Geology Department Highlights

December 15, 2005

Richelle Allen-King and colleagues awarded $1.2 million to study groundwater contamination at the Hanford nuclear site, Washington

Dr. Allen-King, Associate Professor in the Geology Deparment at UB, and her colleagues have been awarded $1.2M to study the processes that affect the fate of the contaminant carbon tetrachloride (CT) in groundwater at DOE’s Hanford site, Washington. The three-year project is funded through the competitive Environmental Management Science Program (EMSP) of DOEs Office of Science. It represents a new collaboration between Dr. Allen-King, a hydrogeochemist, sedimentologist Dr. Gary Weissmann at the University of New Mexico, and a team of geostatisticians and hydrogeologists from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) under the direction of Dr. Christopher Murray. The project is titled: “Geochemical and physical aquifer property heterogeneity:  a multi-scale sedimentologic approach to reactive solute transport.” The properties of groundwater aquifers are spatially complex and we have only limited access to ‘see’ into the earth through drill core that samples a very small proportion of the whole. This leads to poor ability to predict contaminant transport for the purposes of evaluating the risks to human and environmental health, or to plan clean up. The project team’s approach to this limitation is to estimate the spatial properties of aquifers that control contaminant movement and degradation using a multi-scale sedimentological framework – in effect, using an understanding of the sediment transport and deposition processes that generated the different packages of aquifer sediments to both construct a ‘picture’ of the subsurface sediments and to understand the potential of the different packages to react geochemically with the contaminants. This project is one part of Dr. Allen-King’s research portfolio, which seeks to provide means to improve our understanding of anthropogenic organic contaminant transport in ground and surface waters. Such improved understanding leads to improved cleanup design and reduced uncertainty in risk prediction. Dr. Allen-King is looking forward working with the new research students that will join her UB group to work on this project.

December 16, 2005

"Geological Disaster Prevention," State University of New York at Buffalo
Students Learn Disaster Prevention From an Ecological Point of View
By Erin Montgomery