Water supply in the rapidly developing Lewes and Rehoboth Beach areas of coastal Sussex County in Delaware is provided by more than 80 individual public water wells and hundreds of domestic wells. Significant concerns exist about the future viability of the ground-water resource in light of contamination threats and loss of recharge areas. As part of Delaware's Source Water and Assessment Protection Program, wellhead protection areas (WHPAs) were delineated for the 15 largest public supply wells operated by three public water systems. The WHPAs are derived from analysis of results of dozens of steady-state ground-water flow simulations. The simulations were performed with a Visual MODFLOW-based 6-layer, 315,600-node model coupled with GIS-based data on land cover, ground-water recharge and resource potentials, and other base maps and aerial imagery. Because the model was operated under steady-state conditions, long-term average pumping rates were used in the model. The flow model includes four boundary types (constant head, constant flux, head-dependant flux, and no flow), with layers that represent the complex hydrogeologic conditions based on aquifer characterizations. The model is calibrated to within a 10% normalized root mean squared error of the observed water table.

Borehole Oh25-02, located about 3 miles southwest of Lewes, Delaware, ends at a total depth of 1,337 ft in a mid-Oligocene glauconitic silt unit. It penetrated 317 ft of glauconitic sands and silts between the base of the Calvert Formation at a depth of 1,020 ft and total depth. A hiatus at 1,218 ft separates an outer neritic lower Miocene interval (Globorotalia kugleri Zone) above it from a deep upper bathyal mid-Oligocene (G. opima opima Zone) section below; the lower section is characterized by abundant large uvigerinid benthic foraminiferal species representing the transition from Uvigerina tumeyensis to Tiptonina nodifera. Similar uvigerinid assemblages identify the mid-Oligocene unit in boreholes near Bridgeville and Milford, Delaware; Cape May, New Jersey; and Ocean City, Maryland. Updip from these boreholes, the Calvert Formation, of latest Oligocene-middle Miocene age in Delaware, unconformably overlies middle Eocene glauconitic sands of the Piney Point Formation. The juxtaposition of the downdip mid-Oligocene rocks against the updip middle Eocene rocks can best be explained by a fault between the two regions.

Sussex County is in the Atlantic Coastal Plain. Its relatively flat, featureless topography is characterized by two terrace-like surfaces; the lower one rises from sea level to about 40 feet above sea level, and the higher one rises inland from 40 to about 60 feet above sea level. Peculiar landforms of low relief, broad ovals, similar to the "Carolina bays," and to the "New Jersey basins" are common on the sandy flat divides in Sussex County. Hydrologically, they are sites of much ground-water discharge, by evapotranspiration, from meadow and marsh of lush vegetation.

Geology and hydrology of the Northern Coastal Area, Delaware. There are 2 sheets in the series.

The surficial geology of the Lewes and Cape Henlopen quadrangles reflects the geologic history of the Delaware Bay estuary and successive high and low stands of sea levels during the Quaternary. The subsurface Beaverdam Formation was deposited as part of a fluvial-estuarine system during the Pliocene, the sediments of which now form the core of the Delmarva Peninsula. Following a period of glacial outwash during the early Pleistocene represented by the Columbia Formation found to the northwest of the map area (Ramsey, 1997), the Delaware River and Estuary developed their current positions. The Lynch Heights and Scotts Corners Formations (Ramsey, 1993, 1997, 2001) represent shoreline and estuarine deposits associated with high stands of sea level during the middle to late Pleistocene on the margins of the Delaware Estuary. In the map area, the Lynch Heights Formation includes relict spit and dune deposits at the ancestral intersection of the Atlantic Coast and Delaware Bay systems, similar in geomorphic position to the modern Cape Henlopen.

These vector and raster data sets contain the rock unit polygons for the surficial geology in ESRI shapefile and TIF format for the Delaware Coastal Plain covered by DGS Geologic Map No. 12 (Lewes-Cape Henlopen area).

The location of the fresh-salt-water-boundary in the deeper aquifers of Delaware is related mainly to head values. Near coastal areas, dynamic conditions may prevail that affect the interface position within shallow aquifers open to the sea. Holocene and Columbia sands which form Delaware's shallow water-table aquifers contain brackish water in scattered coastal areas while brackish water in the artesian aquifers is found at various depths. Water from Chesapeake Group sediments (Miocene) is fresh in Kent County but is salty in poorly defined areas of Sussex County. The interface in the Piney Point Formation (Eocene) lies just north of Milford and extends in a northeast-southwesterly direction across the State. Brackish water exists in the Magothy and Potomac formations of Cretaceous age a few miles south of Middletown. Heavy pumping near sources of brackish water should be avoided for the present. Proper location of monitoring wells is necessary for detection of future chloride movement.