Illinois State Water Survey

blog posts

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  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.

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  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.

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  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.

• Middle Illinois Region Water Supply Assessment Report Published

  Oct 10, 2018 11:15 am204 views

  A report on the water resources available in the Middle Illinois River water supply planning region is now available (Kelly et al. ISWS Contract Report 2018-02).

• More Good News on the Environment, This Time From Germany

  Jul 15, 2011 4:45 pm217 views

  About 6 months ago I wrote a post reporting on decreasing nitrate concentrations in Danish groundwater. The other day I ran across some encouraging news from a study in Germany, on organic pollutants in rivers.

• 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.

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  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.

• More thoughts on estrogens in the environment

  Jun 29, 2012 9:15 am156 views

  In my last post I mentioned how the European Commission intends to regulate the synthetic estrogen compound ethinyl estradiol (EE2), which has been discovered to cause ecological damage to aquatic species. The Atlantic magazine recently published their annual “Ideas Issue,” and one of their big ideas was to allow the pill to be sold over the counter.

• Mountain Top Removal

  Nov 23, 2010 10:15 am327 views

  Mountain top removal, i.e., stripping off the tops of mountains to mine coal, is not an issue in Illinois, but I grew up in Kentucky and its been a big controversy there and other Appalachian states for a long time. Its hard to believe that there was ever any doubt that mountain top removal polluted surface waters, but thats what some mining industry groups would have us believe. Recent studies put to bed those doubts.

• Nano-particles

  Nov 12, 2010 10:15 am303 views

  At the recent Geological Society of America (GSA) annual meeting in Denver, Mike Hochella, a geochemist at Virginia Tech, gave a couple of talks about nano-particles, an area of research he thinks is the next big thing in the geosciences. In fact, he thinks understanding them is a key to understanding the workings of many major Earth systems in a fundamental way.

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  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.

• No, we're not running out of water, but...

  Apr 21, 2011 3:15 pm506 views

  I recently received a newsletter that talked about something that has bothered me from time to time. I cant tell you how often I hear knowledgeable people, environmentalists and journalists usually, say that were running out of water. Were not running out of water. We cant run out of water. For all intents and purposes, we have a constant amount of water on this planet; we cant destroy water or make new water (at least in amounts that would make any kind of difference). The hydrologic cycle is a closed loop. Its one of the primary differences between the energy crisis and the water crisis; when we use oil or coal or natural gas, we really do use it up, ultimately converting it to carbon dioxide and water, and we really are running out of fossil fuels.

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  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.

• Our Nitrogen Footprint

  Jun 24, 2011 10:00 am339 views

  Most people are familiar with the concept of a carbon footprint, the amount of carbon dioxide an individual or entity produces. Our transportation, food, manufacturing, building, and land use choices all affect the amount of carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere. Ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution, humans have had a major impact on the carbon cycle on Earth, resulting in climate change, accelerated melting of glaciers, rising sea levels, acidification of the oceans, etc. Another element whose cycle we have disrupted in a major way is nitrogen (N), and with impacts that may be similarly serious.

• Our Stressed Great Lakes

  Feb 15, 2013 3:45 pm1023 views

  A recent study investigated the cumulative effects of human activities on the health of the Great Lakes, and concluded that Lakes Erie, Ontario, and Michigan face the greatest threats, while Like Superior is the least threatened. The most stressed areas are along coastlines, especially near major metropolitan areas, which is not surprising. Threats include invasive species (especially zebra mussels and lampreys), climate change (affecting lake temperature and water levels), phosphorous from erosion of agricultural soils, and contaminants from urban areas. Stressed areas almost always have multiple stressors, complicating restoration efforts. The authors of the study note that restoration efforts in the Great Lakes are almost exclusively focused on high-stress sites, but almost never have information about the full range of stressors.

• 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.

• Pharmaceuticals in Water

  May 20, 2011 4:45 pm1144 views

  Not so long ago, back in the 1990s or so, nobody really worried about what might happen if pharmaceutical drugs got released into the environment. In fact, we were advised to get rid of our unused drugs by flushing them down the toilet. What happened after that nobody really seemed to care about. If anything, it was assumed that the wastewater treatment processes would destroy them.

