It is National Groundwater Awareness Week, and the state of California is aware. It knows every aspect of its groundwater. How does that knowledge help Bay Area counties replenish their underground basins?

Every 12 days, a radar satellite passes 430 miles above the state, mapping the sinking surface with centimeter-scale accuracy. From 2020 to 2023, a helicopter zigzagged across priority aquifers towing a 100-foot hoop that sent electromagnetic signals into the ground to model its geological architecture in depths of down to 1,000 feet.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.