Illinois State Water Survey

blog posts

• Drought and Algal Blooms

  Mar 29, 2013 5:15 pm359 views

  During the 2012 drought, the hot, dry conditions caused blooms of blue-green algae (also known as cyanobacteria) in some water bodies. These blooms can produce a toxin known as microcystin, which has a World Health Organization (WHO) drinking water standard of 20 µg/L. They can also foul the taste and odor of drinking water. Elgin and Aurora reported serious issues with algae in the Fox River in 2012, making the water difficult to treat. Here’s what this stuff looks like:

  

  (photo by Mike Bundren, Illinois EPA)

• Sodium and Drinking Water

  Apr 5, 2013 3:45 pm1069 views

  Too much sodium in our diets has long been known to raise blood pressure and increase the risk of heart disease and stroke. A modeling study published in the journal Hypertension (Coxson, P.G., et al. 2013. Mortality Benefits From US Population-wide Reduction in Sodium Consumption: Projections From 3 Modeling Approaches) suggests that even a small reduction in sodium consumption could save hundreds of thousands of lives. I’ve been involved with a lot of research on the contamination of shallow aquifers from road salt (sodium chloride) runoff, but we typically focus on chloride and not sodium. Chloride is a conservative ion, so it travels in groundwater basically at the speed of the water, whereas sodium is more reactive and thus more difficult to predict in the subsurface. But sodium is definitely increasing in these aquifers. This sodium study got me wondering how much sodium we ingest through drinking water.

  

• Groundwater: Possible Long-Term Source of Nitrate to Streams

  Jun 6, 2013 9:15 am183 views

  We’ve known for a long time that too much nitrogen in streams, lakes, and seas can be a bad thing, and many efforts are being made to reduce the amount of nitrogen (primarily nitrate) coming off of agricultural fields. In addition to being smarter about when and how much fertilizer is applied, a number of techniques designed to slow down movement of runoff to streams, such as constructing wetlands or water-table management, are being tested. Decreasing the concentrations and loads of nitrate in streams in agricultural regions has been remarkably difficult, however, and oftentimes do not match expectations based on these new best management practices (BMPs). A recent study by USGS scientists suggests that the long times it takes for groundwater to discharge to streams is the most likely factor.

• Water Management Issues in the Chicago Region

  Jun 24, 2013 3:15 pm40 views

  This is not strictly a water quality issue, but Marcella Bondie of the Metropolitan Planning Commission in Chicago recently posted a blog post about water management issues in the Chicago region. Its title is “Water, Water Everywhere? DuPage Water Commission leads efforts to better manage Lake Michigan water”, and it’s a good summary.

• Conflicting Reports on Fracking and Groundwater Quality

  Jun 27, 2013 4:30 pm322 views

  A couple of recent reports about the effects of fracking on groundwater quality seem to be contradictory. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (Jackson, R.B., et al., 2013. Increased stray gas abundance in a subset of drinking water wells near Marcellus shale gas extraction) found that wells in northeastern Pennsylvania where the Marcellus Shale is being drilled for natural gas has high levels of gases (methane, ethane, propane) that they say are due to drilling practices. On the other hand, a paper published in the journal Groundwater (Molofsky, L.J., et al., 2013. Evaluation of Methane Sources in Groundwater in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Groundwater 51(3):333–349) suggests that methane is ubiquitous in groundwater in northeastern Pennsylvania, and is not the result of shale gas extraction.

  

  Image from UConn Today

• Disinfectant Byproducts

  Jul 12, 2013 3:00 pm66 views

  A friend recently showed me a newsletter he receives from a company that sells vitamins and dietary supplements; an article in it warned that disinfectant byproducts in public drinking water are a serious health risk. The author referred to a paper published by researchers at the University of Illinois that shows some of these compounds kill cells and cause DNA damage (Pals, J.A., et al., 2011. Biological mechanism for the toxicity of haloacetic acid drinking water disinfection byproducts. Environmental Science & Technology 45:5791–5797). The author then states that unless you have a deep private well that you can test and trust, you should consider buying a distillation system. While disinfection byproducts are no joke and are regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, I think the author overstates the problem and its solution.

• Lithium in Drinking Water

  Jul 19, 2013 2:30 pm18164 views

  The title of a recent paper caught my eye, “Potential environmental and human health impacts of rechargeable lithium batteries in electronic waste” (Kang, D.H.P., et al., 2013. Environ. Sci. Technol., 47(10):5495–5503). It’s about the potential hazardous nature of some of the heavy elements present in lithium-ion and lithium-poly batteries, which includes lead, chromium, cobalt, copper, nickel, thallium, and silver, if they leach into our water resources. But I was actually more interested in lithium, which reminded me of an article I read a few years ago about how elevated levels of lithium in our drinking water might actually be a positive thing.

