The Importance of Groundwater in Critical Zone Science

The critical zone (CZ)-from treetops to groundwater-is an increasingly studied part of the earth system, where scientists study interactions between water, air, rock, soil, and life. Groundwater is both a boundary and an essential store in this integrated system, but is often not well considered in part because of the difficulty in accessing it and its slow movement relative to other parts of the system. Here, we describe some fundamental areas where groundwater hydrology is of fundamental importance to CZ science, including sustaining streamflow and vegetation, reacting with minerals to produce dissolved solutes and regolith, and influencing energy fluxes across the land-atmosphere interface. As the timing and type of precipitation change with climate, groundwater may play an even more important role in CZ processes as a sustainable water source for plants and streamflow. Many open questions also exist about the role of CZ processes on groundwater. Many data streams are needed and important to quantifying the integrated response of the CZ to groundwater and vice versa, but long-term data records are often incomplete or discontinued due to limited funding. We argue that the long timescales of processes that involve groundwater necessitate data collection efforts beyond typical federal funding timespans. Sustaining monitoring networks and developing new ones aimed at testing hypotheses related to slow-moving, groundwater-controlled CZ processes should be a scientific priority, and here we outline some open questions that we hope will motivate groundwater scientists to get involved in CZ science.