“Paleo valleys,” carved by ice age rivers and now underground, could provide spaces to recharge California’s depleted groundwater
When glaciers covered the Sierra Nevada mountains several times over the last million years, rivers flowing down the mountains grew more powerful, cutting channels a mile wide and 100 feet deep into what is now California’s Central Valley. When the glaciers receded, high-velocity meltwater surged down the slopes, carrying with it scoured gravel and rock. As the flow slowed along the valley below, the cobble dropped out of the water column, filling the canyons.
People can help restore hydrologic health by spreading water on the surface to percolate underground, a process called managed aquifer recharge. But clay soils make up 65 to 80 percent of the Central Valley, and water moves through them slowly. That is where paleo valleys could come in handy. Because they are filled with gravel, they are more porous than clay soils and can absorb about 60 times more water.
Graham Fogg, a professor emeritus of hydrogeology at the University of California, Davis, first suggested using paleo valleys for managed aquifer recharge nearly 40 years ago. He has hypothesized that each of the about a dozen rivers coming off the Sierra Nevada has corresponding paleo valleys. But in a quarter-century of searching, he and his graduate students have only found three—using a tedious method that analyzes tens of thousands of soil samples from wells.
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