Hydrologic Evidence for an Old Earth

Hmmm. But we have some places - Ouargla, Algeria, for one - where there are fresh water aquifers below salt water ones. There's a recharged aquifer there that gets its water from the Atlas Mountains several hundred miles to the northwest. It's about two miles deep at Ouargla. A mismanaged well to down below that fresh water has resulted in an uncontrolled flow (it could possibly have been fixed in the last fifteen years...) up to surface. To get to surface, though, it had to flow up through a minor oil zone with salty water and through massive beds of solid salt from the evaporation of seawater. And above that salt are a couple of thousand feet of sediment. The water from below dissolves the salt and causes the rock to cave in.Then the hot salty water fills up the sinkhole it's made and leaks off into the near-surface fresh water aquifer. The salt zone was threatening the city of Ouargla's water supply and existance when I worked on a project to block the flow off back about 1990.How do we get fresh Floode water below salty Floode water below salt from evaporated salty Floode water below fresh? Sounds like a pretty busy 150 days, Faith.And, for another thread someday, if the Floode was fresh water, how come we still have jellyfish and corals and all that other sealife that dies when it's put in fresh water?

He's talking about the same thing that makes oil drips from your car disappear into the driveway: concrete and many kinds of rock have tiny pores between the grains that make up the fabric of the rock. These rocks have a property - "permeability" in the oilfield biz but maybe "conductivity" in the water-well biz - that is a measure of how much fluid will seep through the rock at some given pressure difference.In a recharging aquifer, rainwater and snowmelt could pond/puddle up, say, in the mountains in Colorado on top of an outcrop of permeable rock. The slight pressure from that puddle forces some of the water into the rock. Gravity pulls it down to the plains near Lubbock, Texas, where farmers pump it out io irrigate their cotton. But they suck that 100,000 year old water out faster than the sandstone can resupply it from that far away, so they are always drilling deeper wells to get to the water in the very bottom of the sandstone layer. Old water, still.Oh, by the way: your driveway is about as permeable to oil as a typical oil reservoir rock. Edited by Coragyps, : No reason given.

Yes. Essentially all underground water is in the rock itself: caves with pools or srreams exist, all right, but account for a minute fraction of groundwater.

Sure. I wish I remembered what age the aquifer ones in Algeria were - but they're pretty old to be 10,000 feet deep. The outcrop in the Atlas Mts. is there because that portion was bent up and eroded off to expose an "edge" of the originally horizontal beds.The Oglala rock out here at Lubbock is only 5,000,000 years old or so, though. Just a baby.

Most sedimentary rock - almost all, I guess - had its pores full of water when it was laid down and lost a lot of that water as it compacted and became solid (for that majority of rock that solidified after deposition.) Now it is likely that the particular water that's in a rock today isn't the water that started out there. Most formations have probably had some flow through them at one time or another in their past. I'm quite confident that my aquifer in Algeria started full of (perhaps altered) seawater and didn't swap out for fresh until its edge got exposed to a fresh source, for instance.

White dwarf star matter, perhaps. Or neutron star matter. Though it does need to be pointed out that the iridium in meteorites isn't at all pure - probably alloyed with nickel-iron or in the form of chemical compounds. But still heavy.You're still digging yourself a mighty deep hole here, Faith.

OK. We got yer Darcy's Law, but I don't know if I can remember the sucker.....but thanks to this Intarweb, I need not:
Q = KA (h1-h2)/L
and
example : from Darcy's law10.5 meters a year is a mile every 150 years. And it's a ways from Colorado Springs to Lubbock.

Faith: post 90, this thread, is asking for your attention.

Not so often out in nature - though it might happen occasionally in a situation like yours where there's exposed rock at the bottom of a cliff/mountain and a column of water clear to the top. Confined rocks get fractured a lot in the oil industry just by water pressure, but the pressures used are a bit higher: they pump into the rock at 3000 (or 10,000+) psi, depending on the depth and type of rock, to make fractures for oil to travel through. And they fill the fractures with sand to keep them from "healing."

Yup. But that pressure is equally applied to all sides of the rock - including any pore space it has - so there's no fracturing. There's not even any flow in that rock unless there's some other cause for a pressure gradient in it - like a hot area or a difference in water density due to salinity.

There are some "aquifers," like those near Mexicali, Mexico, that have steam in them instead of water. Similar zones up near Brawley, California have 650-degree water, kept liquid by the pressure, instead. These are all in closed aquifers so that the pressure is trapped (or was until Unocal drilled wells to exploit the energy). That whole area is right on a rift zone and the Earth's crust is very thin - the wells at Brawley aren't even two miles deep.

What sorts of cataclysmic events would change the permeability of a sandstone from 100 darcies to 0.01 darcy? What sort of cataclysmic events would instantly swap salt water for fresh or vice versa in the pores of a 100-mile-wide sheet of sandstone? Help us out here, Faith: what can this Floode do? Anything at all that you want it to?

So the salty underground reservoirs, like most petroleum reservoirs, got their seawater-like brines from where, exactly? I'm guessing that ten or fifty times as much subsurface water is salty than is fresh. How did it get there from a fresh-water ocean?