Re: Drown
Posted by Jerry K. on January 07, 2004 at 19:51:21:
In Reply to: Re: Drown posted by denver on January 07, 2004 at 01:20:21:
I visited Devil's Hole on a tour of the Nevada Test Site a few years ago, hosted by a former NTS employee whose name I've forgotten. He'd worked at NTS for 20 years or so, and mentioned that other workers would party at the spring back in the days. I seem to recall he'd mentioned drowning deaths, but I don't recall any specifics.
From the earth scientist's viewpoint, the water in that spring is most likely groundwater that has seeped into the "carbonate aquifer" that underlies eastern Nevada and western Utah from Idaho to about the Devil's Hole vicinity. The USGS has a report out on the deep carbonate aquifer, and Vegas and other cities are hungrily evaluating this aquifer as a "new" source of drinking water. I last worked in Vegas in about '88, so my info may be dated, but geologic features change slowly. The carbonate rocks (limestone, dolomite, etc.) underlie the alluvium (the loose sand & rocks washed off the mountains), and as I recall, the groundwater seeps out in these springs. If you wanted to drill a water well into the carbonate aquifer, it would be more than 2,000 feet deep.
Florida's sinkholes are similar geologic features to Devil's Hole, where groundwater through time has dissolved caverns and tubes through carbonate rocks (like at Carlsbad and other caverns) that may reach to the surface as springs when there is upward flow, or as sinkholes, when the groundwater level is lower than the ground surface.
Since the groundwater seen at Devil's Hole flows beneath NTS, and since NTS detonated many nuclear devices in the subsurface, groundwater exiting at Devil's Hole may one day show radiation contamination. Groundwater in this vicinity is moving very slowly, and the groundwater beneath NTS may not be directly interconnected with the carbonate aquifer, so there are a lot of questions for which I don't have answers. The springs further west or southwest of Devil's Hole are used for irrigation.
Also, I think there are pupfish in Devil's Hole that indicate this spring existed when annual rainfall amounts were much higher than today, and shallow lakes existed in many of the Death Valley region's lowlands.
- Re: Drown Jerry K. 12:56:52 01/09/04
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