Military aspects of hydrogeology: an introduction and overview

The military aspects of hydrogeology can be categorized into five main fields: the use of groundwater to provide a water supply for combatants and to sustain the infrastructure and defence establishments supporting them; the influence of near-surface water as a hazard affecting mobility, tunnelling and the placing and detection of mines; contamination arising from the testing, use and disposal of munitions and hazardous chemicals; training, research and technology transfer; and groundwater use as a potential source of conflict. In both World Wars, US and German forces were able to deploy trained hydrogeologists to address such problems, but the prevailing attitude to applied geology in Britain led to the use of only a few, talented individuals, who gained relevant experience as their military service progressed. Prior to World War II, existing techniques were generally adapted for military use. Significant advances were made in some fields, notably in the use of Norton tube wells (widely known as Abyssinian wells after their successful use in the Abyssinian War of 1867/1868) and in the development of groundwater prospect maps. Since 1945, the need for advice in specific military sectors, including vehicle mobility, explosive threat detection and hydrological forecasting, has resulted in the growth of a group of individuals who can rightly regard themselves as military hydrogeologists. Water is essential to life, and it is not by chance that many Palaeolithic implements, which demonstrate the antiquity of man, come from river gravels, as the lives of early human hunter-gatherers were probably conducted in close proximity to rivers and springs. The first wells may have been created as primitive man dug into the drying beds of rivers or pools, following the water as it disappeared below the surface. Subsequently, as agriculture developed, villages were built adjacent to perennial streams or around groundwater sources consisting of flowing springs or dug wells. The sinking of such wells has a long history, with the oldest known well, discovered in China, having been dug at least 5700 years ago (Chen 2000). Even earlier examples have been claimed from the Middle East (Issar 1990). In Egypt, by c. 2980– 2750 BC, the technology existed to sink shafts through weak rocks such as poorly cemented limestones and sandstones, and records exist from 2160–2000 BC of well-sinking to supply water to men cutting monumental stone (Murray 1955). Subterranean aqueducts or qanats, constructed as a series of well-like vertical shafts connected by gently sloping tunnels, originated in the highlands of western Iran, northern Iraq and eastern Turkey from c. 1000 BC. Groundwater filters into these gently sloping tunnels, and is carried from its upland source to be used for drinking and irrigation in settlements located perhaps tens of kilometres away. Subsequently, the technology spread to adjacent countries throughout the Middle East and North Africa and into Europe with the spread of Arab culture (English 1968). Significant early written references to groundwater and wells come from the Middle East, notably from books of the Bible. Meinzer (1934) has noted that the 26th chapter of Genesis, describing events arguably dating from c. 2000 BC, reads like a water supply memoir. In Genesis the patriarch Abraham and his son Isaac (revered successively by the Jewish, Christian and Islamic faiths) are credited with ordering the digging of wells in what is now southern Israel, notably at Beersheva (Fig. 1), and both became renowned for their success in well construction (Tolman 1937). The earliest recorded tribal disputes between Abraham (Genesis, chapter 21) and Isaac (Genesis, chapter 26) with their neighbours concerned rights to groundwater use – evidence of a potential source of conflict from early times. Humans can survive for only a short period of time without water, and it has long been the practice in time of warfare for an invading army to cut off or poison the water supply to the enemy. To cite a Biblical example, the prophet Elisha is reported to have urged the kings of Israel, Judah and Edom, to ‘stop up all the wells’ in their campaign against the kingdom of Moab in c. 850 BC (2 Kings, chapter 3, as translated in the King James Version). Beleaguered cities could be particularly vulnerable to such means of attack. In c. 680 BC, King Hezekiah averted the danger to Jerusalem by the construction of a tunnel running from the spring at Gihon outside the city From: Rose, E. P. F. & Mather, J. D. (eds) Military Aspects of Hydrogeology. Geological Society, London, Special Publications, 362, 1–17, DOI: 10.1144/SP362.1 # The Geological Society of London 2012. Publishing disclaimer: www.geolsoc.org.uk/pub_ethics walls to the Pool of Siloam within them (2 Chronicles, chapter 32), a tunnel that exists to this day. Although conflicts grading into battles have doubtless been fought since time immemorial, the first recorded conflict about which historians can write with a degree of confidence (MacDonogh 2010) was the Battle of Megiddo in 1456 BC between Pharaoh Thutmose III of Egypt and Durusha of Kadesh. This battle was prolonged, becoming a seven-month siege because the fortified city of Megiddo had a secure water supply. Megiddo (approximately 100 km north of Jerusalem) had a main well outside its defences, to which its garrison had access via an 18 m vertical shaft sunk from the citadel and into a horizontal tunnel. The siege ended only when the garrison was starved into submission. Water supply has long been associated with conflict more widely in this semi-arid ‘Holy Land’ region Fig. 1. ‘Abraham’s Well’, Beersheva, Israel: an ancient well site re-developed for 20th-century use, arguably the site of the earliest known dispute over groundwater rights, and one of the objectives of the British military advance from Egypt in World War I (Rose 2012a ). Photograph from E.P.F. Rose. J. D. MATHER & E. P. F. ROSE 2