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Why dowsing makes perfect sense

By Michael Brooks

29 July 2009

No water here, but is there any science?

(Image: Colin Gray/Getty)

Last week, I went dowsing. Also known as divining, this is the ancient practice of holding twigs or metal rods that are supposed to move in response to hidden objects. It is often used to look for water, and farmers in California have been known to ask dowsers to find ways to irrigate their land .

Yet despite many anecdotal reports of success, dowsing has never been shown to work in controlled scientific tests. That’s not to say the dowsing rods don’t move. They do.

The scientific explanation for what happens when people dowse is that “ ideomotor movements ” – muscle movements caused by subconscious mental activity – make anything held in the hands move. It looks and feels as if the movements are involuntary. The same phenomenon has been shown to lie behind movements of objects on a Ouija board.

Meet the dowser

I knew all this when I went to meet John Baker , who is supervising a dowsing workshop at Sissinghurst castle in Kent, UK, tomorrow. What I didn’t realise is just how hard it is to believe the science.

Baker specialises in dowsing for hidden archaeological structures. By the time I had finished my couple of hours with him, my scepticism about dowsing was getting shaky.

When I arrived, Baker was standing in front of an array of blue flags he had planted in a grassy area in the castle grounds. The flags marked out something his rods had revealed: the outline of a long-forgotten building. Baker held his L-shaped dowsing rods like a pair of six-shooters and walked back and forth across the lines. As he “entered” the building, the rods swung across his body. When he exited, they uncrossed.

At this point, I was neither impressed nor surprised. He could see the line of flags, and he knew what he expected to happen. It would only take a small unconscious movement of his hands to make the rods cross, I thought. What would be impressive and surprising is if the rods crossed when I tried it.

So I had a few goes. Nothing happened. Baker looked untroubled, but I had begun to feel that I was wasting my time.

Baker suggested I try to relax, shake out my shoulders, and maybe visualise something to do with buildings, since that was what I was dowsing for. I did – and it worked.

First the rods started to feel “jumpy” in my hands. Though they didn’t cross as I walked forward, they felt as if they might want to. So I tried it again. Eventually, they crossed every time I “entered” the building. They even uncrossed at the other side.

I have to confess, however much I might be able to rationalise what was happening, my newfound ability freaked me out a little.

So what happened? Baker’s explanation is that by relaxing, and suppressing all my rationalisations, I allowed my brain to tune into a kind of “energy” associated with the buried structure. I think there’s a simpler explanation.

Subtle illusion

I was frustrated when nothing happened, and stimulated (and amused) when something did. It seems that a part of me wanted it to work. In other words, the atmosphere was the perfect set-up for the ideomotor effect to kick in and move the rods.

Scientifically minded sceptics often express deep dismay at the credulousness of people who believe in dowsing , extrasensory perception and other “inexplicable” phenomena. They should not be so harsh. The illusions that make them seem plausible are astonishingly subtle and powerful.

It is only human to attribute such observations to something beyond the normal senses . Even if science is your thing, a brief immersion in the world of the “unexplained” can be enough to inject a little doubt.

A final confession: I am still slightly disappointed that the scientific explanation stands up so well. I had a great time with Baker at Sissinghurst, and I’m sure tomorrow’s apprentice dowsers will too.

We take a perverse pleasure in things that confound our senses, which is why conjuring tricks are delightful and science can seem a killjoy. The physicist Richard Feynman once said that science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. What he didn’t say was just how much fun fooling yourself can be.

Michael Brooks is the author of 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense (Profile/Doubleday)

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Desperate times call for desperate measures, I suppose. Although we live in a world driven by technology, we are always one cataclysm away from retreating to magical notions. Climate change is making droughts worse , which will increase the value of water moving forward. An ancient pseudoscience is poised to make a resurgence in these desperate times.

It's been called water witching, radiesthesia, divination or, simply, dowsing. It consists in finding objects, traditionally water, that cannot be detected by our five senses. In a typical write-up, the Boston Globe last fall reported on the increased use of water witching in Massachusetts amid historic droughts . The article sandwiches scientific facts in between anecdotal reports of the “I don’t know how it works but it did” variety. The reader will be left with the impression that if they are ever thirsty for a new source of water on their land, calling upon a dowser would make perfect sense.

But divination is not limited to finding water. Its services are offered to find oil, buried objects, lost vessels at sea, missing persons, archaeological artefacts, buried pipes, and food impurities. Basically, move over Saint Anthony: we have ourselves a new patron saint for lost objects. The French priest who, in 1927, gave dowsing the scientific sounding name “radiesthesia” (which means to sense with a rod) claimed he could identify specific microbes in a test tube as accurately as a microbiologist using a microscope . He could also find intact shells buried in the ground during the Great War and somehow tell if they were German, French, or Austrian.

Dowsing is traditionally done with the help of a device the movements of which are said to be influenced not by its holder but rather by… something else. This mysterious mover is claimed by different practitioners to be water energy, earth energy, even spirit guides. One of the best-known dowsers in the world, Leroy Bull, says he is guided by a translucent deer, a diaphanous woman, and a Russian agent of the angel of death . The Canadian Society of Dowsers is more circumspect : “I wish I could give you a rational explanation for dowsing. But to date, there is no explanation, scientific or otherwise, as to how dowsing works. There are just theories.”

Dowsers use a pendulum, or a Y-shaped rod, or two L-shaped rods that rotate above the handles, and it is the movement of these devices that gets interpreted as “yes” or “no” by the water witcher. Is there water underneath my feet, they might ask? The L-shaped rods, one held in each hand, will cross into an “X” shape if the answer is yes. Is it deeper than a hundred feet? The Y-shaped rod will start pointing to the ground to say yes. Is it deeper than two hundred feet? The pendulum will swing left to right to indicate no.

By now, it should be obvious that dowsing is not scientific. Nothing in our current understanding of the laws of physics could allow for such a phenomenon by which the mere presence of something hidden is communicated to a held object, irrespective of the material composition of the artefact and the detector. The closest scientific leap one can make is to the metal detector. Such an apparatus works not because it communicates with alleged spirit guides but because of the electromagnetic properties of metals. Similarly, de-mining efforts can capitalize on the metallic composition of some mines as well as to the smells of the explosives themselves, which is why trained animals such as dogs can also be used in these situations. But can underground water affect the movement of metallic rods?

The claims, already dubious, are stretched even further when one learns of map and information dowsing as alternatives to divination in the field. This involves gathering information about a piece of land potentially miles away using a map proxy. And information dowsing? Think Ouija board. You ask any question to your pendulum and it answers back. Don’t believe me? An article once published by the American Society of Dowsers, since deleted , claims you can divine your workout schedule this way. The author writes that they ask their pendulum the following questions: should I exercise for fewer than 90 minutes today? should I work out for fewer than 60 minutes? should I not work out today? The author also reminds us about “dowsing your supplements and dowsing your protein intake for maximum muscle gains.” Why hire a professional when you can rely on the movements of a pendulum?

Just a bit of harmless naïveté, one might say, but what if dowsing was promoted in healthcare? It appears that some dowsers, not content with divining for water, can now treat ADHD ! Meanwhile, the Canadian Society of Dowsers seemingly endorses dowsing for healing , drawing connections between divination and pre-scientific notions of qi and prana and the esoteric art of healing known as Reiki. If you’re ready to believe that swinging a pendulum over a map can find a missing person, it’s a tiny sidestep into thinking it might just cure disease.

But pulling back from these ridiculous claims for a bit and putting aside the question of just how it would work, does the basic practice of dowsing for water work?

This is where we need to visit a barn.

“A misuse of public funds”

They are often known as the Scheunen experiments .

Done over the course of two years in the mid-1980s and to the tune of a quarter of a million American dollars (invested by the German government), the experiment tested 500 dowsers in a barn outside of Munich. Many dowsers believe that what their rods or pendulums are picking up on is a form of radiation, and this radiation could be harmful to our health. Thus, the German government wanted to prove that dowsing was real so that these dowsers might be useful in better understanding this type of radiation. How they went about testing these dowsers is fascinating. It involves a two-story barn.

On the ground floor of the barn (or Scheune in German), imagine a 10-metre line on which a wagon can ride back and forth. On the wagon rests a short pipe hooked up on both sides to a hose. From above, this would look like a cross made up of the 10-metre line and the hose. The idea is to move the wagon to a random point along this line and to turn on the water, which will start flowing through the pipe. Of course, if the dowser is on this floor, they will know where the flowing water is, which is why the dowsers were instead taken to the second floor of the barn.

On this top floor, the 10-metre line is duplicated. The wagon below is moved to an unknown location along its line. Water starts flowing. On the floor above, the dowser must use their skill to figure out exactly where the wagon is along the line.

This set-up was further cheatproofed by being inspected by a professional magician beforehand and by having the position of the wagon in each test be randomly picked by a computer on the spot. These trials were also double-blinded: neither the dowser nor the researcher standing next to them knew where the wagon was during the trial. Even so, there were issues that could have helped dowsers along, such as the possibility that the sound of water turbulence coming from the floor below could have been picked up by the dowser. But this would only have helped the dowsers look more proficient than they were, and since dowsers have often explained their duds by the nearby presence of skeptics, the fact that both the German government investing in the Scheunen trials and the experimenters in charge of them professed a belief in water witching meant that dowsing was primed to prove itself once and for all.

But it didn’t. In the much looser early trials, which were not even double blinded, 457 of the 500 dowsers were eliminated since they did no better than chance at finding where the wagon with the running water was. That’s a little over 91% of the test subjects. The remaining 43 dowsers were submitted to a total of 843 single tests inside the barn. They would come back on separate days and try it again, and their predictions as to the location of the water running through the pipe was recorded, as was the actual location of the wagon. When you plot this data , you see that the totality of the guesses made by the lucky 43 over the course of their 843 tests is a random mess. Six dowsers did really well in one series of tests, but when they were brought back for another series, they did no better than chance. Given the number of trials performed and of individuals tested, some of these dowsers were bound to do well in one test by chance alone. They could not, however, reproduce their results.

The Americans were smarter than the Germans: their Geological Survey had already concluded in 1917 that further testing of dowsing “… would be a misuse of public funds.”

I can already hear the protests from people who have first-hand experience of dowsing successfully finding underground water. The answer is that, in a manner of speaking, dowsing does work.

Lessons from the past

That same U.S. Geological Survey which had declared dowsing a relic of the past a century ago has, on its website , a very prosaic explanation for the success many people have bringing dowsers onto their land to help them find the perfect spot for a well. “In a region of adequate rainfall and favorable geology,” the website states, “it is difficult not to drill and find water!” Therefore, dowsing will help you find water, but so will avoiding the services of a dowser.

As to how a dowser’s rods or pendulums behave as if responding to external forces, the answer here is also simple: the ideomotor effect. In short, suggestions and expectations can trigger muscle movements which bypass our will. Thus, while we are responsible for these twitches, it feels as if we are not. It’s the same effect at work when playing Ouija and resting our fingers on its planchette: our desire for answers triggers minuscule muscle contractions in our fingers which are not willed by the executive centre of our brain. Thus moveth the planchette. Thus moveth the rod. We have known about this for two hundred years. Small, driving movements of the body and arm are enough to produce fairly large pendulum motion . You don’t need to be a grifter for your pendulum to find water; self-deception is enough.

