Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 10 -- Geophysical, Pnuematic and Electromagnetic Engines
A variant on the vapor-bootstrap theory was put forward by
Giovanni Battista in Almagestum Novum (1651). Moisture rises
within the earth as natural vapor from seawater that has seeped
into the ground. Condensed by the cold of winter or at night, a
vacuum ensues and seawater is drawn up to fill it. Rainfall could
not provide an adequate supply for springs, as it penetrates no
more than 4 or 5 meters into the earth; and the Bible records that
springs were in existence before the first rainfall.
Kircher, never at a loss for explanations, also looked to air pressure. From his Mundus
Subterraneus (1665),
The sea, by pressure of air and wind or movement of the tide pushes the waters through
subterranean passages to the highest water chambers of the mountains.
Readers of "The Artesian Well," Western Rural and American Stockman, February 22, 1894,
were misinformed that some artesian wells are due to subterranean gasses.
The philosophy of the flow of water from artesian wells is generally known. No matter how
deep in the earth the well may have been sunk to strike a subterranean vein or pool of water,
one of two causes must operate to force a flow of water to the surface. One of these causes
[the sole correct one, we now know], and the most common, is the existence of a fountain or
source of supply situated at a higher altitude than the point of discharge at the surface of the
ground where the well is situated, and generally a long distance away. The other cause, as a
whole or in part, is the expansive force of air and gases, which operating under the column of
water to be forced to the surface, supplies the power needed to do the work which the gravity
pressure from a distance and higher fountain head has failed to do.
Nathaniel S. Shaler's discussion of artesian wells in Outlines of the Earth's History, A Popular
Study in Physiography (1898) was a bit more complex.
It may be well to note the fact that the greater part of the so-called artesian wells, or borings
which deliver water to a height above the surface, are not true artesian sources, in that they do
not send up the water by the action of gravitation, but under the influence of gaseous
pressure... In all cases this water contains a certain amount of gases derived from the
decomposition of various substances, but principally from the alteration of iron pyrite, which
affords sulphuretted hydrogen. Thus the water is forced to the surface with considerable
energy, and the well is often named artesian, though it flows by gas pressure on the principle of
the soda-water fountain.
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