Your Drinking Water:
A Precious Commodity

Did you know?

The Earth’s surface is made up of 29% land and 71% water; of that, only 3% is fresh water, the rest is salt water.

Glaciers contain two thirds of the earth’s fresh water (66%); the rest of the fresh water is underground (ground water) and only 0.3% is fresh surface water.

40% of all of the earth’s fresh surface water is in just two locations: Russia’s Lake Baikal; it contains 20% of the earth’s fresh surface water and North America’s Great Lakes (Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario).

The Mattapoisett River Watershed is only 29.8 square miles in size. The Mattapoisett River is 12 miles long from Snipatuit Pond to Buzzards Bay.

Cranberry growers, a major part of the SouthCoast local economy, use the river as a source of water for bog irrigation and flooding during harvest.

Species that depend on our waters:

Fish: River Herring, Eel, Red Fin Pickerel, Tesselateed Darters & Pond Fish

Mammals: North American River Otter, American Mink, Red Fox & White-tailed Deer

Birds: Red Shouldered Hawk & Little Blue Heron

River Herring
The survival of our local river herring depend on the Mattapoisett River as their run from the ocean to their spawning area in Snipatuit Pond.

Terms of Reference

Aquifer

An aquifer is an underground layer of water-bearing rock. Water-bearing rocks are permeable, meaning that they have openings that liquids and gases can pass through. An aquifer fills with water from rain or melted snow that drains into the ground. Aquifers act as reservoirs for groundwater.

Ground Water

Ground water is the water that is found beneath the Earth’s surface (we know – why isn’t it called “underground water?!”). Ground water is important because it is where we get our water for drinking, agriculture business and household use. Everyday, people in the United States use 77.5 billions gallons of ground water.

Watershed

A watershed is the area of land where all of the water that is under it drains off and goes into the same body of water, whether it is a creek, river, marsh or ocean. Watersheds come in all sizes, a small watershed for a creek is part of a larger watershed for a river, which is also part of a larger watershed for a bay and so on.