Belief in dowsing may seem innocuous but it has actually claimed lives. In 2010, BBC Newsnight reported on a number of deaths related to the use of a bomb detector exported out of Great Britain and into countries such as Iraq, Thailand, and Kenya. When one of these so-called bomb-detecting wands was disassembled, it was shown to be an empty plastic casing. No functioning electronics were present; rather, it was a plastic handle with a metallic rod that could swing left to right. It was essentially a dowsing rod, primitive and utterly useless. People died because such an instrument failed to detect roadside bombs.

Now, with global warming, dowsing is bound to attract the attention of people trying to survive droughts. The modern skeptical movement cut its teeth on this sort of paranormal thinking, from dowsing to alien visitations to the Satanic panic of the 1980s. These topics may seem quaint by today’s standards, when pseudoscience has become more refined and harder to debunk, but we should not forget the lessons we have learned from these skeptics. The Satanic panic has been transubstantiated into the Save the Children campaign of QAnon. UFO conspiracy theories have infected the brains of extremely popular, so-called public intellectuals . And dowsing? A village in France is training people in water witching, calling it “a growth sector with a bright future,” and both the Canadian city of Ottawa and at least ten UK water companies have been reported as making use of these divination services.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it… and waste their money in the process.

Take-home message: - Dowsing is a debunked technique for searching for underground water or other things using the motion of a held object, like a stick or pendulum - The movements of the held object are actually created by tiny, subconscious movements - Despite the fact that dowsing has been shown time and time again not to work, dowsers continue to be employed, most recently to help find water following climate-change-related droughts

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The Magic of Dowsing Keeps Holding On

In West Texas, a century of scientific debunking hasn’t convinced well-drillers to give up old beliefs.

FAR WEST TEXAS —Before Jeff Boyd became the city of Marfa’s public-works director, he had a long career underwater. As a commercial saturation diver, one of the most specialized kinds of divers around, he would spend his days some 400 feet below the surface, breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen, for month-long stretches. Normal air would kill at that depth.

It was around that time, when he worked at offshore drill rigs along the Gulf of Mexico and the Bay of Campeche, a job for which he was regularly tasked with locating underwater pipelines, that he discovered he was a water witch. He calls it a gift.

Boyd, who has a Hulk Hogan handlebar mustache and liquid-blue eyes, might have grown up in the West Texas desert, but he always felt comfortable in and around water. His office is located beneath the town water tower, an Instagrammable silver beacon with Marfa painted on its side that rises above the hip, touristy town. As public-works director, he is in charge of maintaining and improving the city’s water supply and distribution, and often has to find existing underground pipelines. That’s where his sorcery comes in handy.

He even has a wand, of sorts. The handle looks like the notched grip of a ski pole, from which extends a retractable antenna—the kind you might find on an old portable radio—that swivels around and around on a ball hinge. The tool has a fancy name, “the magnetomatic pipe locator,” and is available for purchase for $38.50 online.

In reality, it’s just a tricked out version of a divining rod—typically a Y-shaped twig or bent metal wire used to witch for water. Dowsing, or water witching, is a centuries-old practice in which a person walks with a divining rod in hand until it moves due to unseen forces, indicating a source of water underground. For some, the rod bends downward. For others, it makes more of a bobbing motion. Boyd’s magnetomatic pipe locator likes to swing sideways.

Read: How evolution’s innovations can help scientists yank water out of the air

If this all sounds a little hokey, you’re not the first to think so. The practice of water witching has been debunked time and time again. More surprising is the number of people who credit it—you’d be hard-pressed to find a single well-drilling operation in the Southwest that doesn’t believe in and use water witching. This has been going on long enough that in 1917 the U.S. Department of the Interior, in cooperation with the U.S. Geological Survey, issued an official, book-length report to expose its baseless science.

In the report, written by the geologist Arthur J. Ellis, you can hear the raw frustration in Ellis’s prose as he tries, once and for all, to put the matter to bed.

“It is difficult to see how for practical purposes the entire matter could be more thoroughly discredited, and it should be obvious to everyone that further tests by the U.S. Geological Survey of this so-called ‘witching’ for water, oil, or other minerals would be a misuse of public funds,” Ellis wrote in his introductory note.

Ellis’s report traces the origins of water witching to German miners in the Harz mountains who used divining rods to find veins underground that might contain ore, though others claim the practice is as old as the Scythian and ancient-Persian empires. From the Germans, Ellis wrote, the delusion spread across Europe. Eventually, people would use the rods to locate water and minerals, among other things: grave sites, treasure, even murderers. In the 17th century, a French peasant used a divining rod to accuse a man of murder (he confessed), and later to hunt down other alleged murderers belonging to a persecuted ethno-religious minority, who were executed when found.

Ellis’s report, available for 10 cents at the time, was meant to be distributed, and its message disseminated. Yet, more than a century later, the custom of water witching has endured. And almost everyone has a story to tell.

One West Texan told me that his brother, a water witch, can’t wear watches, because they always break, thanks to his body’s internal magnetism. Another person told me that she’d been looking for years for a viable well on her land, and at her wits’ end she paid $75 to a water witch, who found one against the odds.

Walter Skinner, the owner of Skinner’s Drilling and Well Service in the neighboring town of Alpine, keeps several spare copper wires in his car just in case. He told me that when he was a young man, a water witch laid a hand on his shoulder and passed on his power. From that day forth, Skinner possessed the ability to witch, too.

The geologist Jeff Bennett may be the only man in Texas who doesn’t believe in water witching, and he’s well aware of his minority status. He worked as a physical scientist in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas on a variety of government-backed well-drilling projects and never met a driller who didn’t want to “witch it.”

Read: California’s underground water war

Bennett makes a compelling argument. You can drill a hole just about anywhere, and if you mine deep enough, you will most likely find water; the chances are ever in the dowser’s favor. “The question is: Is it the easiest water? Is it the most water? Is it the best place to drill?” he says.

Bennett prefers to rely on regular old science instead, looking at the geological features of the landscape—such as clefts and fault lines—that paint a picture of what might lie beneath. Of water witching, he says, “It’s just guessing. And sometimes they’re good guesses. Sometimes they’re not.”

“So, why do you think so many people believe it?” I asked him.

“Everyone loves to believe in magic,” he said.

In the desert Southwest, there is something magical about water, a resource in short supply that has become scarcer with the rapid depletion of critical sources such as the Rio Grande. The late-summer monsoon season brings a boon of storms that build all day and crash through by late afternoon, saturating the once-arid landscape. The flora and fauna are thankful for it; the cacti bloom impetuously and insects emerge from their underground lairs. For the rest of us, there’s nothing much to do but stand by the screen door and stare in stunned silence.

Outside his office, Boyd hands me the magnetomatic pipe locator. He points to two metal caps protruding from the ground—valves off a 10-inch water line that runs beneath the dirt. I walk toward the invisible line, and deliberately slow my pace as I near the valves. The metal antenna slowly keels around when I reach the line, and I can’t tell if I willed it that way.

“I couldn’t tell you how it works,” Boyd says, “I just know that it does.”

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Water witches have been around — and by around, we mean around the world, from Australia and India to Europe and the Americas to many, many other places — for at least five centuries. So just in terms of simple longevity, you have to give it up to the witches . But does that endurance mean dowsing is real?

When it comes to water witches — also known as dowsers, diviners, doodlebuggers and various other names — we're faced with two distinct possibilities. One, they're either really good, and have been for a long time, at pulling a fast one on desperate landowners looking for groundwater .

Or, two, they actually know what they're doing and they're not pulling a fast one at all.

"There's been at least some research testing the dowsers' skill," over the years, says Todd Jarvis , the director of the Institute for Water & Watersheds at Oregon State University, a one-time dowser and member of the American Society of Dowsers , and a practicing hydrogeologist . "And for every study that says there's nothing to it, there's a study that says there's something to it."

What's a Water Witch?

Science vs. water witching, the purported value of dowsing.

You may have seen the water witch in popular culture. Divining rod in front , wandering arid land until, somewhat magically and often with the hint of help from some otherworldly power, the witch and the wand divine a spot in the dirt where life-giving water, at some depth underground, waits to be liberated.

It may sound like some rather hokey hocus-pocus, or something from, say, 500 years ago. But by one estimate, some 60,000 water dowsers are practicing in America today. That's almost 10 times the number of hydrologists, who provide many of the same services as witches, substituting science for dowsing rods.

Not all water witches use the forked branch of a tree these days, of course. Many dowsers locate the underground water based on movement of divining rods. Copper rods and pendulums are popular tools of the trade. Smartly contorted wire coat hangers might do the trick. Shovels. Pitchforks. Glass beads. A crowbar. These are simply channels for the power.

And not all dowsers go about their groundwater search the same way. Some actually incorporate science into their divining; they look at the topography of the land, the geology . They use maps. They may even have an understanding of local aquifers. They make drawings. Do tests.

All rely on some kind of unseen, perhaps divine, intervention to suss out the water . It's an innate ability, a "sense" or "intuition." Sometimes it's simple and quiet. Sometimes it's more theatrical. "You can see some of these folks performing on YouTube," Jarvis says. "Their bodies go into all sorts of contortions."

The thing is, water witches are often right. Or close enough to right.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) has long had to field questions about the viability of dowsers and their claims. Yet even the USGS admits that dowsers — water witches, whatever — can find water. How? From the USGS :

All this pointing and "feeling" has led to real tension between scientists and dowsers. Some of it, undoubtedly, flows from the fact that the witches indeed have a measure of success in locating underground water, which has led many landowners in search of water to call on dowsers in place of, or in addition to, scientists.

The scientists push back.

"To locate ground water accurately ... as to depth, quantity and quality, a number of techniques must be used. Hydrologic, geologic, and geophysical knowledge is needed to determine the depths and extent of the different water-bearing strata and the quantity and quality of water found in each. The area must be thoroughly tested and studied to determine these facts," the USGS says .

"Compared to dowsing," Timothy Parker, a California groundwater management consultant and hydrogeologist, told The New York Times , "which is a person with a stick."

The USGS and others suggest that the added expense of calling in water witches, though reportedly less than a certified scientist , is simply not worth it.

If dowsing is a waste of money, why does it remain so popular?

For his part, Jarvis maintains that geologists and other scientists (including hydrologists) are more adept at finding the water. But witches, he says, are more trusted by farmers and other landowners.

Jarvis regularly lectures on water witching (a recent webinar conducted for the American Water Resources Association was entitled, " Finding Water the Ol' Timey Way ") and has some firsthand knowledge of it.

Early on in his more-than-30-year career, he regularly encountered dowsers — he still does — and, after joining the American Society of Dowsers (ASD), someone found his name on a list of dowsers and, much to his surprise, asked him to come witch a well . So he did.

After getting the lay of the land, he picked a spot. It turned out OK. Still, "it didn't make any sense to me as a geologist," he says.

