Drilling of a 1400-foot-deep, multi-port ground-water monitoring well will get underway in west Long Beach, Monday, July 10. The well, which is a joint project of the U.S. Geological Survey, the Water Replenishment District of Southern California and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works, will permit scientists to monitor the county's extension to the Dominguez Gap Seawater Intrusion Barrier, and will provide data for the refinement of both local and regional models of stratigraphy, groundwater flow, and earthquake hazards.

In addition to the Long Beach well, the USGS and the Water Replenishment District have recently installed 24 monitoring wells within the Los Angeles basin, to support a regional ground-water model. With support from LA County, this new well will be continuously cored to 1000 feet, and spot-cored to 1400 feet, using a new coring system acquired by the USGS. The cores taken from the wells will be subjected to an extensive suite of descriptive, geochemical, and physical properties analyses done in a mobile laboratory located at the drill site. The cores will then be sent to the USGS laboratories in Menlo Park, Calif., where they will be kept in refrigerated storage, and made available for future research.

The core data and logs will provide an unprecedented new level of information on the geologic history of the western LA basin, and associated physical and hydrologic properties, according to Dan Ponti, USGS chief scientist for the project. "Along with additional field studies, the core data are being used to develop a digital 3-D sequence-stratigraphic and physical properties model for the Los Angeles and Orange County coastal plain and adjacent continental shelf," Ponti said. "This model has application not only to ground-water investigations, but for earthquake hazards, environmental, and engineering studies as well."

The drill site and laboratory in Long Beach will be open to reporters and photographers during the coring operations, July 10-26. To arrange a time for a visit and interviews, contact Jocelyn Davies at 626-583-7226 or 626-583-7811, or jocey@usgs.gov. Questions regarding this project, or related USGS studies in the Los Angeles area, should be directed to Daniel Ponti , 650-329-5679) or Eric Reichard , 858-637-6834.

As the Nation's largest water, earth and biological science and civilian mapping agency, the USGS works in cooperation with more than 2,000 organizations across the country to provide reliable, impartial, scientific information to resource managers, planners, and other customers. This information is gathered in every state by USGS scientists to minimize the loss of life and property from natural disasters, contribute to the sound conservation, economic and physical development of the Nation's natural resources, and enhance the quality of life by monitoring water, biological, energy, and mineral resources.

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