks fairly close to the surface. And that we selected as our most likely location to find high level water within the saddle. And so we drilled there, and the elevation was about 6,400 feet above sea level. And we actually encountered a layer of fresh water at a depth of only 700 feet. So that's 5,700 feet above sea level. No one was predicting that we would see water there. Nobody knew it was there. No, nobody had any idea that there was water. This is in that very dry area there. The saddle is pretty dry. Yes, oh yes, very dry. It is one of the lowest rainfall areas in the state. And we hit a saturated zone at 700 feet depth, 5,700 feet. It continued for about 500 feet. So it wasn't just a drop in the bucket, so to speak, a 500 foot thick aquifer of continuous saturation. And then again, because we were collecting core, as we got towards the bottom of that layer of water, we actually encountered a layer of very clay rich ash. And when we drilled through it, no more water. So this layer of clay and ash was actually serving kind of as a basin as what we call a perching formation. So rainfall, and we were able to determine that the rainfall that produced that water occurs at about 9,000 feet above sea level. So above the middle of the saddle. It comes down both sides of the... Well, it probably comes down mostly from the slope of Monacaia. It infiltrates, but then it's intercepted by that basin and is basically being caught there. And probably it continues to flow sort of further down to the south from where we encountered it. But it's not a lot of permeation. But well, most of the rock is very permeable, but this one layer is actually what's controlling the flow. Got it. So when we drilled through that layer, we were back into dry rock, but only for about another 600 feet. And then we found another layer of fresh water. And so that layer was standing at about 4,600 feet above sea level. And it was continuous from there down almost to sea level where we stopped drilling. We actually didn't quite get to sea level in this borehole, but continuous saturation. And so it looks like there's a huge reservoir of fresh water that's contained within the saddle. Never tapped before. Never tapped before. Never known before. Never known before. And so the magic was to figure out, to sort of triangulate the geological point of view, that it was probably up there. Right. Well, in part it was the geophysics. In part it was the prior findings that we made down in Hilo. You know, those gave us some hints and we just followed them up with some good science. But nobody knew before. Nobody had known about it before. And so again, very unique findings. And because we were collecting rock samples, we can actually describe this reservoir. And we've known about these types of reservoirs in other locations, but we didn't know it existed here. It's called a dyke impounded aquifer. And it may encompass an area of maybe 400 square miles or 400 square kilometers up there within the saddle. We believe it's based on the geophysical work that is quite large. How important is this? It sounds like, you know, ultimately Hawaii is going to have already has a problem with water. This sounds like it could solve the problem. So, you know, how does it change things for us in our daily water use and water finding? Well, I think the main thing that it tells us, and really the important take-home message, is that geology exerts a much greater control over groundwater flow and groundwater storage than we've really ever known before. Now again, Sterns and McDonald did an amazing bit of work, but we've gained a lot since then. We've gained new techniques, new technology, that allow us to go in and do investigations that they couldn't have done back then. And now that we're seeing these things that, you know, are out there, we're finding that, okay, this is not uncommon. And we're seeing situations in the Kehoe aquifer where we have these impounded bodies of water. And prior to, and it wasn't, I certainly had nothing to do with the discovery of this impounded water, the so-called high-level water, but prior to that, the assumption was that there just wasn't any water in Kailuakona area. It was a very, very small amount of water. But it turns out that we've got a, what is in one hand, a perching formation is also an impounding formation. So it's telling us that we really do need to understand the geology in a lot more detail than we do now to understand how groundwater moves. And, you know- This is, these are lessons. This is a lesson that we didn't know before, that we now know. It's a certain geological discoveries in the process, the way geology works here in these islands, that will have an effect on every island, am I right? Every island. Well, every island has got geology, and it really is the geologic history of the island that controls the water flow. And really to bring the story home to Oahu, we understand maybe 10% of the geology of Oahu. We have what over a million people on this island. We are critically dependent on the groundwater resources that we have here. And there is just a tremendous amount that we don't understand about groundwater flow. As we talked about before the show started, there's controversy over the Red Hill and the release of some fuel there. We don't even know anything as basic as, okay, which direction is the water flow moving in this area? I mean, that's critically important to know how much of a threat either that spill or a future spill would present. And so in part because of these findings, the