Despite the head-butting between Old World and new science, Jarvis now is rather neutral about the idea of dowsing and water witching. He's never surprised when someone finds underground water through nonscientific methods — again, there's a lot of groundwater out there — but he says that the act of striking water, of bringing it to the surface, remains "magical."

"I look at it this way," Jarvis says. "They have a 400-year jump on us [dowsers versus hydrologists and hydrogeologists]. To me, it's part of the folklore. It's easy to dismiss it. But if you do, you dismiss that folklore. You dismiss a part of your history."

Often drought-stricken California has the largest assemblage of dowsers, according to the ASD, making up at least a half-dozen chapters in the state . Overall, the organization boasts 2,000 active members.

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Water divining (1)

• Reference work entry
• First Online: 01 January 2016
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• Rhodes W. Fairbridge ,
• Arthur J. Askew ,
• R. W. Herschy ,
• Robert M. Hordon ,
• Robert A. Muller ,
• John M. Grymes III ,
• R. W. Herschy &
• F. C. Brassington  

Part of the book series: Encyclopedia of Earth Science ((EESS))

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Water divining (or dowsing), known in the USA as water witching, is a mystical, non scientific technique which exponents claim enables them to locate auspicious places to construct new wells. Dowsing is also used as a wider term referring to the application of these methods to locate any mineral including oil, gold and metal ores, or buried objects such as pipes, and even missing persons or the bodies of murder victims. Water divining is found in some form in all countries.

The most commonly used technique in water divining ( Ellis, 1917 ; Todd, 1980 ; Randi, 1991 ) involves holding a forked stick (hazel and willow being the most favored) which is gripped by the two forks with the elbows held to the sides, and with the bottom end of the stick pointing away from the body. The dowser then walks over the local area until the end of the stick is twisted downwards, which the dowser interprets as indicating the presence of groundwater. Another popular method uses two metal rods of copper or...

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Bibliography

Brassington, R., 1995. Finding Water, 2nd edn. John Wiley and Sons, Chichester, 271 pp.

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Ellis, A.J., 1917. The divining rod–a history of water witching. US Geological Survey Water Supply Paper 416, 59 pp.

Lehr, J.H., 1985. Tolerence of water witching rhetoric is reprehensible. Well Water Journal, June, 8–11.

Price, M., 1985. Introducing Groundwater. George Allen & Unwin, London, 195 pp.

Randi, J., 1991. James Randi: Psychic Investigator, Boxtree Ltd, London, 159 pp.

Todd, D.K., 1980. Groundwater Hydrology, 2nd edn. John Wiley and Sons. New York, 535 pp.

Vogt, E.Z. and R. Hyman, 1959. Water Witching USA.University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 248 pp.

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Groundwater ; Water Divining (2)

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Fairbridge, R.W. et al. (1998). Water divining (1). In: Herschy, R.W., Fairbridge, R.W. (eds) Encyclopedia of Hydrology and Water Resources. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4497-7_238

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Dowsing: The Pseudoscience of Water Witching

Dowsing is an unexplained process in which people use a forked twig or wire to find missing and hidden objects. Dowsing, also known as divining and doodlebugging, is often used to search for water or missing jewelry, but it is also often employed in other applications including ghost hunting, crop circles and fortunetelling.

The dowsing that most people are familiar with is water dowsing, or water witching or rhabdomancy, in which a person holds a Y-shaped branch (or two L-shaped wire rods) and walks around until they feel a pull on the branch, or the wire rods cross, at which point water is allegedly below. Sometimes a pendulum is used held over a map until it swings (or stops swinging) over a spot where the desired object may be found. Dowsing is said to find anything and everything, including missing persons, buried pipes, oil deposits and even archaeological ruins.

They got it wrong

Part of the reason for dowsing's longevity is its versatility in the New Age and paranormal worlds. According to many books and dowsing experts, the practice has a robust history and its success has been known for centuries. For example in the book "Divining the Future: Prognostication From Astrology to Zoomancy," Eva Shaw writes, "In 1556, 'De Re Metallica,' a book on metallurgy and mining written by George [sic] Agricola, discussed dowsing as an acceptable method of locating rich mineral sources." This reference to 'De Re Metallica' is widely cited among dowsers as proof of its validity, though there are two problems.

The first is that the argument is a transparent example of a logical fallacy called the "appeal to tradition" ("it must work because people have done it for centuries"); just because a practice has endured for hundreds of years does not mean it is valid. For nearly 2,000 years, for example, physicians practiced bloodletting, believing that balancing non-existent bodily humors would restore health to sick patients.

Furthermore, it seems that the dowsing advocates didn't actually read the book because it says exactly the opposite of what they claim: Instead of endorsing dowsing, Agricola states that those seeking minerals "should not make use of an enchanted twig, because if he is prudent and skilled in the natural signs, he understands that a forked stick is of no use to him."

If dowsing could be proven to work, what could the mechanism be? How could a twig or two metal wires know what the dowser is looking for (water, money, minerals, a lost item, etc.), much less where it could be found? The proposed mechanisms are as varied as the dowsers themselves. Some sources claim that strong psychic energy is radiated by the object and detected by the dowser; others believe that ghosts , spirits or mysterious Earth energies direct the dowser to their targets.

Dowsing: No better than chance

Skeptic James Randi in his "Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural," notes that dowsers often cannot agree on even the basics of their profession: "Some instructions tell learners never to try dowsing with rubber footwear, while others insist that it helps immeasurably. Some practitioners say that when divining rods cross, that specifically indicates water; others say that water makes the rods diverge to 180 degrees."

Though some people swear by dowsing's effectiveness, dowsers have been subjected to many tests over the years and have performed no better than chance under controlled conditions. It's not surprising that water can often be found with dowsing rods, since if you dig deep enough you'll find water just about anywhere. If missing objects (and even missing people) could be reliably and accurately located using dowsing techniques, it would be a great benefit: If you lose your keys or cell phone, you should be able to just pull out your pendulum and find it; if a person goes missing or is abducted, police should be able to locate them with dowsing rods.

Science differs from the New Age and paranormal belief in that it progresses, correcting and building on itself. Technology and medicine are continually advancing and refining. Designs and techniques are improved or abandoned depending on how well they work. By contrast, dowsers have not gotten any more accurate over centuries and millennia of practice.

Benjamin Radford is deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine and author of six books including Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries. His Web site is www.BenjaminRadford.com .

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Water diviners say the practice is growing in popularity, yet even they don't know how it works

By Lucy Cooper

Topic: Water

Roman Dubinchak still gets excited when he finds water.

"Every day when you strike water it's a great feeling because you know you're changing someone's life to a degree, giving them a resource that they can fall back on for the rest of their life," he said.

Mr Dubinchak owns a drilling company in Townsville, north Queensland, and offers water divining, a practice dating to the 1500s, as a service to his rural clients.

"I find divining and picking locations prior to drilling is critical to minimise the chances of drilling dry holes," he said.

What is water divining?

Using metal rods, sticks, or a forked branch, water diviners will walk around waiting for their chosen tool to give a signal.

For metal rods, the place at which they begin to move apart or over each other signals to a diviner that an underground water source is below them.

There's no scientific evidence that water divining, also known as water dowsing, works.

Even Mr Dubinchak struggles to find an answer.

"I think divining has something to do with energies in our bodies," he said.

"Similar to how birds know which way to fly to migrate, there is something that's hard to explain within us that you can visually display with a wire."

Mr Dubinchak relocated to North Queensland due to the high demand for drilling and water-bore services. ( ABC Rural: Lucy Cooper )

Hobby farmer Steve McAndrew also practises water divining.

"I walk around with these rods and they start doing funny things," Mr McAndrew said.

"They will either cross or part and I mark the ground and see if I am looking at a stream or a basin of water," he said.

Steve McAndrew learnt about water divining from his grandfather. ( ABC Rural: Lucy Cooper )

Divining on his property at Rollingstone, north of Townsville, Mr McAndrew has found water, but cannot explain how.

"The science behind it, I've got no idea, it's intriguing," he said.

"I've never really trusted myself, but I've always found water.

"[When] I was 12 or 13 and I marked every spot and dad trusted me.

"Every spot I marked all over the 2,500-acre [1,011-hectare] property, we drilled and got water on every single one of them.

"I'm not convinced but how many times have I got to prove myself before I'm reassured?"

Demand growing but diviners dwindling

Mr McAndrew said fewer people were practising divining at a time when more people were seeking practitioners.

Putting a bore down can cost a landholder millions of dollars, a cost many aren't willing to risk, so they turn to water divining as a cheap, "almost free" alternative. 

"It [water divining] would have to be [growing in popularity]," Mr McAndrew said.

"Whether they are desperate or inquisitive or both, I would say it [divining] would have to increase in demand."

The practice was taught to Mr McAndrew "a long time ago" by his grandfather.

"I think it's sort of lost with my generation, it wasn't really taught," Mr Dubinchak said.

"The diviners that I come across tend to be older, and younger people that I speak to, if they can't prove it with hard science, they are big sceptics about it."

Some people choose to use sticks or forked branches to divine.  ( ABC South West: Anthony Pancia )

Other methods

Smart sensors are used by water utility companies to monitor water flows, but such technological advances don't faze Mr McAndrew.

"I think there are a lot of electronic gadgets out now that can send signals down and they get a reading," he said.

"I've never looked into that, I've always trusted a bent bit of steel."

The prospect of drought is always on farmers' minds, prompting many to explore water divining. ( ABC Rural: Lucy Cooper )

But there are other ways to find water on rural properties.

Centre for Water in the Minerals Industry senior research fellow Louisa Rochford said government websites had information on aquifer types, depth of groundwater and potential yields.

Dr Rochford, a hydrogeologist, said it had "never crossed her mind" to water divine, instead opting for "desktop information and geophysics".

Louisa Rochford says the first step to finding underground water is local knowledge. ( Supplied )

"I guess as a scientist, you deal more with the physical world whereas my understanding of divining is it's more about intuition, and energy and those types of things," she said.

"Science really looks at physical aspects and physical things that provide evidence of something."

But Mr Dubinchak was quite comfortable not having an answer for now.

"Everybody wants a scientific answer for everything," he said.

"Everybody wants to prove or disprove and it's so easy to discredit and it's so easy to be negative about.

"But at the end of the day, having drilled countless bores, it's hard to not believe in it and those in the industry that do a lot of drilling, will not drill without divining."

ABC Rural RoundUp newsletter

Welcome to the Dowsing Research Group

Dowsing is a way to know things that we are unable to perceive with our normal senses. It is an ancient art, known as ‘divining’, and it was certainly used by the Egyptians and perhaps even earlier. Animals, birds and marine life use this sensitivity, but humans have mainly lost the use of this sense.

