How exactly do contaminants spread underground? How much urban stress can an aquifer withstand?
With the need for clean fresh water growing daily, finding answers to those questions is a top priority for researchers at G360, the new Centre for Applied Groundwater Research at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.
The state-of-the-art G360 centre has several components: a Bedrock Aquifer Field Facility, two analytical laboratories, nearly 20 field research sites in North and South America, Europe and Asia and, in the future, a Groundwater Discovery Centre on the university campus.
“Our goal is to provide a research centre where anyone in the world can come, test their theories and do research,” says the G360 Centre’s Director, Dr. Beth Parker, a University of Guelph engineering professor and one of Canada’s leading scientists in groundwater contamination. Dr. Parker’s research is supported by $5 million through the Ontario Research Fund, along with annual funding by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and private companies.
One particular focus of the new G360 institute is researching the behaviour of chlorinated solvents in fractured sedimentary bedrock. Chlorinated solvents are common industrial chemicals used in a wide variety of every day processes from dry cleaning to de-greasing equipment. As such, they are some of the most prevalent environmental contaminants in the world and particularly difficult ones to clean up.
The challenge is that the rock adsorbs the contaminants and the fractured rock structure enables the chemicals to migrate deep through natural cracks and channels in all directions through the aquifer, making environmental clean-up and remediation difficult and expensive.
Since most of the world’s fresh water passes through aquifers at some point, understanding how to maintain them is a critically important global issue, especially with the growing demand for more and more clean water.
“This knowledge is needed to help us make better decisions not just in Canada but around the world,” says Dr. Parker. “Understanding aquifers is directly related to water-use planning and protecting our water supply.”
To discover the answers, G360 researchers are drilling a network of boreholes and wells across the University of Guelph campus and throughout the City of Guelph which sits atop one of Canada’s largest bedrock aquifers. The resulting information will produce the most detailed portrait of an aquifer in an urban setting anywhere in the world. As such, it will provide an invaluable benchmarking tool for scientists and engineers worldwide who are working to solve local issues and develop more effective remediation technologies.
The project is a collaboration of three Ontario universities with expertise in water resource engineering – the universities of Guelph, McMaster and Waterloo – and includes cross-disciplinary collaborations with universities in Quebec, Switzerland and the United States.
The G360 centre is the latest addition to a network of more than 21 research institutes in Ontario that are dedicated to both finding answers to water-related issues as well as training the next generation of water scientists.
The University of Guelph, for example, is also the lead institution for the University Consortium for Field-Focused Groundwater Contamination Research. The consortium is an international scientific collaboration that involves eight Canadian and U.S. universities, connections with the U.S. Geological Survey and several European institutions, and company sponsors that include Boeing Aerospace, DuPont, Dow Chemicals, Lockheed Martin, Schlumberger Water Services, General Electric and others.
Other nearby research centres include the National Water Research Institute , which has almost 400 scientific and technical professionals conducting research into water-related environmental issues; the Water Institute at the University of Waterloo, which brings together the expertise of more than 100 faculty members from six faculties and close to 20 departments; and the United Nations University - Institute for Water, Environment and Health, which acts as the UN’s think-tank on water.
To build on this remarkable pool of expertise, the Ontario government recently passed the Water Opportunities Act. The goal is to make Ontario the leading clean water jurisdiction in North America by the development of innovative water technologies and encouraging smarter water use within the province.
Through initiatives like these, Ontario researchers and water technology companies can develop the innovative solutions needed for a world that is getting thirstier every day.