• Creating Energy while Cleaning Water

  Sep 18, 2013 4:15 pm50 views

  Here’s an interesting news article involving water quality. Engineers from Stanford are developing techniques to harness electricity from microbes as they work to clean human sewage. Basically, by inserting positive and negative electrodes into wasterwater, the researchers “fish for electrons”. During reactions that degrade organic molecules, microbes cluster around the negative electrode and produce electrons, which are then captured by the positive electrode.

• 

  Arsenic in Vietnamese Groundwater

  Sep 25, 2013 4:00 pm133 views

  It’s not every day someone I know is quoted in the New York Times. In yesterday’s (Sept. 24, 2013) ScienceTimes section (p. D5), there was an article highlighting work by Lex van Geen, a geochemist at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University. Lex contacted the Water Survey a couple of years ago about some potential collaboration on arsenic in groundwater in central Illinois, a subject we have studied in some detail. In fact, we just received news that a National Science Foundation proposal that one of our staff (Tom Holm) is co-PI on with Lex has been funded. The research will use a new sampling technique (“freeze shoe”) to collect intact cores of aquifer material, and initial work will probably be done in Tazewell County.

• 

  RIP Ruth Patrick

  Sep 27, 2013 9:15 am66 views

  I don't remember ever hearing of Ruth Patrick before I read her obituary the other day, but I wish I had known her. She was one of the earliest researchers in water quality, studying diatoms in lakes, and revealing the importance of biodiversity. The idea that biological diversity reflects environmental stresses even bears her name, the “Patrick Principle.” She worked when being a woman scientist and an environmentalist were both rare and sometimes suspect, starting her career in the 1930s. I should really know her name, since one of her publications was “Groundwater Contamination in the United States”, published in 1987. RIP, Dr. Patrick.

• 

  Restricting Antibiotics Use for Livestock

  Dec 12, 2013 2:00 pm184 views

  It’s not that common to have important environmental news on the front page of The New York Times, but today is such a day. The Food and Drug Administration yesterday (December 12, 2013) announced a major new policy to phase out the “indiscriminate use” of antibiotics for livestock raised for meat. This is really important, and really good, news for the environment and human health.

• Contaminant Spill of the Day

  Jan 10, 2014 3:45 pm109 views

  There was a major contamination event in West Virginia yesterday, causing the governor to issue a state of emergency. A large amount of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, a coal preparation foaming agent, leaked in the Elk River just outside of Charleston. The size of the spill hasn’t been reported yet. About 300,000 people have been warned not to use tap water for drinking, cooking, or bathing, and a number of businesses and schools have closed as a result.

• How Safe Is Our Drinking Water?

  Jan 17, 2014 3:29 pm755 views

  Here’s a link to what I think is a very good (and brief) article about keeping our drinking water safe, by James Salzman at slate.com. I think a lot of people, including myself, were a bit shaken up by how severely impacted Charleston, WV, was by the discharge of methylcyclohexane methanol (MCHM) into the Elk River, their drinking water supply.

• A Salty Winter

  Feb 21, 2014 10:45 am615 views

  Somewhat lost in all the hype about the heavy snows and frigid temperatures much of the country has had this winter, and the frustration with a pothole epidemic and treacherous roads and sidewalks, is that we may be applying record amounts of road deicing chemicals, primarily salt (NaCl). A couple of recent articles in the New York Times highlighted how much salt we’ve been using. From an article on February 16, 2014, it was reported that Chicago has already spent $25 million for plowing and salting, $5 million more than budgeted. That’s with half of February and all of March still to come; in a typical March, Chicago gets about 7 inches of snow. Other data from that article: Pennsylvania is using road salt at a pace 24% ahead of normal, and Maine has already spent almost 40% more than they do in a normal year.

• The Cost of Unregulated Pollution

  Apr 18, 2014 4:15 pm28 views

  An op-ed piece published in the New York Times on April 6, 2014, is pretty sobering. Its title is “China’s Poisonous Waterways”, and in it the author describes the massive amount of industrial and agricultural pollution that has contaminated the river that runs through his childhood village since he left. There seems to be an undue amount of sickness and early death in the village, which he attributes to the poisonous river. His old village is one of more than 200 “cancer villages” in China with extraordinary cancer rates. 

