Groundwaters, Ancient and Modern
Part of modern research is on the temperature of groundwaters circulating either at depth or near the surface. Iceland is developing hot water and electricity supplies From the geothermal waters connected with the volcanoes and lava fields of the island. All geothermal waters carry minerals in solution which are deposited on cooling, eg: silica and aragonite terraces round the Old Faithful geyser of Yellowstone Park.
It should be possible to obtain heat from deep wells, in suitable rock strata, by circulating water through two wells, one the injection well, the other, the extraction well. These wells would be very deep, eg: at Winterbourne Kingston (Lincs) the temperature at a depth of 2,400 metres is 80 degrees C but very saline. Heat flow maps are be Hungary, Anglo-Paris basin, the mid-Mediterranean and the Hampshire basin in southern England, to mention a few. Sweden has research going on at the moment on the movement of water in granite, a seemingly impermeable rock, yet it was discovered to be circulating at a few litres per hour, a surprising result.
Modern methods of dating water use the isoptoes of Tritum H3 which has a life of twelve years, carbon 14, which gives dates from 0-40,000 years, helium 4 gives dates to 5,000 years and uranium gives dates from 2,000-1 million years.
In dating our Bath hot spring water, no tritium was found, which makes it older than 12 years and carbon 14 gives a date somewhere between 8 and 10,000 years’ old. This suggests that the water issuing forth today at a rate of a quarter million gallons per day was once the melt water of the last ice age.