finding really that the groundwater system is much more complex than we had ever realized, we submitted a proposal about a year and a half ago now to National Science Foundation that we proposed actually to undertake really a new evaluation of the groundwater system in Hawaii and to start actually with the Pearl Harbor aquifer and the Kehoe aquifer on the Big Island. We were not going to be able to do them all at once. We selected the Kehoe aquifer in part because there's some interesting things going on there. There is a bit of a dispute going on over how the water is being used there. And likewise here on Oahu, but the Kehoe aquifer is a young volcanic system. Oahu is much, much older. We know that as the islands age, things change. So we selected these to have a spectrum of geologic conditions to deal with and to try to lend some new data into understanding how the groundwater system works on Oahu. And that understanding is going to change the way we see water, the way we use water. It's going to change, up till now, we've worried about the possibility we'll need to do desalination and these bladders out in the ocean and all these very expensive high-tech things. Now it appears from this research that we may not have to do that anymore. We may have a really fine supply out there, but what are the challenges? I mean, one of the things I'm concerned with, and I'm sure you are, is mismanaging this fantastic new resource. Well, it's not so much mismanaging, but not optimizing the management. And again, I'm not by no means criticizing the Commission on Water Resources Management. They do the best they can with the information that they have. But we can, at the university, produce more information, give them better information with which to monitor the resources. If we can go out and develop more details on the geology, define how the water is moving within the island, we can help them optimize how we develop the resource. We know that, certainly as a population on this island increases, the demand on the groundwater system is going to continually increase. And also with the increased population, you have increased potential for contamination. And so we need to be able to develop the information on the existing groundwater system that will allow us to manage it better, both sort of in the immediate term when somebody wants to drill a well or when we need water in a particular location, we can identify where the optimum place is to drill that well. But so we don't lose the water. So we don't damage the aquifer. You can overdraw an aquifer and basically draw seawater into it that will then take a long period of time to dissipate. And so we don't want to do that. But I think equally important that we're not looking at over the next decade, we're looking over the next 10 decades, because we can reasonably anticipate that the climate is going to change. Now we don't know whether it's going to increase rainfall or decrease it. But if we understand the groundwater aquifer on the island well enough and have good enough models, we can then project what the effect of a range of climate change possibilities are, and then see how best to manage the resource in anticipation of sort of the average case or the worst case or the best case. And so we can make better decisions on how we develop that water supply. This is incredible. It means that potentially, if we do it right, over time, we'll be able to supply the entire population of Oahu with this Odoa water from all islands as an incredible possibility, given the risks and dangers that we thought we had before. Yes. And then it gets better from that too. It gets better from that. At Nelha, and you and I sat together on the board at Nelha, they had this deep-sea pipe and they were able to draw this high-quality water out of the depths of the ocean and then process it into desalinated water and then sell that to Asia at a significant profit. So now we have a new source of water. What do you think about that? Well, certainly there's potential there. They're in many countries. I think, honestly, we don't adequately appreciate the quality of the water that we have here in Hawaii. It's some of the best in the world. And you have huge populations in China. You have populations in Southeast Asia and Japan that could only hope for water as good a quality as we have. And there is strong interest in bottled water. And again, if we can develop a method of harvesting that water, in my opinion, we harvest it before we lose it to the ocean, so it doesn't impact the supply, the reserve that we have, then that could be a very interesting new industry for Hawaii. The power of geology, if I can say that. And the power of the University of Hawaii doing, at least part of its mission, by doing research that has a direct effect on our lives in these islands. Absolutely. And that's really, to me, in a land grant university that's supported by the taxpayers, this is the kind of thing that we should be doing and really should be focusing on. I mean, I think it's incredibly important to the residents of Hawaii, and it really is a way for us to justify our existence and our research program at the university. Don, thank you for coming down. My pleasure. Thank you for all the stuff and thank you for saving us, okay? I'm not sure I can save anybody. We'll check back with you and we'll see later on. Right, check back with me in 100 years and we'll know how effective I've been. Don Thomas, research professor at HIVP and so forth. My pleasure. Thanks very much for the opportunity.