Juergen Hannappel wrote:
"George E. Cawthon" writes:


[...]


What gets contaminated in ground water or "aquifer" if you prefer.
There's another common mistake "ground water aquifer" because ground
water and aquifer mean the same thing. Oops, guess the old editor job
just spilled out.


mode="nitpick"
Isn't the aquifer rather the structure in the ground that contains the
ground water than the water itself? The word certainly means that (it
would be something like "water carrier").
/mode
;-)
Juergen

Technically, you are correct. But you can't have
groundwater without an aquifer and you can't have
an aquifer without groundwater. So ground water
aquifer is still redundant. In common usage,
aquifer is used interchangeably with ground water.

But stupidities abound as I saw in my dictionary.
They define aquifer spring. It should be quite
obvious that all springs are simply groundwater
coming to the surface. So springs necessarily
require an aquifer.