“However, we still see increases in radium from 2000 to 2018 in the rest of the state, regardless of if there is a confining unit or not.” ![]() “We found that, overall, the radium levels are increasing more in the confined region in the eastern part of the state,” said Plechacek. Mathews said all those conditions are found below the regional confining unit in eastern Wisconsin. Previous studies have shown that elevated radium occurs in groundwater that is old, has elevated dissolved solids or is anoxic. In the rest of the state, you don’t have this really thick shale layer, so we call it regionally unconfined.” “In the very eastern part of Wisconsin, there’s a thick shale layer that acts as a regional confining unit, separating the deep Cambrian-Ordovician bedrock below from the shallow Silurian bedrock above. Mathews explained what conditions result in elevated radium in groundwater. The students took information from a long-term, publicly available dataset by the DNR and examined the numbers from the year 2000 through 2018 for trends in radium levels, focusing on the most-problematic deep sandstone aquifer. Water softeners can lower radium levels in drinking water, as can diluting it with water containing lower radium concentrations. In Wisconsin, the highest radium levels occur in water from two types of rock aquifers: the deep sandstone in Wisconsin’s eastern quarter and the crystalline granite found in the north-central part of the state. Some rocks transfer radium more effectively than others into groundwater. As the water moves through the underground aquifer system, minerals and other elements, including radium, dissolve out of the rock and into the groundwater. ![]() Radium occurs naturally in some Wisconsin groundwater. (“ Spatial and temporal variability of radium in the Wisconsin Cambrian-Ordovician aquifer system.”)Īccording to the National Academy of Sciences, radium is of concern because long-term exposure to elevated levels of this contaminant in drinking water may result in an increased risk of bone cancer. 20 in “AWWA Water Science,” a journal of the American Water Works Association. Madeleine Mathews, Amy Plechacek and Marie Dematatis conducted their study on this natural contaminant under the guidance of Matthew Ginder-Vogel, associate professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at UW-Madison, by putting a new spin on groundwater data collected by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR). Several graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were part of a research team that found levels of radium in groundwater from public water supply wells in much of Wisconsin have risen over the past 18 years.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |