Confined and unconfined aquifers, Darcy's law for groundwater flow, well hydraulics and the cone of depression, aquifer pumping tests, and groundwater contamination transport and remediation basics.
Groundwater behaves nothing like flow in a pipe or open channel — it moves slowly through pore space under a hydraulic gradient governed by Darcy's law, and an aquifer's confined-versus-unconfined character decides how it responds to pumping, recharge, and contamination in ways that are easy to get backwards. This module builds Darcy's law from first principles through a fully worked flux-and-seepage-velocity calculation, covers well hydraulics and the cone of depression pumping creates, and closes with how a contaminant plume actually moves and how it is remediated once it does.
By the end of this module you should be able to explain why a confined aquifer well's static water level is not the top of the aquifer, and why seepage velocity — not the Darcy flux alone — is the number that actually predicts how fast a contaminant plume travels toward a downgradient well.