GROUND-WATER INVESTIGATIONS IN THE 
UNITED STATES! 
By A. N. Sayre 
Geologist in Charge, Ground Water Branch 
Water Resources Division, U. S. Geological Survey 
Before discussing ground-water investigations in the United States 
I should like to outline briefly the broad problems of water supply, 
water control, and conservation, in the solution of which ground- 
water investigations play an important part. 
For mere existence, a man requires only about 2 quarts of water 
per day. However, even in simple pastoral or agricultural settings, 
the biological necessity represents only a part of the total needs for 
water, and in our own complex industrial and agricultural economy 
great quantities of water are needed for a multitude of purposes. 
Water is needed for sanitation, for washing clothes, for facilitating 
sewage disposal, for scrubbing floors, and for processing foods. It is 
needed for fire protection, for generating power, and for industrial 
processes, for irrigation, for air conditioning, and even for producing 
atomic energy. The task of providing water at the right time and 
place is a serious problem which fully occupies the attention of 
thousands of engineers and chemists and a smaller number of geolo- 
gists. Intimately associated with the water-supply problem is the 
problem of controlling floods to minimize the erosion of our soils and to 
conserve floodwater for beneficial uses. For obvious reasons, many 
of our agricultural, industrial, and urban developments have taken 
place along waterways where they are vulnerable to the ravages 
of floods which appear to become more costly almost year by year. 
There is good reason to believe that the demand for water supply will 
continue to increase and that the demand for control and conservation 
of floodwaters will also increase. Projects for accomplishing these 
ends will become more expensive and their planning and design will 
require greater knowledge of our water resources and of the basic 
geologic and hydrologic factors affecting them. 
1 Presented at the joint meeting of the Society of Economic Geologists and Geological Society of America, 
Ottawa, Canada, December 1947. Reprinted by permission from Economic Geology, vol. 43, No.7, Novem- 
ber 1948. 
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