Reflections on Water - Chapter 1

Chris Nicodemus & Katrina Meserve

Natural Resources in the North Country need to be understood in order for sensitive resources to be protected. For the past two years, volunteers and staff at ACT have been collaborating with local conservation commissions and the Environmental Science Program at Plymouth State University to explore the topic of natural resources in our areas and how to address and understand these real-world issues on a community level. Once beginning this process, it became apparent the simple ideas and topics actually become surprisingly complex and often it seems the forest itself can be lost amongst the trees. The PSU students took the first steps in sifting through these important natural resources topics and created a “Story Map” of their findings. Throughout the process it became ever apparent that water and water resources are unifying theme in which every community has raised concerns about their water.

The North Country is lucky to have abundant water; however, its purity is not universal and how we as a cluster of neighboring communities impact our water supplies will have lasting consequences both good and bad for generations to come. This new series titled “Reflections on Water” will use the PSU water resource Story Map as a starting point to dig deeper into the varying aspects of our regional water in more focused detail, one story at a time.

Our sensible hydrology reflects the regions “headwaters topography” coupled to northern New England’s climate that so frequently serves as the battleground between warm moist southern air and colder dryer northern air. The Ammonoosuc Conservation Trust’s “service area” is northern Grafton and Coös County New Hampshire and the valleys of the northern White Mountains. The region is experiencing a wave of large parcel subdivisions and an emerging web-based economy enabling remote workplace employment that is starting to bring fundamental economic change to the region. The ultimate consequence is difficult to fully anticipate, but as a greater community we are the stewards of this special place and it behooves us all to be aware of how our water flows both above and below ground, the limits of our current knowledge and the opportunities, risks, and hazards that may be associated with both individual and public changes to our landscape.

Google Earth perspective of the Northern New Hampshire service area of ACT and the headwaters flowing off our mountain peaks.

Land ownership brings with it a responsibility to safeguard our natural resources and especially our water resources for future generations. It is through shared understanding of the risks and benefits associated with disturbances to our geography and a better appreciation of the geography’s status as a regional headwater, that emerging progress can be planned to minimize adverse impacts and, if done artfully, improve the quality and resilience of our water resources and natural environment. The cumulative effect of many individual impacts could be devastating or seamless and each of us as an individual resident player has a role in this unfolding story.

The region’s water flows over and resides within our surface topography that includes the foundational bedrock and the superficial glacial deposits that define our visible landscape. Domestic water supplies historically have been taken from all these compartments, and the threats to the water supply vary with each compartment. Individuals may find their personal concerns about water are tied to the water source on which they rely, but as all water sources are interconnected, awareness of the multiple historical approaches to obtaining potable water is relevant to the complete story which begins with our bedrock.

The exposed bedrock of northern New England is the by-product of plate tectonics (Reference Eusden Geology of White Mountains[CN1] ) and the movements of the continents beginning with the merging of older continents to create the most recent super continent Pangea almost 500 million years ago and extending through several hundred million years of metamorphic compressions and foldings and then the subsequent rifting of the supercontinent 230 million years ago. Failed rifting faults created valleys such as the Connecticut River Valley and the Ammonoosuc Valley whereas the successful rift formed the nearby Atlantic Ocean. The Rock “continental islands” of the earth’s crust move slowly relatively to each other and the poles. If two continents were to separate from each other by 3000 miles over 300 million years, their average separation speed from each other would be would be 3 miles in 300,000 years (0.1 mile in 10,000 years), but if they are rotating around, their separation speed would be even less.  Continental movement is infinitesimally slow in the context of human experience. The  volcanism associated with the formation of the Atlantic is believed to have caused the higher peaks of the present day White Mountains, so the rock basin which underlies our region date to the existence of Pangea from its formation to its break up, a period in which ecosystems flourished, the carboniferous era of high carbon dioxide provided vigorous photosynthesis, abundant plant growth and resultant high oxygen content leading to larger insects and animals sequestering that hydrocarbon in our current oil reserves around the planet. The lower hills and mountains to the north and west in our region date to early periods and the formation of Pangea. The metamorphic changes that occurred in these rocks exposed sediments to intense heat and pressure and is the source of minerals, gems and metals that can be found at various locations throughout the region. These minerals were the focus of intensive 19th century prospecting and the mining industry that was an early economic force in the settlement of the region. Remains of mines and prospecting activities can be found scattered throughout the woodlands of the North Country, and the remains of this activity represent a threat to the purity of locally sourced water, a threat to which we all should be aware.

