Illinois State Water Survey

blog posts

• Brackish Groundwater: A Potential Source for Drinking Water

  Jul 31, 2015 2:15 pm

  A recent article discussed the potential for desalinating brackish groundwater as a potential source of drinking water, specifically in Texas. West Texas is dry and has limited fresh groundwater resources, so it may make economic sense in areas like that.

• More News on Antibiotic Resistance

  May 13, 2015 10:45 am

  I recently read a couple of articles on the development of antibiotic resistance of water-borne pathogenic bacteria, an unsettling reality in the modern world. One article was about antibiotic resistance in China’s waterways primarily due to practices in the pork industry. The other article was about a typhoid epidemic in Africa being traced to drug-resistant bacteria.

• primary for post 168251

  How Much Oil is Spilled Annually?

  May 8, 2015 9:30 am

  Earlier this week it was reported that a train spilled about 2,000 gallons of diesel fuel near the town of Sidney, Illinois (about 15 miles southeast of Champaign). A lot of it apparently ended up in a creek, a tributary of the Salt Fork River. No reports of dead fish yet, but it smelled pretty bad. That story got me wondering, how much oil gets spilled annually?

• Compound in Fracking Fluid Found in Domestic Well

  May 5, 2015 3:00 pm

  In a paper just published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it’s been reported that an organic compound used in gas-drilling fluids, 2-n-Butoxyethanol (C4H9OC2H4OH), was detected in a domestic well in Pennsylvania. This was a bit of a surprise, because actually the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, occurs thousands of feet beneath the aquifer. It appears the contamination is the result of poor practices at the surface, either drilling fluid escaping during the initial drilling of the well, or a leaky drilling waste pit.

• "Tapped"

  Apr 10, 2015 10:30 am

  The Land Conservation Foundation Program in Law and Philosophy at the University of Illinois screened the movie “Tapped” in Champaign the other night and asked me to make a few comments after the film ended. “Tapped” was released in 2008 as an exposé of the bottled water industry. I’ve blogged about bottled water in the past, so I got the gig.

• Petroleum Spills Can Increase Arsenic Leaching

  Jan 30, 2015 4:15 pm

  One of the most widespread contaminants of groundwater in Illinois, and the world, is arsenic. Most of the contamination is naturally occurring, but there are many potential human sources, including mining, fossil fuel combustion, pesticides, and wood preservation. A new study suggests a combination of human and natural contamination, where human activities may increase the release of naturally occurring arsenic.

• primary for post 118943

  More on Fracking and Groundwater Quality

  Nov 26, 2014 2:00 pm

  Another study, this one by the USGS in North Dakota, suggests fracking has not degraded water quality in an overlying aquifer.

• Arsenic in Drinking Water Can Affect Children’s IQ

  Aug 22, 2014 9:45 am

  A recent paper suggests that children exposed to elevated levels of arsenic in their drinking water experienced declines in intelligence [G.A. Wasserman et al., 2014. A cross-sectional study of well water arsenic and child IQ in Maine schoolchildren. Environmental Health 13:23  doi:10.1186/1476-069X-13-23]. Previous studies reported similar results in South Asia and Bangladesh, but this is the first study showing problems in the U.S. Most disturbing to me was that the arsenic concentration threshold above which effects were seen was so low, only 5 µg/L (5 ppb), or half of the drinking water standard in the U.S. and Europe (10 µg/L). The researchers state that the effects on IQ are similar to those found for children with elevated levels of lead in their blood.

• Microplastics

  Jul 11, 2014 3:00 pm

  An interesting, and somewhat concerning, article in the latest issue of Science, on microplastics in the oceanic environment (“Microplastics in the seas,” by Kara Lavender Law and Richard C. Thompson. Science 345(6193):144-145. DOI: 10.1126/science.1254065). Microplastics refers to plastic debris smaller than 5 mm in diameter, and there’s a lot of it in the ocean. How harmful it is to ocean biota is unknown, but there are reasons for concern. Cleaning them up would be an impossible task. Once again, our best policy would be to figure out how to limit them from entering the environment in the first place.

• Drinking Our Own Pee

  Jun 17, 2014 3:00 pm

  Here’s a great article on Slate.com about drinking “recycled” water.