Stephan Ernst Riess (26 December 189817 December 1985) was a German geochemist, mineralogist, geo-hydrologist and dowser who immigrated to the US after World War I. He worked for over five decades, located over 800 water wells, and studied the concept of earth-generated water, also known as "new water" or "primary water".
Riess ultimately formulated the Theory of Primary Water and through the applied science of geo-hydrology, the study of surface waters of deep Earth origin, worked to end water scarcity globally.
Riess's theory of primary water was criticized in mainstream geological and hydrological publications. A number of wells cited by Reiss as examples of high-yield primary water were found on analysis to be of meteoric origin. In addition, several wells drilled by Reiss did not perform as he had promised. Although the existence of large reserves of water deep underground are not disputed, the potability of such water is.
Biography
Born in 1898 to the Prussian Army officer Herman Franz Wolf Riess von Scheurnschloss and his wife (née Koch) in Dillingen on the Danube, Kingdom of Bavaria (by that date part of the German Empire), he joined a "school ship" at the age of 14 to train to become a sailor. A few years later he served aboard a German Navy ship that was sunk during the 1916 Battle of Jutland in the North Sea. He was saved from the frigid sea by the British and became a prisoner of war. While a POW in England he began to learn English. After World War I he returned to Germany, where he studied chemistry and metallurgy. Affected by the crisis of the post-war years of the Weimar Republic, Riess would travel to Australia and South America and ultimately the United States where he ended up in California working industrial mine concerns.
During the late 1920s and early 1930s while working at mines throughout the American Southwest he experienced frequent flooding of mining operations by what seemed to him as inexplicable and sometimes immense flows of subterranean water. Riess began to study these phenomena as a new area of research. While working for Hoover Family interests in El Dorado Canyon south of Las Vegas, Nevada, where all water was piped great distance and elevation from the Colorado River, Riess worked with a crew to hand dig his first primary water well. When the source was struck, laborers scrambled from the pit to avoid drowning; eventually the free-flowing water created a lagoon until it was brought under control.
Theory of primary water
Riess's theories and exploits were chronicled in what is considered to be the primary water textbook, "New Water for a Thirsty World" by University of Southern California economics professor Michael Salzman published in 1960, with a foreword by Aldous Huxley. Salzman learned of Riess as a result of numerous news articles chronicling Riess's exploits during the 1950s. Riess introduced the term "primary water" into English, for what in mainstream geology is known as juvenile water. He called "the new water he finds "primary" because of its close association with primary minerals." In 1957, Encyclopædia Britannica's Book of the Year wrote the following on The "New Water" Theory of Stephan Riess: "Stephan Riess of California formulated a theory that 'new water' which never existed before, is constantly being formed within the earth by the combination of elemental hydrogen and oxygen and that this water finds its way to the surface, and can be located and tapped, to constitute a steady and unfailing new supply."
As a mining engineer in the 1940s Riess had access to government and mining company assay laboratories. In order to investigate the problem of subterranean water which caused certain mines to have to be abandoned, he began taking soil and rock samples from the failed mines and submitted them to chemical analysis. Riess thereby developed a body of test data leading to a previously undetected pattern. These waters, he noted:
Emanated from below and surged upward, often to elevations far above the water table even in zones of no known aquifer with little precipitation, usually in hard rock Was chemically associated with Plutonic rock (which solidifies deep in the Earth where the cooling is slow and the various minerals have had time to crystallize) and not with any of the aggregate usually associated with meteoric water Traveled in a vertical or semi-vertical direction from the interior of the Earth toward the surface in hard rock faults or fissures