The mountainous terrain defines the flow of surface waters and the watershed divides that direct surface water toward the sea in multiple directions. Northern Coös County and the first Connecticut Lakes defines our southward flowing watershed of northern New Hampshire distinct from the St Lawrence bound surface waters of Quebec. The Forest Lands of Northern Coös flow east or west and feed the Connecticut River to the west and the Androscoggin River to the east and water thus travels to mid coast Maine or the eastern Connecticut to find the sea. Southern Coös and Northern Grafton Counties both feed the Connecticut Water shed with the Ammonoosuc and Israel Rivers draining westward through the “failed” rift that is the broad Ammonoosuc Valley separating the Kilkenny Range from the Presidential and Franconia Ranges. North Country residents should consider where they individually reside relative to this network of watersheds, as they consider the water resources to their residence and community.   It is noted that the southeastern part of Franconia from Profile Lake in Franconia Notch State Park to the Pemigewasset Wilderness in the White Mountain National Forest includes the Headwaters of the Pemigewasset River that flows south into the Merrimack reaching the Atlantic near Newburyport Massachusetts.

One might think this is the end of the story. Our snow and rain collect on the higher elevations and flow toward the sea but in fact most of us obtain our water from wells that may be in superficial in the surface soils or deep in the bedrock. The story thus extends from the watersheds to an appreciation of glaciation and the surface soils that dam and absorb the surface water and the movement of water between bedrock and the superficial layers. Most modern private wells tap water in the bedrock, while municipal wells require higher flow rates to supply peak demands and those wells are often placed in glacial aquifers, or the water supplies may be drawn from surface waters gathered in reservoir lakes or in our larger rivers.

The movement of water through the bedrock starts with fissures and cracks in the rock at the highest altitudes of our mountains and then follows paths of least resistance through fractures and faults in the rock and into fractured bedrock aquifers. Depending on the path of the water, the head of pressure coming from the high altitudes may force that water back up as artesian wells or springs that bring bedrock aquifer water to the surface soils and ponds or in contrast the pressure in the bedrock aquifer may be locally lower and water from the surface soils and glacial till may serve to also re-supply water to the bedrock aquifers. The complexity of the movements means that in any specific location water may be coming and going between surface, glacial, and bedrock sources but only after expensive and time consuming  detailed hydrologic study can these details at the local level be fully understood. In New Hampshire, the Department of Environmental Services is charged with regulating and protecting our overall water quality and for deeper understanding of our regional hydrology they partner with the regional office of the US Geologic Survey in Pembroke, NH.

ACT’s collaboration with PSU and area conservation commissions has identified the regulators and scientists who focus on these matters on behalf of the region. In this series, Reflections on Water,  we will explore various aspects of this story to help our community better understand the vulnerability and risks that can locally threaten our water supply and teach toward polices and approaches to development that can minimize adverse impact and mitigate threats associated with our water supply in an era of climate change. The legacy of the multiple glaciation cycles that have characterized the region in the past few million years (recent time speaking geologically) have substantially influenced our headwaters geography and will be the focus of the next chapter in this series and set the series up to explore various risks to local waters in our region.

 [CN1]Reference Durand Press, Lyme NH 2013...lead author J. Dykstra Eusden

Banner Photo by: EP Chow