Hydrology is the study of water and its movement on and around the earth. It involves the study of resources management, rainfall, rivers, erosion, and more. UC Berkeley, my institution at present, has a handful of classes representing sub-fields including Forest, Vadose Zone, Groundwater, and Urban hydrology.
As the semester begins, I've been sampling these classes and comparing them to the hydrology course I took last Fall. None have been well-structured in the prototypical sense, by which I mean, none have had clearly delineated landscapes of ideas or more than stunted branches of progression through concepts. And while I'm sure there are some options out there, none of the textbooks I've seen are clearly organized either. Studying hydrology seems to start in the middle of the content and spiral around itself, or touch on some ideas and neglect necessary components of intertwined processes. (Maybe the water is discussed but not the soil; maybe the soil is discussed but not the ecology.) What is going on?
Well, how can we structure an understanding water in the first place? The only way to keep track of water and turn it into an entity—an identifiable stock—is to contain it. When we do this we can start talking about fluid mechanics and all the lovely physics we've developed around tangible, identifiable objects. But water has a fickle relationship with its container: it escapes through the air, leaks out the bottom, erodes walls, drowns its territory, and invites rot.
One might instead plan to keep water in motion, as a flux (fluid dynamics). This requires a containing body and adds ontological complexity. What is a river? The first half of Heraclitus' most famous quote is that "no man ever steps in the same river twice;" a river is an entity of flux, a "control volume" that engineers worldwide are accustomed to thinking with. This methodology requires imposing a static frame around a dynamic entity, and losing the full view of where the water came from, and where it's going.
Basically, water doesn't stay put, but keeping it moving makes management difficult. Water resource management is a calculated keeping-track of reservoirs (quantity and various qualia) and flows which depend on hydrologic phenomena like rain, snow, and fog to maintain desired quantities. Whether in-motion or not, we can only start keeping track once the water is in our designated containers—an enormous technological imposition on an entity that loves to destroy the walls around it. These buckets are generally distinct locations we have designed to collect and command surface water (tanks, pipes, oceans, rivers): what about the other parts of the water cycle?
Conversations with my friend Pierie have introduced me to the work of Mathur and da Cunha, and some of their work around "rain" as a metaphor for water, in its connecting atmospheric to surface water. Rivers, reservoirs, oceans—a focus on these keep us locked in a "stock" and "flux" view of the forms water takes and how we can commodify it. "Occult" forms of water (mist, fog, clouds) comprise a very small percent of volume of water at any given moment, but represent enormous amounts of water movement around the globe. Occult forms may serve as a better metaphor for how to think about water—more ephemeral, more amorphous, harder to avoid. We're in hyperobject territory, now, which feels like a more appropriate ontology than the dualistic and deterministic framing ever-present in typical engineering.
The approach to hydrology that we're working against is one of water being *here* moving *there* as a contained entity to be extracted and put to use. Our little blue dot really has water everywhere, and it is only at the global scale that we can even think of the hydrosphere as a closed system. A lake, a river, and our human bodies just happen to be a high concentrations of water, with low concentrations of water in-between (as air, land, and drywall). All of it is being shuffled around by biotics and gradients in density, temperature, and energy.
The nature of water is canonically chaotic and self-determined despite our best engineering. Water as an omnipresent flux hyperobject is the best ontology, for now, but this designation does little to help the contemporary hydrologist. Perhaps this is why everyone teaching the subject just says "fuck it, let's start with Darcy's Law."
Sopping wet,
Lukas
As the semester begins, I've been sampling these classes and comparing them to the hydrology course I took last Fall. None have been well-structured in the prototypical sense, by which I mean, none have had clearly delineated landscapes of ideas or more than stunted branches of progression through concepts. And while I'm sure there are some options out there, none of the textbooks I've seen are clearly organized either. Studying hydrology seems to start in the middle of the content and spiral around itself, or touch on some ideas and neglect necessary components of intertwined processes. (Maybe the water is discussed but not the soil; maybe the soil is discussed but not the ecology.) What is going on?
Well, how can we structure an understanding water in the first place? The only way to keep track of water and turn it into an entity—an identifiable stock—is to contain it. When we do this we can start talking about fluid mechanics and all the lovely physics we've developed around tangible, identifiable objects. But water has a fickle relationship with its container: it escapes through the air, leaks out the bottom, erodes walls, drowns its territory, and invites rot.
One might instead plan to keep water in motion, as a flux (fluid dynamics). This requires a containing body and adds ontological complexity. What is a river? The first half of Heraclitus' most famous quote is that "no man ever steps in the same river twice;" a river is an entity of flux, a "control volume" that engineers worldwide are accustomed to thinking with. This methodology requires imposing a static frame around a dynamic entity, and losing the full view of where the water came from, and where it's going.
Basically, water doesn't stay put, but keeping it moving makes management difficult. Water resource management is a calculated keeping-track of reservoirs (quantity and various qualia) and flows which depend on hydrologic phenomena like rain, snow, and fog to maintain desired quantities. Whether in-motion or not, we can only start keeping track once the water is in our designated containers—an enormous technological imposition on an entity that loves to destroy the walls around it. These buckets are generally distinct locations we have designed to collect and command surface water (tanks, pipes, oceans, rivers): what about the other parts of the water cycle?
Conversations with my friend Pierie have introduced me to the work of Mathur and da Cunha, and some of their work around "rain" as a metaphor for water, in its connecting atmospheric to surface water. Rivers, reservoirs, oceans—a focus on these keep us locked in a "stock" and "flux" view of the forms water takes and how we can commodify it. "Occult" forms of water (mist, fog, clouds) comprise a very small percent of volume of water at any given moment, but represent enormous amounts of water movement around the globe. Occult forms may serve as a better metaphor for how to think about water—more ephemeral, more amorphous, harder to avoid. We're in hyperobject territory, now, which feels like a more appropriate ontology than the dualistic and deterministic framing ever-present in typical engineering.
The approach to hydrology that we're working against is one of water being *here* moving *there* as a contained entity to be extracted and put to use. Our little blue dot really has water everywhere, and it is only at the global scale that we can even think of the hydrosphere as a closed system. A lake, a river, and our human bodies just happen to be a high concentrations of water, with low concentrations of water in-between (as air, land, and drywall). All of it is being shuffled around by biotics and gradients in density, temperature, and energy.
The nature of water is canonically chaotic and self-determined despite our best engineering. Water as an omnipresent flux hyperobject is the best ontology, for now, but this designation does little to help the contemporary hydrologist. Perhaps this is why everyone teaching the subject just says "fuck it, let's start with Darcy's Law."
Sopping wet,
Lukas