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Dowsing is the practice of detecting resources or objects beneath the ground by passing handheld, inert tools such as forked sticks, pendulums, or metal rods over a terrain. For example, dowsers typically determine prospective water-well drilling locations by walking with a horizontally held forked tree branch until it becomes vertical, claiming the the strength of the pull felt by the dowser correlates with the potential well’s flow rate.
Those skeptical of dowsing’s efficacy point to the crudeness of its methods as a self-evident reason to question it. They assert that dowsers’ use of inert tools indicates that the dowsers themselves actually make subconscious determinations concerning the likely location of groundwater using clues derived from surface conditions; the tools’ movements merely expected to be ubiquitous, making it statistically unlikely that a dowsed well will be completely dry.
Proponents of dowsing point out that it involves a number of distinct techniques and contend that each of these techniques should be evaluated separately. They also note that numerous dowsing studies have been influenced by a lack of care in selecting the study population; dowsers are largely self-proclaimed and self-certified, and verifiably and hydrologists who use scientific tools such as electromagnetic sensors or seismic readings to locate groundwater.
The last two claims were corroborated during a recent and extensive study that utilized teams of the most successful dowsers, geologists, and hydrologists to locate reliable water supplies in various arid countries. Efforts were concentrated on finding groundwater in narrow, tilted fracture zones in bedrock underlying surface sediments. The teams were unfamiliar request even located a dry fracture zone, suggesting that dowsers can detect variations in subsurface conditions.
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