The Incredible Edible Aquifer

Mundell, as the lead consultant for the Marion County Wellfield Education Corporation (MCWEC), led the MCWEC board members through a fun groundwater education activity demonstration last night at their May board meeting. The activity is called “The Incredible, Edible Aquifer” and was created by community education staff at the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality.

In this activity, we used a variety of food items to simulate geological features, such as cereal to simulate a subsurface gravel layer, fruit to represent larger cobbles and boulders, graham crackers to simulate bedrock, and mango slices to simulate discontinuous clay layers. After our geological layers were created, we added sprite or sparkling water to represent groundwater. Then, we added food dye at the surface of our mini-aquifer so we could see how the flow of contamination is affected by different types of geology.

We learned about this fun activity last year at The Groundwater Foundation’s conference in beautiful Boise, Idaho and were excited to share it! We hope to eventually do this activity with members of the community and schools as a way to spread awareness about how important keeping Indianapolis’ groundwater safe is.