Dowsing is believed to have arisen from early mankind’s links to the earth, his sensitivity to its energy fields, and his passion for creating what we term today, sacred sites. Most people are aware of water diviners finding underground water, but dowsers can use it for finding any subsurface features – electricity, gas, telephone cables and archaeological foundations and ditches. It can also be used for analysing health problems. Oil and mining companies regularly use dowsers to detect new resources. The Russians use the technique for surveying, even from the air; and teach it at university level to geophysicists and geologists. In the early 20th century Royal Engineers used dowsing for finding water and detecting explosive land mines. In 1933 a group of engineers founded the British Society of Dowsers. Sixty years later the Dowsing Research Group was formed to discover the fundamental science behind this subject. Its work has revealed a plethora of links to frontier science. Dowsing is a respectable branch of biophysics and has strong links to the study of consciousness, and the topic of non-locality; a subject of intense investigation in quantum physics. So if you see a plumber using bent pieces of wire to find where the water pipes run, say to yourself, I could do that! At the same time, realise that this simple task is a significant factor in the emerging paradigm of universal connectedness. Enjoy the site – it is here to stimulate your interest and we welcome any positive comments.

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Is it really possible to find water with dowsing rods?

For physicist arnt inge vistnes, dowsing is in the blood. he is one of the few researchers who has studied the phenomenon..

Perhaps you've seen someone dowsing or tried it yourself. Some people use a Y-shaped twig or rod to find buried pipelines, leaks or places in the ground with a lot of water.

Above the place where water is suspected to be, the rod pulls towards the ground, as if being drawn by a mysterious force. What is actually happening here?

Svein Tømmerdal from Leksvik in Trøndelag county is one of the people who find water with dowsing rods. He prefers to use birch, because it is tougher.

He explains that he holds the twig ends in front of him with a firm grip, with his thumbs out to the side.

“If I come across water, the twig goes up for me. For some dowsers, it goes down.”

“You have to have a fairly firm grip. The twig twists the bark, at least in the spring,” Tømmerdal says.

Tømmerdal can find veins with water or good places to build a well using the dowsing rod.

He also says he is able to precisely measure the depth of the veins with the help of the rod. He takes a few steps to the side, and when the twig dips again, he can calculate the depth by imagining a right-angled triangle.

Tømmerdal believes that there must be an explanation for what makes the rod move. Not everyone who tries dowsing gets a reaction.

“We must have something in us that receives the radiation or the energy,” he says, wondering.

Could there be something to dowsing?

Arnt Inge Vistnes has also wondered what it is that makes someone get dowsing results. He is one of only a few people in Norway to have researched dowsing.

Is there anything special in the places where it happens? Or, he wondered, could it have something to do with magnetic or electric fields that affect the body?

Perhaps some people are sensitive enough to notice these forces?

Vistnes had the requisite background to find some answers. He is a physicist and now professor emeritus at the University of Oslo.

Dowsing was not an unknown concept for him.

“My grandfather did it in a big way and my great-grandfather did too. You could say it’s in the family,” Vistnes says.

Earth ray radiation

Vistnes' great-grandfather was a naturopath. So was his grandfather, who was called "Second Sage." He used a dowsing rod to detect the earth’s radiation. He would neutralize the earth rays in an area to alleviate health ailments.

Earth radiation is a non-scientific term that has been used to explain what causes a dowsing rod to locate water. It has been suggested that earth radiation occurs where there are water veins.

Others have suggested that earth ray radiation is like an underground net, independent of water, and that it has an impact on health.

“My grandfather had so-called supernatural abilities and in a way was the ‘man with warm hands’ of the time. He had a lot of success with dowsing,” says Vistnes.

Caught his grandfather red-handed

Vistnes himself had mixed feelings about the practice.

“I caught my grandfather red-handed once as a child when he was going to neutralize earth rays.”

He was going to demonstrate a new and effective remedy at my father's home. He said that there were two ways it could be set up: one worked, the other did not.

First he set it up so that it didn’t work.

“When he walked through the house he found earth radiation the whole way,” says Vistnes.

“Then my grandfather set it up so that it should work. When he walked around he found no earth radiation in the house.”

“What he didn’t know was that I had switched things around so that it wouldn’t work.”

Initiated experiment

Vistnes reflected on the episode afterwards.

“At the same time, this whole matter sat so deep in me, that even though I was a little sceptical, I believed that there might still be something there,” he says.

Vistnes recently wrote about his experiences in the latest issue of the journal Fra fysikkens verden (From the World of Physics) , which is published by the Norwegian Physical Society.

In the 1980s, he set up a large-scale experiment.

Vistnes first wanted to find out whether dowsers would actually find earth radiation in the same places. Afterwards, his plan as a physicist was to investigate whether there was anything special about the places the majority of dowsers had pointed out.

Could it be that they were discovering places with weak electric and magnetic fields, for instance?

No one agreed

Twenty-five well-known dowsers joined the experiment. They conducted a survey in one corridor. The zones where the dowsers had a reaction were noted. The experiment was double-blind, and the subjects were not told where the others had found something.

It turned out that the dowsers found earth rays in completely different locations.

“When you have 25 dowsers that go out and none of their findings overlap, I just had to shelve the project,” says Vistnes.

Investigating whether anything was physically different about the places that had been marked was pointless, since the experiment didn’t show any agreement on where these places were.

The experiment wasn’t published. But Vistnes has now written an article about it in the journal Fra fysikkens verden .

Anders Bærheim, Steinar Hunskår and Bjørn Bjorvatn reported about a similar experiment in the journal Tidsskrift for den norske legeforening . Four experienced dowsers searched for patterns of earth rays in a gymnasium. No agreement resulted between their findings.

Vistnes also did a lot of research from 1987 to 2005 on whether electric fields could affect people’s health and work environments. He was interested in electromagnetic hypersensitivity and initially wondered if it might be related to dowsers’ experiences.

“I’ve actually come to the conclusion that there isn’t much to either electrical hypersensitivity or dowsing,” he says.

Dig deep enough and you can usually find water

Erik Tunstad is a biologist, author and non-fiction writer. He was the editor of forskning.no (the Norwegian version of sciencenorway.no) from 2002 to 2009. He is familiar with dowsing, but from a sceptical perspective. He co-founded the organization Skepsis in 1989.

Over the years, Skepsis has attacked pseudoscience and claims of supernatural phenomena.

“I’ve been interested in the topic, so I’ve spent time with people who have been looking for water. They often find it,” says Tunstad.

“I’ve often been impressed and thought how strange it was. The dowsers were incredibly precise. But then you can say, ok, what if he’d dug over there instead, would he still have found water?”

“The problem is that you can dig just about anywhere you want in Norway, and if you go deep enough, you’ll find water,” he says.

Water veins?

“Dowsing is based on a notion that water runs in veins,” says Tunstad.

But most of the time it doesn’t.

Groundwater is the part of the subsoil where cracks and pore spaces are all completely filled with water, according to Store Norske leksikon , the Norwegian online encyclopaedia.

Groundwater is everywhere, but in different amounts, says hydrogeologist Atle Dagestad at the Norwegian Geological Survey (NGU).

“In Norwegian bedrock, groundwater is mostly found in cracks and weak zones, because we don’t have larger areas of sedimentary rocks with primary porosity where the groundwater can flow,” says Dagestad.

The amount of groundwater can be particularly large in weak zones in the bedrock, where bigger tectonic movements lead to the rock being crushed.

Groundwater rarely flows in veins in the subsoil,” says Dagestad. It occurs more in areas where the bedrock consists of limestone.

“In Norway, this kind of bedrock is found in the Svartis area in the north, which is known for its numerous big limestone caves, and where there can occasionally be significant water flow.”

“In sediment deposited by rivers or glaciers from earlier times, some layers have better water flow properties than others. But we don’t find a lot of water veins in Norway,” Dagestad says.

A million dollars

Along with joining water dowsers in the field, Tunstad has observed and arranged tests, where dowsers’ abilities have been tested using scientific methods.

The results have been clear.

“Whenever researchers have systematically gone in, they’ve found that water dowsers don’t have this ability,” Tunstad says.

James Randi was a magician, a writer and a sceptic who passed away last year. He is known for launching the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. The person who could prove that they have supernatural abilities would receive $10 000. Later, the prize was raised to one million dollars.

Randi’s challenges have included experiments with dowsers. None of them has been able to prove that they have the ability to find water or other objects with dowsing rods.

No better than flipping a coin

Tunstad joined Randi for an experiment in Finland in the 1980s.

“There was a dowser who’d made his living from finding water,” he said.

Now the dowser wanted to test his abilities, and he and Randi agreed on the terms.

“First, Randi set out a container of water. The water dowser could see the water, and when he tested it with his rod, it dipped strongly. No one could say that the rod wasn’t working that day, or that the dowser was in poor shape.”

Next, the water was placed where it wasn’t visible. Containers that either held water or were empty were hidden in boxes. Neither Randi nor any of the other involved parties knew whether the rod was dipping over a full or an empty water container.

“We did this all day long. Only when the results came in were we told that the dowser had only found water around 50 per cent of the time, about the same result as he would have had if he’d flipped a coin,” says Tunstad.

You can watch a video of the experiments arranged by James Randi with dowsers in Australia here .

Mining and treasure hunting

Some people use a pendulum or L-shaped metal rods, instead of a Y-rod or twig to look for the hidden items.

In addition to searching for water, people have used rods to find other things, such as burial sites and metals.

When did dowsing start?

Johannes Dillinger is a professor of early modern history at Oxford Brookes University and has researched the history of the dowsing rod.

He says the dowsing rod appeared in the late Middle Ages in Germany in connection with the mining industry.

The book De re metallica is a textbook on mining from 1556 and is one of the earliest known texts that mention dowsing.

The author, Georgius Agricola, wrote that rods were sometimes used to find mineral veins. But he wasn’t positive about the practice, says Dillinger.

“He rejected the idea, saying it’s below the dignity of a decent miner to use dowsing,” Dillinger said.

Its use became more widespread in the 17th century, then mainly as a tool for finding hidden treasures.

“Treasure hunting was actually the most important use of dowsing rods in the pre-modern period,” Dillinger says.

Water dowsing wasn’t important

The practice was never generally accepted, says Dillinger.

“Certain schools or courses for miners included dowsing in the instruction, but the practice was always very controversial.”

Water dowsing wasn’t important, he says.

“Finding water wasn’t really a problem. Most of Europe has plenty of water. There wasn’t any point in looking for water.”

The use of rods to find water was mentioned early on but did not become widespread until later.

The phenomenon of dowsing has been attributed to three main ideas over time, says Dillinger.

The first explanation is that dowsing was a form of magic. The second is that the dowser is sensitive to what he or she is looking for, and the rod provides a way to focus. The third is that mineral veins, for example, emit something that physically affects the rod.

L-rods used in avalanche search

Few studies exist showing that dowsing actually works. But experiments have been conducted.

A study published in the journal Nature from 1971 was undertaken by the Ministry of Defence in the UK, and found no support that using dowsing rods works. Tests were also carried out to see whether dowsers could find mines and water.

Norwegian researchers Rolf Manne and Steinar Bakkehøi carried out an experiment in 1987. Manne had reacted to the Red Cross promoting the use of forked rods or L-rods to find people who had been buried by avalanches. In 1986, 31 soldiers were caught in an avalanche in Vassdalen in Northern Norway, and 16 perished. Dowsing rods were among the tools used to find them.

The Norwegian Armed Forces invited Manne to take part in a scientific experiment in which a soldier was (safely) buried.

