United States: An Underground Water Reservoir of 81 Billion Cubic Meters Discovered in the Mountains and Volcanoes of Oregon

A little over 32 cubic kilometers: that’s the amount of water contained in Lake Mead, an artificial reservoir created from the Colorado River, straddling Nevada and Arizona in the United States. This quantity is colossal – for comparison, Lake Annecy holds approximately 1.22 cubic kilometers of water, which is 1.2 billion cubic meters of this precious liquid.

Colossal and vital for a part of the United States that it irrigates – serving 20 million people and vast agricultural lands – but variable: while its levels have returned to a less alarming volume for the lives that depend on it, as explained by Newsweek, they had dropped dangerously low in 2022.

American aquifers, whether natural or artificial, are therefore crucial for this water-thirsty nation. This is why the announcement of a discovery by scientists in the Cascade Range, between Oregon and Washington, in the northwest of the United States, is so significant. This reserve could be the largest of its kind in the world.

As reported by Live Science and Phys.org, researchers have not only searched but have found, deep within the Cascade Mountains, what is described in an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) as a water reserve of “continental proportions.”

The Cascade Range, as explained by Wikipedia, does not only cover part of Oregon and Washington but also extends beyond the Canadian border into British Columbia, and is the result of ancient volcanic processes – the infamous Mount St. Helens, whose catastrophic eruption in 1980 is still memorable, and Mount Rainier are two of its highest peaks.

It is precisely in some of these rocky summits that scientists have discovered a potentially phenomenal amount of water. “It’s a lake of continental proportions, stored in the rocks at the top of the mountains, like a giant water tower,” explains Leif Karlstrom from the University of Oregon in a statement. “The existence of similar volcanic aquifers north of the Columbia Gorge and near Mount Shasta likely makes the Cascade Range the largest aquifer of its type in the world.”

According to calculations revealed by the study, this volcanic aquifer of immense proportions could represent a total of 81 cubic kilometers of water, or 81 billion cubic meters of this vital liquid – more than twice what Lake Mead contains.

Although these two reservoirs – one natural and hard to access, the other artificial and designed for human needs – are not directly comparable, the discovery of the Cascade aquifer could mark a turning point in water management in this part of North America.

However, scientists warn: this giant aquifer could potentially meet human needs, but it’s important to remember that drilling into active volcanoes inevitably carries some risks.

The volumes of water were discovered precisely because the rock in contact with them is cooler than what is usually found at such depths. But if this liquid were to come into contact with the magma flowing in the hearts of some of these mountains and volcanoes, the reaction could be explosive, profoundly altering the geological landscape.

“Geological treasure has been bestowed upon this region, but we are just beginning to understand it,” explains Gordon Grant, a hydrologist for the U.S. Forest Service. “If there is no snowfall, or if we experience a bad series of winters without rain, what will happen? These are the questions we now need to focus on.”