Tracking pollution with sweetenersGroundwater flow is a complicated but incredibly important issue.
Tracking pollution with sweetenersGroundwater flow is a complicated but incredibly important issue. Deep underground, water flows in complicated directions through all sorts of geologic materials, sometimes taking hundreds of years or longer to flow through an entire unit.This combination of complicated paths, slow motion, and deep burial makes it hard to answer important questions. Imagine that a city is relying on groundwater to supply its people, but it is discovered that a contaminant has entered the ground. How much contaminant is there? Where did it come from? How can it be cleaned up? These are multi-million dollar questions with answers that can be buried under hundreds of meters of rock.Scientists, however, are creative people, and sometimes they come up with creative solutions to problems like these. Areas like you see on the left, landfills and garbage dumps are obvious sources of contamination. The ideal landfill wouldn’t leak, but it’s hard to contain those things over decades. If you discover that there is a contaminant coming from the landfill, is there a way to identify source of the leak? Turns out, one answer to that can be found in the image on the right; artificial sweeteners.Artificial sweeteners started being heavily used a few decades ago and started becoming trash at the same time. They dissolve in water, so they can be used to trace leaks. And importantly, they change with time; as new sweeteners have been introduced, the chemicals leaching out change.Scientists from the Water Science and Technology Directorate in Canada tested a nearby stream and were able to identify not only its source; landfill versus other area, but even could tell the age of the material in the landfill that was leaking. The age-dating only gives to within a few years, but that can distinguish which parts of landfills are leaking or whether a contaminant is sourced from a landfill or some other area.-JBBImage credits: https://www.flickr.com/photos/punchingjudy/3524925775/http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bald_Eagle_at_Tomoka_Landfill_-Flickr-_Andrea_Westmoreland.jpgRead full study:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24041482 -- source link
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