Four dowsers with extensive experience and two teams of quickly trained soldiers tried to find the buried individual. Nobody did.

‘The Armed Forces concluded from this that dowsing is of no value in avalanche searches, and the method was abandoned,’ Manne wrote in the series Psevdovitenskap og etikk (Pseudoscience and Ethics), published by NTNU.

Underground water pipes

In 1991, an experiment was carried out in Kassel, Germany by the German sceptical organization GWUP. Twenty dowsers participated.

A pipe was dug into the ground, with the water supply to the pipe turned either on or off. The participants had to find out whether there was water in the pipe or not with the help of a dowsing rod. The dowsers did 30 tests each.

The results were no better than what you would expect from random guessing. The experiment has not been published in a scientific journal, but was described in an article in the magazine Skeptiker in 1991.

German experiments

A 1995 report written by Hans-Dieter Betz from Germany provided support for the use of dowsing. The company Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) dug wells in arid areas with support from the German authorities. Dowsing was among the approaches they used.

According to Betz, the results from Sri Lanka were particularly impressive, where the dowser found water in over 90 per cent of the cases. He wrote that a success rate of 30 to 50 per cent would be expected based on the geological conditions.

However, controlled experiments that Hans-Dieter Betz helped conduct did not yield the same result.

In the late 1980s, 500 water dowsers underwent tests in Germany. The 43 with the best results were selected for further tests.

The water dowsers were to locate a pipe with running water. The water pipe was on the ground floor of a barn, and the dowsers searched on the second floor.

Of the selected candidates, 37 only attained results that matched random chance. Six had slightly better results, according to Wikipedia. The researchers believed this was proof that the dowsing phenomenon was valid.

Jim T. Enright, a professor of behavioural physiology, did a critical analysis of the experiments.

Enright criticized the researchers’ analysis and believed that the results of the best were also due to chance. According to him, the study was ‘the most convincing disproof imaginable that dowsers can do what they claim.’

Build skills from experience

Hydrogeologist Dagestad believes that individuals who succeed at dowsing can be good at reading the terrain and the local hydrogeological conditions.

“I think they’re good at observing where in the terrain the probability of finding groundwater is good, and over time they gain experience with where to look for water.”

Tunstad concurs and says that the rod might be a tool to help with concentration.

“I would say that their brains are what solve the terrain. That’s been shown through the blind tests. It's not the twig, it's the brain,” he says.

Dagestad adds that most of Norway has a lot of rainfall throughout the year, which makes it less demanding to find groundwater for individual households and smaller water supply facilities.

In the past, it was perhaps useful for a stranger to give advice on where to dig a well, says Dagestad.

“Digging down to the groundwater probably took several days, and it wasn’t completely safe either. If half the village was needed to dig, then they’d be less likely to start arguing among themselves if an outside expert had pointed out a suitable location for a well,” he says.

“The probability of finding water is greater if you dig down a few more metres.”

Rod tips out of equilibrium

Physicist Vistnes says the rod is kept in a state called unstable equilibrium. Small unconscious movements of the hand can cause it to move out of position.

“This means that it only takes very little for the rod to react. It may seem that it dips really strongly. But that power really is only coming from you keeping the rod tense yourself,” says Vistnes.

“If you hold this belief, along with a rod in unstable equilibrium, then what you think and hope can also contribute to these effects.”

“It’s been an interesting journey through this landscape. I have to say that. But I’ve probably ended up without any faith in the dowsing phenomenon,” Vistnes says.

Power of thought has no effect

Tømmerdal, who is a dowser himself, still has no doubt that using a dowsing rod works.

“Of course, scientists are against something they themselves can’t see, touch or measure with their instruments,” he says.

Tømmerdal disagrees with Vistnes that the effects on the rod come from small movements and the way it is held.

“That's just nonsense. There’s no point in controlling or making small unconscious movements to force the rod, in my case, to go up,” says Tømmerdal.

He points out that dowsers clearly look at the terrain, but that’s not the main point.

“When we come across a water vein, water pipes or electrical wires underground, the power of thought doesn’t help,” he says.

“Those of us who know how dowsing works, know that it’s real!”

References:

Arnt Inge Vistnes: Ønskekvistfenomenet – del 1: En personlig beretning om en pussig folketradisjon, Fra fysikkens verden, number 3 , 2021.

Arnt Inge Vistnes: Ønskekvistfenomenet – del 2: Rapport fra en vitenskapelig studie, Fra fysikkens verden, number 4 , 2021.

Anders Bærheim et.al.: Jordstråler – et begrep uten vitenskapelig grunnlag. Tidsskr Nor Lægeforen , 2006.

Erik Tunstad: Duell ved soloppgang. Skepsis dokument: Søkevinkler, Skepsis, number 3 , 1992.

R. A. Foulkes: Dowsing Experiment. Nature , 1971. ( Summary )

Rolf Manne: Ønskekvist i snøskred – psevdovitenskap i praksis?. May Thorseth (Red.), Psevdovitenskap og etikk, NTNU , 2005.

Hans-Dieter Betz: Unconventional Water Detection: Field Test of the Dowsing Technique in Dry Zones: Part l . Journal of Scientific Exploration , 1995.

J. T. Enright: Water Dowsing: the Scheunen Experiments. Naturwissenschaften , 1995.

J. T. Enright: Testing Dowsing: The Failure of the Munich Experiments . Skeptical Inquirer , 1999.

H. -D. Betz et.al.: Dowsing reviewed — the effect persists . Naturwissenschaften , 1996.

Robert Konig et.al.: The Kassel Dowsing Test: Part 1. Skeptiker , 1991. republished on Geotech.

Robert Konig et.al.: The Kassel Dowsing Test: Part 2. Skeptiker , 1991. republished on Geotech.

Translated by Ingrid Nuse

Read the Norwegian version of this article at forskning.no

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Mongabay Series: Indigenous Knowledge

Trust, cost go greater depths to sustain unscientific water divining practice

• Popular among residents of hard rock terrains, the traditional practice of water divining is believed to locate groundwater without relying on scientific instruments or techniques.
• Water diviners are sustained by people’s steadfast faith in the practice and its accessibility, in contrast to scientific methods that often involve lengthy processes and significant costs.
• A modernised variant, “scientific” divining incorporates machinery and technology, such as electrical resistivity metres, but scientists say these methods are ineffective, warning of the potential risks of over-extraction of groundwater.

Shanmugan lifts his veshti and gingerly places his foot on the ground, only to withdraw it and step in a different direction. “It’s stronger over here,” he says more confidently, guided by a chain with a bunch of keys which he grips in his hands. Shanmugan, 47, is on a quest to find groundwater, and according to him, his ability to find it is something of a gift.

Shanmugan is a “water diviner” – someone who searches for groundwater without the aid of scientific instruments or techniques. In the drought-prone district of Dharmapuri in Tamil Nadu, his services are immensely popular. “No one will dare dig a borewell without a diviner,” says Ponni, Shanmugan’s neighbour and client from Dhathanaickenpatti village in Dharmapuri.

Water divining, or “dowsing,” is a traditional practice largely regarded as pseudoscience by geologists and hydrologists. Its effectiveness remains controversial, as there is no scientific evidence proving it to be any better than chance.

However, for many living in areas with hard rock, water divining is believed to be the only reliable method to locate groundwater. Given the high cost of drilling a borewell and the scarcity of water supplies, digging a borewell without consulting a diviner is an expensive risk few want to take.

Finding water with sticks and coconuts

Water divining involves using rudimentary metal instruments, such as a chain with keys, or natural materials like forked twigs and coconuts, and holding them above the ground. The diviner acts as the conductor between the ground and the instrument. When approaching an underground water source, these materials start to quiver on their own, says Shanmugan. “It’s like a magnetic current passing through your body when you find a source of water. Some materials have a better relationship with the water than others,” he explains. Each material serves a specific purpose: the coconut helps him detect water flow, the neem stick gauges depth, and the bundle of keys indicates the size of the aquifer.

When Pavithra from Dhathanaickenpatti village witnessed Shanmugan in action for the first time, she was fascinated. “I had never seen a water diviner at work. It felt like I was discovering something new,” she says. Pavithra and her husband hired Shanmugan to locate a bore point (groundwater point) after enduring an unreliable water supply from the local panchayat board for over a year. She is now a happy client, enjoying an abundant water supply that can be controlled at the flip of a switch—a luxury she invested Rs 3 lakh in towards the drilling costs.

A water diviner’s knowledge of groundwater geography is not based on technical expertise. But the outcomes of borewell drilling and feedback from clients are often taken as confirmation of the skill. Shanmugan has only studied up to the fifth grade. Guided by his intuition, he believes that the ideal bore point is where the underground rocks are most fragmented—what he describes as a gap—providing a clear channel to an aquifer.

An obscure history

The history and origins of water divining in India remain largely obscure. Science historian Kapil Subramanian found through archival research that water divining had been in practice in the country since at least the mid-20th century. In pre-independent India, the British brought European diviners to assist in groundwater surveys. Believing it to be an “unscientific and superstitious” practice, some members of the Indian political elite such as Congressman C. Rajagopalachari and Swaraj Party leader Mulund Rao Jayakar refused to endorse it.

“After gaining independence, India embarked on development in many spheres, including tapping groundwater resources, but the state was faced with a paucity of knowledge. Water diviners were able to fill that gap at the ground level, where the question of where to site a well was most urgent. It also became more acceptable, drawing less vocal opposition after independence,” Subramanian explains.

In 1949, when the newly independent India established its first dedicated groundwater institution, the Rajasthan Underground Water Board, it had only one member with experience in groundwater issues—a water diviner named Paniwala Maharaj. The rest of the board members were bureaucrats from various government departments and ministries.

Sustained popularity of the practice

Even though India’s ability to generate scientific information on groundwater has expanded significantly since independence, several factors such as accessibility and cost continue to sustain belief in water divining. Many groundwater authorities do not offer well-siting services, leaving individuals to identify suitable locations themselves. Water diviners like Shanmugan charge an affordable rate between Rs 5,000 and Rs 15,000 to locate a bore point.

“Employing the right experts to do a scientific survey is time consuming and expensive. It can cost lakhs to do geotechnical investigations, and it’s not financially feasible for most who want to dig wells for household use or to irrigate small farmlands,” says Sekhar Muddu, a hydrogeologist and professor with the department of civil engineering at the Indian Institute of Science (IISC) in Bengaluru.

Emerging alongside traditional diviners are the so-called “scientific diviners,” who attempt to modernise the practice by incorporating technology, for which they charge a few thousand rupees more. A simple Google search reveals numerous diviners who claim to use advanced divining techniques, such as electrical resistivity metres. However, Muddu says these tools are inadequate for detecting rock formations deeper than 10 to 20 metres. Electrical resistivity metres work by sending electrical signals into the ground to assess subsurface layer thickness, but the results can be easily misinterpreted. “A result indicating low resistance might be assumed to signify water, but it could also be a low-resistance rock formation,” Muddu explains.