• Drinking Our Own Pee

  Jun 17, 2014 3:00 pm71 views

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

• 

  Microplastics

  Jul 11, 2014 3:00 pm91 views

  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.

• Arsenic in Drinking Water Can Affect Children’s IQ

  Aug 22, 2014 9:45 am134 views

  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.

• 

  More on Fracking and Groundwater Quality

  Nov 26, 2014 2:00 pm71 views

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

• Petroleum Spills Can Increase Arsenic Leaching

  Jan 30, 2015 4:15 pm38 views

  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.

• "Tapped"

  Apr 10, 2015 10:30 am136 views

  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.

• Compound in Fracking Fluid Found in Domestic Well

  May 5, 2015 3:00 pm65 views

  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.

• 

  How Much Oil is Spilled Annually?

  May 8, 2015 9:30 am385 views

  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?

• More News on Antibiotic Resistance

  May 13, 2015 10:45 am32 views

  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.

• Brackish Groundwater: A Potential Source for Drinking Water

  Jul 31, 2015 2:15 pm155 views

  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.

• 

  Acid Mine Waste Disaster

  Aug 11, 2015 3:30 pm536 views

  You may have seen this story about the release of an estimated 3 million gallons of toxic water into a river in southwestern Colorado last week. The images were pretty awful, showing the Animas River a sickening yellow-orange color. A USEPA team was working on diverting flow from an abandoned gold mine when they accidently poked a hole in a dam and caused the release. The result was contamination by a classic case of acid mine drainage.

• 

  Shade Balls

  Aug 13, 2015 4:15 pm332 views

  I think this a really cool low-tech idea: black plastic balls added to Los Angeles’s largest reservoir to prevent algal blooms and limit evaporation.

• 

  Neonicotinoids in U.S. Streams

  Aug 20, 2015 4:15 pm152 views

  As you might guess from their name, neonicotinoids are chemically similar to nicotine and, sort of ironically, are especially effective against sucking insects. The most controversial aspect of neonicotinoids is that they have been linked to honey bee colony collapse.

• Teflon Regulations

  Sep 4, 2015 3:45 pm89 views

  My brilliant daughter (I have two) recently sent me a link to a disturbing story. It has to do with surface water and groundwater contamination in Parkersburg, WV, by DuPont. The offending compound was perfluorooctanoic acid, also known as C8, which is a key ingredient in Teflon and many other products.

• 

  Sunscreen and Coral Reefs

  Oct 22, 2015 9:45 am226 views

  A few years ago, a group of researchers working in the Caribbean were talking to a local vendor who was waiting for the day’s invasion of tourists. He told them that the tourists would leave behind “a long oil slick” in the water. The scientists were intrigued, and wondered how this “oil slick” would affect the local coral reefs.

• 

  Microplastics in Table Salt

  Nov 19, 2015 2:30 pm501 views

  These are plastic debris smaller than 5 mm in diameter, and there’s a lot of it in the ocean. Now comes a report that we may be ingesting microplastics through sea salt.

• High Levels of Lead in Flint Drinking Water

  Jan 13, 2016 4:00 pm479 views

  About 25% of Flint households have lead levels above the federal standard of 15 parts per billion (ppb), with one home having an almost unbelievable level of 13,200 ppb. But why are there are such high levels of lead in Flint’s water?

• Video on Flint Water Crisis

  Mar 11, 2016 3:15 pm37 views

  The New Yorker tweeted a 5-minute video of residents of Flint talking about how the water crisis has affected them, and how they’ve lost trust in the system. One of the worst things about the whole debacle is the loss of trust in this basic service of delivering healthy water to our citizens.

• 

  Plastic Debris and Human Health

  Jul 5, 2016 9:45 am521 views

  A recent viewpoint in the journal Environmental Science & Technology suggests that persistent plastic debris may be an important health issue for humans. We’ve known for a long time that aquatic animals are vulnerable to plastic pollution.

• 

  Climate Change and Water Quality

  Jul 20, 2016 4:00 pm77 views

  Groundwater is generally shielded from variations in the weather, and changes in groundwater quality due to changes in temperature and precipitation are likely to be muted and subtle. However, surface water quality is a different story, and a recent article in Nature discusses this.

• 

  Triclosan and Microbiomes

  Jul 22, 2016 4:45 pm157 views

  Triclosan is a very common antibacterial compound, used in antibacterial soaps and toothpaste, and it is found in humans (detected in about 75% of urine samples in the U.S. in 2008) and in the aquatic environment. 

