Superfund Research Program
Hydrogeology Core
Project Leader: Alexander F. van Geen
Grant Number: P42ES010349
Funding Period: 2000-2021
Project-Specific Links
Final Progress Reports
PublicationsFinal Progress Reports
The Hydrogeology Support Core provides information on the groundwater and surface-water flow and transport regime at the field sites in the United States and Bangladesh, and it supports Drs. Van Geen and Chillrud as well as the Research Translation Core.
Notable Advances for the Last Period
Field Efforts: In January 2010, Core researchers conducted a field trip to Bangladesh and continued work on characterizing the deeper, low-arsenic aquifers. They sampled wells supplying low-arsenic water to the communities in the research area for chemical composition and environmental isotopes such as noble gases and radiocarbon. The researchers found that groundwater in these formations are hundreds to thousands of years old. They also tested the capability of deeper aquifer sediments to absorb arsenic in the case that shallow, high-arsenic groundwater would make it into deeper formations by over pumping or well leakage. Researchers developed and set up a system in the field that keeps sediment columns anoxic and flushed them for several weeks with high-arsenic water pumped right at the site. The same system was used to determine the quantity of mobilizable arsenic in the shallow aquifer at the intensive field-study site K.
Laboratory Efforts: Core researchers adapted a method on the ion chromatograph that reduced the measurement time for bromide, a tracer used in many of the field and lab experiments, by a factor of three.
Sample Measurements: Researchers performed 21 3H, 36 3He, and 24 14C analyses on samples from wells in Bangladesh and about 100 Br measurements for column experiments.
Modeling: The Core supported groundwater-flow modeling activities (MODFLOW, MT3D) at site X in Bangladesh in order to quantify the groundwater/surface-water interactions. Reseachers used tracer data to calibrate the dispersivity used in the model. They were able to reproduce the observed distribution of arsenic at site X with remarkable success (Aziz et al., 2010).
Instrument Development: The Core further studied and finalized the design of a multichannel reagent supply system that has been successfully used by researchers and subsequently by a consulting firm collaborating with them at the Vineland Superfund site (Wovkulich et al., 2010).