Apart from being economical, trust is another key factor in the practice’s popularity, according to Andres Verzjil, senior lecturer in water governance at IHE Delft, a Netherlands-based water research institute. “For a farmer who doesn’t understand the science of hydrogeology, a more worthwhile question is, where do I place my trust to dig a borewell? A water diviner, for whatever reason, is inspiring that trust in these places,” he told Mongabay India.

In a 2023 paper titled From Divine to Design: Unearthing Groundwater Practices in Tamil Nadu, India , Verzjil and his team documented both dowsing and modelling as groundwater practices in Tamil Nadu. They found that groundwater modellers “indubitably make use of the wisdom of dowsers,” as they rely on known well locations and depths to make their predictions more accurate and sensitive. The paper argues that water diviners are a “crucial but absent” stakeholder in groundwater management decisions.

Between rock and deep water sources

Ponni, 53, who believes that the diviners possess special powers to accurately locate ground water, recalls a time in her childhood when open wells were common in her village. She says that for generations, water diviners have been used to identify locations for open wells. Over the years, these wells gradually dried up and were replaced by borewells.

Dharmapuri’s geography is characterised by hard crystalline rocks of Archaean age, which formed between four and two-and-a-half billion years ago. These hard rock aquifers have limited groundwater resources and are not easily replenished by rainfall. According to a report by the National Water Mission (NWM), recent monsoon failures in the region have exacerbated the reduction in groundwater resources. Intense, short-duration rain events have resulted in decreased recharge and increased runoff, further diminishing water availability in this already arid area.

Vivek M, a consultant with the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), who contributed to the 2023 study involving Verzijl, says drilling borewells was not a popular choice in the past given the hard rock terrain. The dependence on water divining is driven, in part, by a lack of other options in the face of water scarcity. “People have always relied on traditional methods and beliefs to locate water here. It was once believed that there would be water where a mound of termites collected or where cattle chose to sit in an open field,” he says.

Indiscriminate borewell sinking has contributed to the rapid depletion of Dharmapuri’s water table. The Tamil Nadu Water Supply and Drainage Board reports that out of the 23 firkas, or sub-divisional administrative units in the district, 14 are overexploited.

The risk of over extraction

The appeal of water divining isn’t limited to rural areas. S. Samson, a 52-year-old diviner based in Bengaluru, serves a diverse clientele, including real estate developers and farmers. Despite having a YouTube channel with over 2,000 subscribers, Samson says that most of his clients find him through word-of-mouth.

When Mongabay India met him, Samson was surveying a plot of land in the city designated for an apartment complex. He was the fifth diviner called to locate a bore point after four previous diviners had failed to find a viable water source. Despite multiple failures, the site manager’s faith in the practice remained resolute. “I cannot blame the diviner if he couldn’t find the correct bore point. He’s providing a service and charging me for it, and I am aware of the risks. If we get the water, then it’s all well and good,” says the site manager, who chose to remain anonymous.

Much like Shanmugan, Samson spends hours examining the land using six different types of copper instruments that are believed to twist or twirl when hovered over groundwater. A Christian by faith and a carpenter by trade, Samson begins his work with a prayer and a blessing for the instruments. He believes that his ability to locate groundwater is a divine gift that rarely fails. He attributes the occasional failures in predictions to challenging terrains: “Hard and hilly terrains can complicate the process.”

Over extraction of water sources

With over 11,000 registered borewells, groundwater extraction is rampant in Bengaluru. During the summer months this year, when temperatures soared over 40 degrees celcius in some parts of the city, Samson got more calls for help than usual. “Normally, I get eight to nine calls a month, but this summer it went up to 20 to 30 because people needed water,” he says. By March, nearly 50% of the city’s borewells were either dry or yielding minimal water.

Borewells are dug at an average depth of 800 to 900 feet (240-270 metres) in the city, says Sanath Kumar V, an assistant engineer at the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB). “Even then, you may not get water since the water table has fallen so much,” he tells Mongabay India. The BWSSB is working on installing recharge pits in existing borewells to help improve groundwater recharge in the city, but the pace of extraction and the drilling of illegal wells is a challenge for state and municipal authorities.

According to scientists, the more worrying risk is associated with extracting groundwater from non-rechargeable depths. Drilling hundreds of metres below the surface can lead to the depletion of fossil water, a non-renewable resource. “It’s become common practice to drill to great depths for groundwater,” Muddu says, “but with rudimentary tools and improper application, drilling might hit a fracture that doesn’t recharge, leading to supply dying out in a few years.” He adds: “Ideally, drilling should be conducted at a depth that allows for natural recharge, typically not exceeding 100 metres.”

Shanmugan says that the goodwill from his clients ensures his services are regularly in demand. Right before leaving, he receives a frantic call from a client who found only muck after digging 500 feet at a point Shanmugan indicated. “Don’t worry,” Shanmugan assures the client, “The water will come. Just dig a little deeper and you will see.”

Banner image: S. Samson, a Bengaluru-based water diviner, tries to find a bore point using a copper instrument as children watch him. Image by Simrin Sirur/Mongabay.

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Curious questions: Does water divining actually work? (N.B. Einstein thought it probably did…)

• Curious Questions

Widely thought to be a form of witchcraft, water divining relies on a pair of rods and ‘the uncanny reaction of the human nervous system’ to factors unknown. Yet it is still employed by water companies today, discovers Catriona Gray.

Water divining is one of those things that sounds utterly improbable until you see it for yourself. For me, it happened last summer. Workmen were digging trenches in our garden and we were all worrying about the digger hitting the water pipe, the location of which had always been unknown.

To our surprise, the very pragmatic engineer whipped out a set of divining rods and had not merely located, but had also mapped the course of the pipe in less than a minute. Still sceptical, we tentatively dug where he suggested and, sure enough, the spade soon struck metal. There was the 100-year-old water pipe, following a course that defied all logical pre- dictions, but that had somehow been found, using only a pair of bent copper rods.

“I know very well that many scientists consider dowsing as they do astrology, as a type of ancient superstition. According to my conviction, this is unjustified.” — Albert Einstein

The art of divining, also known as dowsing, goes back millennia and seems to have sprung up independently in several different countries. Prehistoric cave drawings in Spain, Algeria and Iraq depict figures clutching a forked twig, engaged in the act of divining. Confucius wrote about it and the ancient Egyptians practised it: divining tools were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun and Cleopatra allegedly employed dowsers to search for gold.

The Christian Church appeared to have a complicated relationship with dowsing — there are plenty of accounts of monks using it, but it was eventually concluded to be on the side of sorcery and was denounced accordingly.

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Yet, it continued to be used. Elizabeth I brought German miners over to England to teach British miners how to divine for ore deposits and many notable thinkers and scientists were dowsers, including Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein. By the early 20th century, it was practised widely, but remained a slightly dubious art.

‘I know very well that many scientists consider dowsing as they do astrology, as a type of ancient superstition,’ wrote Einstein. ‘According to my conviction, this is unjustified. The dowsing rod is a simple instrument which shows the uncanny reaction of the human nervous system to certain factors which are unknown to us at this time.’

In 1933, a group of army engineers came together to found the British Society of Dowsers, a charitable organisation that aimed to explore and promote the art of dowsing. Today, the group has more than 600 members. ‘We believe that everyone has the ability to dowse,’ states Richard Fry, acting president of the society. ‘Most of our members treat it as a hobby — albeit a serious one. Others are listed on our professional register and actually make a living from their skills.’

Among them is Linda Fentum, a professional water diviner based in Worcestershire, who advises clients on the best spots to dig boreholes. She first tried dowsing when she was living in South Africa and, following her return to the UK in 2005, a chance encounter with another dowser lead her to realise that not only was it possible to locate water, but that she was also able to detect the depth of a water line or an underground stream.

“She is called in after scientific methods – such as hydrogeological surveys – have failed”

With an impressive knack for finding water in tricky spots, she is often called in after more scientific methods — such as hydrogeological surveys — have failed. ‘The worst one was where they had drilled three unsuccessful boreholes before they drilled mine,’ Mrs Fentum remembers. ‘The first three were completely dry, but the place I suggested yielded 20 gallons of water a minute, which is a lot of water.’

She uses a combination of researching the geology of the area and studying maps of the site, then visiting in person to pinpoint the best location and depth. ‘When I find the right spot, I’ll keep my rods in a search position — horizontal to the ground, facing forwards — and ask myself if it’s 10ft, 20ft, 30ft and so on. Once they start reacting, I narrow it down, so if I get a reaction at 80ft, I’ll then count 81, 82, 83 and when the rods turn at right angles, that’s the depth.’

Incredibly, given how specific her estimates are, Mrs Fentum believes that her success rates are higher than 90% — which certainly suggests that there is something more than luck or guesswork going on.

Nonetheless, divining is still seen as a form of witchcraft, if recent newspaper articles are anything to go by. In 2017, a PhD student called Sally LePage contacted a number of British water companies — after her parents spotted an engineer from Severn Trent using a pair of bent tent pegs to locate a water pipe near Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire — and found that 10 out of 12 of them still used dowsing, among other methods.

The result was a flurry of disapproving articles about this ‘discredited medieval practice’, with plenty of scientists weighing in on how ridiculous it was. Unsurprisingly, it resulted in driving divining even further underground; four years later, not a single one of those water companies was willing to comment on the subject.

However, not all scientists dismiss this ancient art. Nicholas Gray, a leading expert in water technology based at Trinity College Dublin, first became aware of dowsing as a child growing up in Gloucestershire, where he saw local water diviners at work and taught himself how to do the same.

‘I strongly suspect there is a rational explanation to do with energy fields caused by water movement,’ he says. ‘For me, divining only reliably works on water pipes and electricity cables, and it is something most people can do. When I was teaching, I’d occasionally take the undergraduates into the college park and we would spend half an hour or so divining, trying to plot the water pipes. It was a bit of light relief from the more formal laboratory sessions, but it always turned out that the majority of students could do it after a bit of practice.’

Having worked in and written about the water industry since the 1970s, consulting for many large companies, Prof Gray has seen first hand how the method continues to be used, but is often frowned upon: ‘In a world of multi-million-pound projects, people somehow feel safer with more modern technologies. If something can’t be explained, then it is better to keep with the explainable.’

Perhaps that’s why dowsing remains principally a rural skill — one that’s passed down from generation to generation, by people who don’t really care why it works, but accept that it does. After all, the best mysteries are the ones that remain unsolved.

How to dowse

• Cut two pieces of thin wire, about 18in in length and 2mm in diameter. Metal coat hangers work well for this.
• Bend the wires to create a right angle about two-thirds along their length.
• Hold one in each hand, by the short length, then raise the rods, keeping your elbows to your sides and the rods pointing directly for- wards.
• Start off by placing a bottle of water on the floor, then walking over it. Eventu- ally, the rods should cross involuntarily when you reach the water source.
• Don’t worry if it doesn’t work immediately—try to relax and keep practising.

The British Society of Dowsers offers classes and further advice

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Dowsing Blog

Commentaries by dowsers illustrating the practice of dowsing, a different technique for water divining.

This is a personal account by another water diviner, Clive Beadon, who describes some general features of dowsing and his own technique for locating water. This account written a couple of decades on from the previous posts, incorporates some different features from those earlier methods, presumably incorporating newer ideas.

