ML163442

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Subject 1: (Interview). Subtitle: Gordon Grant, Elizabeth Arnold. Timecode In: 00:01:51. Timecode out: 01:13:05. Notes: Hydrology discussion. Subject 2: (Sound Effects). Subtitle: Trickling water, birds. Timecode In: 01:16:37. Timecode out: 01:19:58. Subject 3: (Interview). Subtitle: Gordon Grant, Elizabeth Arnold. Timecode In: 01:21:18. Timecode out: 01:27:21. Notes: Hydrology discussion. Equipment Notes: Decoded MS stereo; Sonosax SXM 2 preamp. NPR/NGS RADIO EXPEDITIONS Show: USFS 100th anniversary Engineer: Leo DelAguila Date: June 11-13, 2005 DAT #3 Gordon Grant, Research hydrologist with the USFS Pac NW research station in Corvalis Oregon Elizabeth Arnold Leo delAguila 00:05 Hi it's Leo. This is Dat #3. It's Sunday the 12th of June and we are at the Dee Wright Observatory at the Willamet National Forest. We're about 5325 elevation. It's a stereo recording, same settings, recorded in Stereo. Elizabeth is the reporter. Yeah, and that is it. It is Dat 3, like I said earlier. 1:53 EA- I can't believe how these trees do, I mean the live trees. How deep do their roots go? 1:57 GG- Well it's amazing these trees are real survivors. 2:05 GG- Their roots have to go down but I think what they have to find are little pockets of finds. Little places where they..trapped in the field. Turns out to be something we're working on. 2:26 EA- but then the tree can only last or grow based on the nourishment in the finds right? 2:32 GG- It's mostly water, I think it's mostly water as to where you can get and keep a tree because this is one dry place out here. 2:50 Leo- Ok, we're all set, just be careful of where you move your foot. 3:03 GG- So I'm Gordon Grant, I'm a research hydrologist with the USFS Pacific NorthWest research station in Corvalis Oregon. 3:12 EA- Then, if you're a hydrologist, hydrologists study water, then why are we in this incredibly dry place? 3:18 GG- That's a great question. So we're up here on the very crest of the Cascade mountains in Oregon. This is a story about water, but when you look around here, one of the first things you notice as you cast your eye over this moonscape of these young, blocky, chunky lava flows that have come out of these cones and volcanoes that we see dotting the skylines here. We need to start at the crest, not only because the water starts at the crest, but also because what we see when we look around is the absence of any water. But what if I were to tell you that in this landscape, this very place where we're sitting, we get between six and ten feet of water coming down out of the sky every year. Water comes down because the Pacific ocean is not too far away and everyone knows it rains in Oregon. But the water that comes down has to go somewhere, so where does it go? You look across this moonscape of lava and you ask yourself, where does the water go? Well there's only one direction it goes. It goes down and it feeds a vast and huge ground water system that feeds the rivers of western Oregon. So what we're looking at here is the very top of what you can think of as a kind of hydrologic sponge, a vast hydrologic sponge that stores not just one years worth of water, but many years worth of water under the ground and it stores it in cracks in fissures, in tubes, in pipes that are formed in the very rock itself. And the volume of that water is huge. We estimate that the volume of water that is just in this one place that you can see, just in the landscape we're looking, it probably on the same order as lake Geneva in Switzerland, but it's all underground. And if you consider the whole cascade range, the parts of the cascade that can store this kind of water, we're talking of volumes in the order of Great Salt Lake. These are cubic miles of water that are stored in the ground itself. 6: 26 EA- Ok crazy question, we're still in... (Notes truncated)