• 

  Thermal Pollution

  Oct 28, 2016 10:15 am3178 views

  In surface water, temperature is an important water quality parameter affecting aquatic organisms, and a recently published paper has looked at the magnitude of thermal pollution in many river basins throughout the world.

• 

  Micro- and Nanoparticles

  Nov 3, 2016 9:00 am176 views

  There are both natural and engineered micro- and nanomaterials in our world. Ocean spray, smoke, and milk all contain natural nanomaterials. In recent years, engineered materials have been designed and produced with many useful applications.

• 

  Large Study of Bacterial Water Quality in Sub-Saharan Africa

  Nov 17, 2016 10:45 am29 views

  A just released study did a meta-analysis of almost 43,000 water samples from 7 countries in sub-Saharan Africa to assess the amount of bacterial contamination and how it varied with respect to source type.

• 

  Animas River Spill Follow-Up

  Dec 22, 2016 3:45 pm51 views

  The first peer-reviewed paper (as far as I can tell) related to the Animas River, Colorado, was recently published. An estimated 3 million gallons of toxic acid mine drainage water was released into a small tributary of the Animas River due to the failure of a dam containing the waste.

• 

  Fish Adapting to Pollution

  Dec 22, 2016 4:15 pm155 views

  A paper published in Science reports that genetic adaptions in the Atlantic killifish (Fundulus heteroclitus) allow it to survive what, in unpolluted environments, would be lethal levels of bioaccumulative dioxin-like contaminants.

• A Change in Focus: More Groundwater

  Aug 17, 2017 9:45 am55 views

  Due to various circumstances, I have been unable to maintain a reasonable schedule for blog posts on my blog "Water Quality, Focus on Illinois." In fact, I haven't posted in a number of months. As a result, we are expanding the blogs to include multiple authors in the Groundwater Science Section at the Illinois State Water Survey, Prairie Research Institute at the University of Illinois. The scope of the blog posts will be broadened to include many topics on groundwater, not just water quality, still with an emphasis on Illinois, although not limited to our state. We hope you enjoy the new look, and we look forward to your feedback.

• 

  Groundwater Depletion in Chicago’s Southwestern Suburbs

  Aug 29, 2017 11:30 am2864 views

  Sandstone water supplies in the southwest suburbs are at the highest risk, where water levels have reached historic lows, exceeding 1,100 feet of drawdown when wells are pumping.

• 

  Improving our ability to “see” aquifers

  Sep 8, 2017 10:15 am411 views

  The Illinois State Water Survey has developed new modeling approaches to analyze the 150+ years of data we have collected in the region, improving both our historic understanding of the aquifers of the state and our modeling capabilities to simulate future water supply planning scenarios.

• 

  The Private Well Class, Five Years in the Making

  Oct 2, 2017 4:45 pm315 views

  Staff at the University of Illinois developed a 10-lesson online class, the Private Well Class, for homeowners with private wells to learn how to properly care for their water well.

• 

  4,000 Year-Old Pollution

  Oct 12, 2017 11:45 am125 views

  We've been polluting for a long time.

• 

  Water from Where? The Complex Web of Water Use in Illinois

  Nov 6, 2017 3:45 pm2215 views

  Scientists at the Illinois Water Survey have developed an interactive map of where every community in Illinois gets their water from.

• Pledge to Test Your Well Water: Win a FREE Water Test

  Feb 6, 2018 4:30 pm91 views

  

  The Private Well Class is celebrating National Groundwater Awareness Week (#GWAW2018) by hosting the 3rd annual Pledge to Test (#pledge2test) Campaign. In this nationwide pledge, well owners are invited to pledge to submit a water sample for testing to a lab in their area. One Pledge to Test Campaign participant will be randomly selected to be reimbursed for the cost of testing the private well water at their residence, up to $200.

• 

  Ongoing Water Supply Planning in Middle Illinois

  Mar 27, 2018 2:15 pm150 views

  Water Supply Planning is a cyclical effort to perform long-term water supply analyses for each of the planning regions throughout Illinois and identify potential risks to water supply using the latest available data. Here we present some early results for the Middle Illinois region, with work slated to wrap up over the next few months.

• 

  ISWS Reignites Outreach Activities in Illinois

  Jun 1, 2018 1:45 pm188 views

  The Illinois State Water Survey’s Groundwater Section has begun taking a more active role in outreach to help the residents and youth in Illinois learn more about groundwater and private wells. The ISWS has been working with Illinois citizens and important stakeholders for more than a century to raise awareness about protecting Illinois’ water resources.