Sustained Change in Tidal Response of Well Water Levels: Possible Evidence of Confinement Change of Aquifer

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-946-9_22How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Well water levels; Tidal analysis methods; Aquifer confinement

Abstract

Deep confined aquifers overlain by barrier formations may become leaky after large earthquakes, hydrological processes and even land subsidence. It suggests that monitoring of aquifer confinement may be needed to ensure if the deep aquifer is really confined. In recent studies, several methods have been proposed to determine aquifer confinement based on the response of well water levels to Earth and atmospheric tides. And in this paper, we applied a comprehensive (combination of the three) tidal determination method to a deep CX well (~2400m) in North China, and comprehensively determined the confinement of aquifer observed in CX well. The results showed that well tide could quantitively and continuously determine aquifer confinement. And aquifer confinement determined varied significantly between the tidal and traditional method (using lithology at the time of well formation), suggesting not only that there are differences between the methods, but also that aquifer confinement may change with time. The change of aquifer confinement may influence the safe underground storage of waste. In addition, in seismic subsurface fluid observation, wells with well confinement are usually selected for seismic precursor observation wells. Therefore, the determination of aquifer confinement contributes to the safe underground storage of wastewater and provides a theoretical basis for earthquake monitoring and prediction.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Chen-Yue Hu
AU  - Xin Liao
AU  - Xue-Liang Chen
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/01/04
TI  - Sustained Change in Tidal Response of Well Water Levels: Possible Evidence of Confinement Change of Aquifer
BT  - Proceedings of the 11th Annual Meeting of Risk Analysis Council of China Association for Disaster Prevention (RAC 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 174
EP  - 180
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-946-9_22
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-946-9_22
ID  - Hu2026
ER  -