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Lesson 02.5 · 3D Viewer
This is the actual Shelby County geological model built by CAESER at the University of Memphis. It's interpolated from 131 real well logs, cross-checked against 3,032 formation picks. Toggle the layers on and off. Turn up the vertical exaggeration. Orbit the camera. This is what your drinking water is buried under.
Every layer is a 3D surface interpolated between well logs. Where there are many wells, the surfaces are well-constrained. Where wells are sparse, they're estimates. CAESER updates this model as new well data comes in.
The viewer ships with vertical exaggeration at 8× by default — meaning heights are 8 times bigger than they really are — because otherwise the layers look almost flat. Try the slider to see what 1× looks like. (Spoiler: Memphis sits on a very flat surface relative to the depth of the aquifer.)
Turn on wireframe mode to see the actual mesh geometry — the triangular faces the model uses to represent each surface.
This is the GMS model v2.1 — a Shelby County groundwater model built in the Groundwater Modeling System (Aquaveo GMS). It was exported to Draco-compressed 3D meshes for web delivery. The full model contains 14 hydrogeologic formations and covers the entire county.
CAESER maintains a detailed local version of this model and updates it based on their $5M MLGW Aquifer Study (2018–2023). That study confirmed 6 previously-suspected breaches in the protective clay and identified 36 new ones.