Like many dowsers, he took up dowsing, after observing a dowser at work and being encouraged to try it himself. He tells an amusing tail of dowsing from an aircraft, as a means of practice (there are a number of instances of this in the British Society of Dowsers’ journal).

He stresses the need to only apply one’s dowsing to particular specific areas. This is because the key to dowsing is the proper interpretation of the dowsing reactions. The dowser is constantly learning, and he found that his dowsing technique was constantly changing. The important factor is one’s “mental attitude”, should be “determination and certainty”, and one should be aware “Shibboleths”, that is attitudes and ways of working which only hamper interpretation. Instead use direct and simple questions, with cross checking where possible.

In the latter part of the article, he talks about his experiences water divining in the drier parts of Portugal.

His method of water divining differs from the previous posts. He starts with a map dowse using a pendulum. He then programs his mind to look for water no deeper than some pre-set depth. To provide some guarantee of a good water supply, he searches for streams crossing each other at different depths. Then for each stream, he deduces its depth and the different strata between it and the surface, since this will affect the ease or otherwise of the drilling. Then the rate of flow and water purity, with reference to trace elements, since customers might require this knowledge. The likely positions must be referenced to the actual geography, as shown on the map, to check for access to the site, and to establish that if a bore hole was sunk, that it does not rob a neighbour of their water supply.

Next, he goes on site with a whalebone dowsing rod (a springy type of rod) and he goes about double checking the results of the map dowsing.  On site he surveys the strata below. He finds the crossing point if the two streams. Separately analysing each stream for depth and flow rate. For depthing he uses a purely mental approach, in which he counts down in feet from the surface until he gets a reaction. For flow rate, he stands over the stream and rotates himself through 360 degrees, until he gets a reaction, each rotation being so many gallons per hour.  He has to correct depth estimates and flow estimates based on his analysis of the strata.

He uses a particularly interesting (and probably individualistic) method to determine whether there are any more flows, flowing into the crossing point. This involves inserting an iron rod over the stream reactions to cancel out the previous reactions. There is a similarity here to the Cryke depthing method described in the last post. It is as if the dowser can program their dowsing reactions through mental intent.

However, there are two confounding issues (dowsing traps) affecting his dowsing and other aspects of the search, a dry aquifer, or “Spook” and a “Shadow” (or imaginary image) of the real stream, or aquifer. But he describes techniques he uses to identify these.

He does not go into much detail about determining the purity of the water, but my guess is that he uses a “Mager colour wheel”, simply a card with a palette of differing colours around the circumference, then using each colour as a sample of the purity of the water, e.g. black might mean brackish water, and light blue might mean drinkable.

All in all, his technique is very thorough to avoid mistakes, which though potentially quite an exhausting process, is one which he found gave its just rewards.

The article is entitled “A splinter of sound”, available here: http://www.dowsing-research.net/blog_extracts/BSD_No162_1973_p290.pdf

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Identifying Drinking Water Filters Certified to Reduce PFAS

Finding a pfas drinking water filter for your home, how effective are the filters, what certifications should i look for, more filter certifications.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are a group of chemicals that have been widely used in industrial and consumer products and have been shown to cause health issues. Reducing levels of PFAS in your water is an effective way to limit your exposure to these chemicals. Some filters have been certified to remove some PFAS chemicals.

Point-of-use (POU) filters — or a water treatment system used at a single faucet or other fixture — are a relatively inexpensive treatment for reducing PFAS in the home.

Contact your  state environmental protection agency  or health department and your local water utility to find out what actions they recommend.

Granular Activated Carbon (GAC)

Granular activated carbon in a filter traps chemicals as water passes through the material. GAC materials are extremely porous, and the small pores trap the contaminants present in the water.

• $20 - $1,000 (not including maintenance costs).
• Filters have a limited capacity, requiring periodic replacement.
• Contaminants stay captured in the filter, and the filters can be discarded in the trash.

Ion Exchange Resin (IX)

Ion exchange resin is composed of tiny beads that act like powerful ion magnets that attract and hold the contaminated materials from passing through the water system.

• $20-$1,000 (not including maintenance costs).

Reverse Osmosis (RO)

Reverse osmosis systems force water through a thin barrier (in typically a three, four, or five stage filtration process) that separates chemicals from the water, creating a stream of treated drinking water and untreated water. The untreated water is sent "down the drain" to septic or municipal sewer systems. 

• $150 – $1,000 (not including maintenance costs).
• Requires changing filter cartridges and the RO membrane. 
• Cartridges and membrane filters can be discarded in the trash.
• Additional water treatment might be needed depending on your incoming water quality.
• Wastes about one gallon of water per every gallon treated.

EPA found that the GAC, IX, and RO point-of-use systems studied can greatly reduce PFAS levels. Filters are only effective if they are maintained according to the manufacturer’s instructions for how long their filters or membranes will last before they need to be replaced. 

See the certification information below to learn how to make sure the product you purchase is certified to reduce PFAS.

Learn more in Science Matters:  Reducing PFAS in Drinking Water with Treatment Technologies .

About NSF and ANSI

NSF =  National Sanitation Foundation

ANSI  = American National Standards Institute

NSF is an ANSI-accredited third-party certification body that evaluates point-of-use water filters for reductions in harmful contaminants.

NSF/ANSI 53 for PFAS Reduction

Find  certified products with PFAS reduction claims here .

NSF/ANSI 58 for Reverse Osmosis

Find  certified reverse osmosis systems here .

When buying a water filter...

Look on product labels for certification under NSF/ANSI 53 or NSF/ANSI 58 for PFAS reduction.

Look on manufacturer website for certification information or contact them directly.

Check NSF website to see if product treats the type of PFAS you’re trying to remove.

Why is certification recommended?

Consumers can purchase filters that have been tested by an accredited third-party certification body. These certifications verify the effectiveness of the filters and accuracy of the contaminant reduction claims.

Please note that any mention of trade names, manufacturers or products does not imply an endorsement by the United States Government or the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. EPA and its employees do not endorse any commercial products, services or enterprises.

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Scientists Uncover a Billion-Year Secret in Earth’s Largest Iron Ore Deposits

Curtin University researchers found that Western Australia’s Hamersley iron ore deposits are one billion years younger than previously believed, formed during significant geological events 1.4 to 1.1 billion years ago.

Research conducted by Curtin University has uncovered that the vast iron ore deposits in Western Australia’s Hamersley Province are approximately one billion years younger than previously estimated. This finding could significantly boost the search for more of the resource.

Using a new geochronology technique to accurately measure the age of iron oxide minerals, researchers found the Hamersley deposits formed between 1.4 and 1.1 billion years ago, rather than 2.2 billion years ago as previously estimated.

Geological Activity and Iron Ore Formation

Lead author Dr Liam Courtney-Davies, who was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Curtin University’s John de Laeter Centre at the time of the research and is now at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said the findings showed iron deposits formed during a period of major geological activity when ancient supercontinents were breaking apart and new ones were forming.

“The energy from this epic geological activity likely triggered the production of billions of tonnes of iron-rich rock across the Pilbara,” Dr Courtney-Davies said.

“The discovery of a link between these giant iron ore deposits and changes in supercontinent cycles enhances our understanding of ancient geological processes and improves our ability to predict where we should explore in the future.

Dating of Banded Iron Formations (BIFs)

Study co-author Associate Professor Martin Danišík, from the John de Laeter Centre, said the research precisely dated minerals from banded iron formations (BIFs), which are ancient underwater layers of iron-rich rock that can provide significant insights into the Earth’s deep geologic past.

“Until now, the exact timeline of these formations changing from 30 percent iron as they originally were, to more than 60 percent iron as they are today, was unclear, which has hindered our understanding of the processes that led to the formation of the world’s largest ore deposits,” Associate Professor Danišík said.

“By using an emerging technique to date iron oxide minerals through uranium and lead isotope analysis within the mineral grains, we directly dated all the major giant BIF-hosted iron ore deposits in the Hamersley Province.

“Our research indicates these deposits formed in conjunction with major tectonic events, highlighting the dynamic nature of our planet’s history and the complexity of iron ore mineralization.”

Reference: “A billion-year shift in the formation of Earth’s largest ore deposits” by Liam Courtney-Davies, Marco Fiorentini, Hilke Dalstra, Steffen Hagemann, Erick Ramanaidou, Martin Danišik, Noreen J. Evans, Kai Rankenburg and Brent I. A. McInnes, 23 July 2024, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2405741121

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Are these new dates consistent with other non-iron containing rocks in the region?

As far as I can tell these are revised dates. Possibly due to improved dating techniques.

Iron is sedimentation and oxidation not found in basement rock…if laid down rapidly as seen world wide, prove your “billions” Of years and recall catastrophism Is real, not a singular billion year event.

See Mineville and Tahawus, in Upstate New York and the Grenville Orogeny!!!!

Is Hammersley Iron ore province similare to Tiris iron ore province in Mauritania ?

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Department of Soil and Water Systems

University of Idaho

Physical Address: E. J. Iddings Agricultural Science Laboratory, Rm 242 606 S Rayburn St

Mailing Address: 875 Perimeter Drive MS 2340 Moscow, ID 83844-2340

Email: [email protected]

Web: uidaho.edu/cals/sws

Meetpal Kukal

Assistant professor — hydrologic science & water management.

402-219-3969

[email protected]

University of Idaho Boise Idaho Water Center 322 E Front St, Suite 440J Boise ID 83702

View Full Profile

Meetpal’s research is on hydrology of agricultural and natural landscapes; how global change stressors impact water resources, and solutions for sustaining and improving agricultural profitability and water security.

College of Agricultural and Life Sciences

Ph.D., University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2019 M.S., University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2015 B.Tech., Punjab Agricultural University, 2013

• WR 604: CUAHSI Virtual University
• ASM 315: Irrigation Systems and Water Management

Languages other than English spoken

Research/Extension Interests

• Agricultural hydrology
• Evapotranspiration
• Irrigation science, engineering and management
• Biometeorology and surface energy balance
• Soil health and hydrology

Selected Publications

• Kukal, Meetpal S. (2024). Consumptive water use and efficiency of irrigated US corn: Learning from hundreds of site-management-year observations. Water Resources Research, 60(8), e2024WR037434.
• Kukal, Meetpal S. (2024). The US Midwest and High Plains Aquifer-fed croplands are previously unrealized hotspots of extreme evaporative demand exposure. Environmental Research Letters, 19(6), 064062.
• Kukal, Meetpal Singh. (2024). Relative and Unified Skill of Environmental, Edaphic, and Management Factors to Explain Crop Yield Variance Using Machine Learning.
• Kukal, M. S., Kukal, S., Irmak, S., & Vellidis, G. (2024). Drivers of enhanced evaporative demand in US croplands: Determining relative contribution using constrained input scenarios. JAWRA Journal of the American Water Resources Association, 60(1), 79–94.
• Kukal, Meetpal S., & Irmak, S. (2023). Can limits of plant available water be inferred from soil moisture distributions? Agricultural & Environmental Letters, 8(2), e20113.
• Kukal, M. S., & Irmak, S. (2023). Fractional coefficient for estimating physiologically meaningful and diurnal transpiration cycle weighted VPD from daily ambient environmental data. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 339, 109583.
• Kukal, M. S., & Irmak, S. (2023). Disentangling day-night contributions towards altering atmospheric desiccation strength for US croplands. Agronomy Journal.
• Kukal, M. S., Irmak, S., Dobos, R., & Gupta, S. (2023). Atmospheric dryness impacts on crop yields are buffered in soils with higher available water capacity. Geoderma, 429, 116270.

Kukal conducts applied research, teaching and outreach in hydrologic science and water management, hydroclimatology and soil-plant-atmospheric relations at point to continental scales. In his work, he integrates principles from water and irrigation science, plant physiology, biometeorology, agricultural engineering, agronomics and geospatial science to address questions that lie at the intersection of agriculture, water and climate. His group employs both measurements (in situ, proximal and remote) as well as modeling (data-driven and process-based) approaches to assess and predict crop and water budgets’ response to global change elements and management regimes. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed research and extension/outreach articles. He has been a PI on USDA-NIFA and NRCS-funded projects focused on hydrologic impacts of climate-smart agriculture.

Awards and Honors

• ASABE Superior Paper Award
• Educational Aids Blue Ribbon Award, ASABE
• Boyd Scott Graduate Research Award, ASABE
• Folsom Distinguished Dissertation Award, University of Nebraska
• Outstanding Graduate Research and Creative Activities Award, University of Nebraska

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Researchers Urge Closing Outdated Water Rule to Aid Colorado River Crisis

By McGregor McCance

Researchers investigating the historic stresses of the American West’s water supply have identified a simple solution that could put parts of the Colorado River Basin on a more sustainable path.

In a new paper published today , a consortium of scientists and water experts including University of Virginia Darden School of Business Professor Peter Debaere recommend that closing Colorado’s “free river conditions” loophole would serve as a key initial step to reducing water stress in the region.

“Closing this loophole in Colorado’s water rights system could save millions of cubic meters of water and be the state’s modest contribution to solving water stress in the Colorado River Basin,” said Debaere, an expert in the economics of water and water markets.

In Colorado, when the river carries enough water to meet everyone’s needs, the “free river condition” allows anyone — regardless of whether they own water rights — to take as much water as they want from the river.

The new paper, “Closing Loopholes in Water Rights Systems to Save Water: The Colorado River Basin,” appears in the journal “Water Resources Research,” published by AGU, a global organization dedicated to Earth and space sciences. Debaere is part of a consortium that includes researchers from the UVA School of Engineering and Applied Science and other scientific and academic partners.

The 1,450-mile Colorado River is a lifeline for the American West. It quenches the thirst of 40 million people across seven states, more than 25 Native American tribes and parts of Mexico. It also irrigates some of the country’s most productive farmland and generates hydropower used across the region. The seven states using Colorado River water are divided into two groups: Upper Basin (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico) and Lower Basin (Arizona, Nevada, California).

But this vital resource is under threat: the amount of water flowing into the Colorado has been shrinking as rising temperatures have increased evaporation and reduced the snowpack that feeds the river. At the same time, demand from farms and cities has been rising.

That increasing stress on limited resources further highlights the problems associated with Colorado’s free river loophole.

Describing free river conditions as “an antiquated relic from when water was relatively abundant,” the paper suggests that the approach perpetuates the imbalanced supply and demand. That raises the likelihood that Lower Basin water users exercise a “compact call,” essentially charging that the Upper Basin is not ensuring the legally required amount of water. Such a maneuver could result in additional caps or restrictions on water use in the Upper Basin.

“Colorado can help avert this by closing its free river loophole,” the paper states.

The current challenges came to a head in mid-2022, when water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two major reservoirs on the Colorado River, dropped so low that they threatened the intake of water for hydropower. The situation was dire enough for the Biden administration to step in.

Further progress proved difficult, however. California, Arizona and Nevada only agreed to major water cuts in exchange for federal funding. Fortunately, an unusually wet winter in 2022-2023 plus conservation efforts have eased the immediate crisis.

Government officials said Lake Powell and Lake Mead were still only at 37% capacity as of Aug. 15. In 2000, they were nearly full.

Within each state in the Upper and Lower Basins, water users like farms or cities have their own rights to a fixed amount of water, with earlier users having stronger claims.

During shortages, users with older water rights have priority. They receive their allocation first and can claim water from users with newer rights, who consequently receive reduced amounts or no water at all.

This long-standing system is increasingly under strain due to climate change. The strain is exacerbated by two factors: first, the river has been overallocated since the first Colorado River Compact was signed; and second, there is no explicit agreed-upon cap on water usage, Moreover, the system lacks a cap that could adjust to changing water availability.

The seven states are currently negotiating how to share the shrinking supply, as some current guidelines for how the basin will share water expire at the end of 2025.

“Finding a compromise among the seven states will be difficult but closing the free river condition could be a way in which Colorado might contribute to the process,” Debaere said.

During free river conditions in 2017 —and in spite of downstream water challenges and lowering reservoir levels, for example — water users diverted an estimated 108 million cubic meters more than their water rights allowed, according to the new paper. That’s water that could have been stored in Lake Powell.

Debaere said that while the annual excess water taken during free river conditions is significant but not exorbitant, closing this loophole is crucial for other reasons.

It would better define water rights and prevent withdrawals beyond legal limits. This is important for future reforms, such as capping overall water use or introducing programs to leave fields fallow. These efforts won’t work if unlimited water access is occasionally allowed.

Closing this loophole could also be Colorado’s contribution to easing water stress in the Colorado River Basin, especially as the seven basin states struggle to agree on reducing overall water use.

“Abolishing the free river condition will not only reduce water use but also prepare the water rights system for future reforms,” Debaere said.

In addition to Debaere, co-authors of the new paper represent organizations including: International Business School Suzhou, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China; B3 Insight, Denver; Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, University of Alabama; Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Department of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Virginia; Sustainable Waters, Crozet, Va.

The University of Virginia Darden School of Business prepares responsible global leaders through unparalleled transformational learning experiences. Darden’s graduate degree programs (MBA, MSBA and Ph.D.) and Executive Education & Lifelong Learning programs offered by the Darden School Foundation set the stage for a lifetime of career advancement and impact. Darden’s top-ranked faculty, renowned for teaching excellence, inspires and shapes modern business leadership worldwide through research, thought leadership and business publishing. Darden has Grounds in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Washington, D.C., area and a global community that includes 18,000 alumni in 90 countries. Darden was established in 1955 at the University of Virginia, a top public university founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819 in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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Home • Water Industry Insights • U.S. & Canada Digital Water Market Outlook: Key Drivers, Competitive Shifts, and Forecasts, 2024–2033

U.S. & Canada Digital Water Market Outlook: Key Drivers, Competitive Shifts, and Forecasts, 2024–2033

The U.S. and Canada have long been at the forefront of digital water adoption, shaped by a diverse network of assets, an expansive roster of technology vendors, and relative access to capital. As such. Bluefield Research anticipates strong demand for digital water solutions in North America, underpinning a cumulative US$169.5 billion in spending from 2024 to 2033.  

This growth is fueled by several key factors: the need for increased efficiencies in asset and operations management, which is becoming ever more critical due to a growing workforce gap; shifts in policy and government funding that are incentivizing digital technology adoption; and the increasingly ubiquitous deployment of technology across all aspects of critical infrastructure. These drivers also usher in the increasingly complex challenges associated with cybersecurity.

As utility demand intensifies, from very large to very small utilities, the vendor landscape is becoming more competitive. The market is currently dominated by established water technology players, many of which are based in the U.S. and Canada. However, new market entrants are making inroads through strategic acquisitions and partnerships, while emerging startups are challenging the status quo, especially with software-based solutions.

This Insight Report ( and related data dashboard) offers a comprehensive analysis of the U.S. & Canada digital water market, including hardware, software, services, and connectivity. Bluefield’s bottom-up approach provides a detailed view of the current landscape and future growth, along with insights into major drivers and trends, the competitive environment, and detailed company profiles of 15 major digital water incumbents.

Table of Contents

Section 1: U.S. & Canada Digital Water Market Drivers & Trends

• Drivers and Inhibitors Impacting the Digital Water Market
• Challenges and Solutions – Digital Water Addresses Industry Pain Points
• Digital Maturity – Differing Needs and Experiences
• Landscape Fragmentation – Diverging Digital Water Priorities
• Driving Change – Policies and Government Funding Influence Investments
• Slow and Steady – IIJA Funding Presents Opportunities for Digital Water
• Silver Tsunami – Utility Workforce Trends
• Cybersecurity – Rising Concern, Limited Capacity
• Internal Challenges – Barriers to Digital Water Adoption

Section 2: U.S. & Canada Digital Water Market Forecasts

• Bluefield Digital Water Market Model Overview
• Asset Base – U.S. Utility Landscape
• Asset Base – Canada Utility Landscape
• Quantifying Spend – Digital Water Pricing by Utility Size
• The Big Picture – U.S. & Canada Digital Water Market Opportunity
• 10-Year Spend – Legacy Solutions Account for Lion’s Share
• Digital Water Hot Spots – Market Size by U.S. State
• Digital Water Hot Spots – Market Size by Canadian Province
• Digital Water Solutions Come Online – Market Outlook by Product Type
• Water Utilities Spearhead Investments – Market Outlook by Water Type
• OPEX Outpaces CAPEX – Market Outlook by Spend Type
• Growth Opportunities Across the Board – Market Outlook by Utility Size
• Digital Drives Optimization – Network & Plant Mgmt. Market Outlook
• Beyond Meter to Cash – Metering & Customer Mgmt. Market Outlook
• Reactive to Proactive – Work & Asset Mgmt. Market Outlook
• Next Steps in Digital Transformation – Information Mgmt. Market Outlook
• Securing IT and OT – Cybersecurity Market Outlook
• Leveraging Data – AI/ML Enhances Digital Water Solutions
• Push to the Cloud – Digital Water Software Adoption Trends

Section 3: Competitive Landscape

• Key Competitive Trends Emerging Across Digital Water Landscape
• Vendor Growth – Riding the Technology Wave
• Portfolio Expansion – Organic and Inorganic Growth Strategies
• Acquisition Hot Spots – Digital Water M&A Trends in the U.S. & Canada
• Market Consolidation – Strategic Growth via M&A
• Capital Flows – Investments Support Early-Stage Growth
• Notable M&A and VC Investment Deals
• Vendor Landscape – Hardware and Software Companies
• Beyond Technology – The Role of Service Providers

Section 4: Key Company Profiles

• Badger Meter
• Bentley Systems
• IDEX Corporation
• Mueller Water Products
• Neptune Technology Group
• Rockwell Automation

Companies Profiled

Companies mentioned.

• U.S. Digital Water Forecasts, 2024–2033
• Canada Digital Water Forecasts, 2024–2033

Related Water Industry Insights

Global digital water incumbents: top company strategies and rankings, 2024 u.s. elections: implications for the water industry, digital twins in water: market overview, competitive trends, and key profiles, related podcast, from milestones to predictions: what’s next for the future of water  , have ongoing analysis needs.

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