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  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.

• Please Remove Pigs Before Drinking Water

  Mar 15, 2013 4:30 pm202 views

  I was looking through the front section of The New York Times the other day (March 13, 2013), and there were several articles having to do with water and water quality. There was an article about the lack of potable water in India, including the depletion of some groundwater supplies. Another article told how public schools in New York City are saving large volumes of water as a result of replacing thousands of old toilets with low-flush models. There was also an op-ed piece about how the melting of ice in the Arctic Ocean is opening up sea lanes and what that might mean. But the article that really caught my attention was in the World Briefing section about how 6,000 dead pigs were found floating in the Huangpu River in China, which provides drinking water to Shanghai. Ugh.

   

• 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.

• Reading Your Water Quality Report

  Jun 7, 2011 3:15 pm484 views

  I recently received in the mail the annual water quality report from our local water company, Illinois American Water. I usually only give them a quick glance, but this year I decided to take a closer look.

• Regulating pharmaceuticals

  Jun 8, 2012 10:15 am112 views

  In a recent article published in Nature titled “The hidden costs of flexible fertility”, Richard Owen and Susan Jobling report that the European Commission recently announced that it intends to regulate the synthetic estrogen compound ethinyl estradiol (EE2) under the Water Framework Directive. With more than 100 million women worldwide using contraceptive pills, a lot of synthetic estrogen is entering the environment, causing negative effects to aquatic species, such as changing the sex of fish.

• 'Removing' Micropollutants from Wastewater

  Mar 1, 2013 3:15 pm207 views

  We ask a lot of our wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). We expect them to clean up our sewage, so that the effluent that is returned to our water resources is environmentally benign. A century or more ago, the main goal was to prevent the spread of water-borne diseases, and treatment mainly consisted of dilution. Since that time, our environmental sensibilities have increased, and treatment techniques have been vastly improved to disinfect wastewater and remove pollutants to protect receiving waters. At first those pollutants were primarily limited to nutrients. Now we’re asking WWTPs to remove other things. Any idea what this compound is?

   

• Report on Arsenic in Tolono Area Published

  Nov 22, 2011 4:45 pm236 views

  The final report 'Arsenic in Groundwater in the Tolono Region' by Walt Kelly and Tom Holm, Illinois State Water Survey Miscellaneous Report 196, is now available at the ISWS website:

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  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.

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  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.

• Road Salt and Lakes in Lake County

  Nov 4, 2011 4:00 pm235 views

  In my last post, I began talking about road salt and its environmental effects. In that post I showed a plot of increasing chloride in Lake Michigan due to road salt runoff. While the increase in the past 25 years was only 3 mg/L, that represents about 660,000 tons of chloride being added annually to the lake. Other lakes in northeastern Illinois have seen much larger increases in chloride concentrations.

• Road Salt and Rivers in Chicago

  Nov 11, 2011 2:00 pm511 views

  While lakes have been impacted by road salt runoff in the Chicago region (see my previous 2 posts), the impact on rivers and streams has probably been even more dramatic. Various agencies, including the USGS, Illinois EPA, and Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRDGC), have been monitoring was quality in many rivers and canals since at least the 1970s. Almost all of the rivers and streams monitored have had significant increases in chloride (Cl-) and sodium (Na) concentrations since that time.

• Road Salt in Groundwater (Part 1)

  Dec 1, 2011 4:30 pm336 views

  Being primarily a groundwater guy, my initial interest in road salt runoff was whether we could detect it in aquifers. The Illinois State Water Survey (ISWS) has a groundwater quality database going back over 100 years, and since road salting started taking off around 1960, I figured we might be able to see increases in chloride and total dissolved solids (TDS) concentrations in well samples. Short answer: Yes we do.

• Road Salt in Groundwater (Part 2)

  Dec 19, 2011 2:00 pm427 views

  In my last post I presented some data showing increasing chloride concentrations in groundwater in the Chicago region. One of the interesting things was that concentrations and rates of increase were lower in Cook and Lake Counties, compared to counties west or south of Chicago. We believe there are several reasons for this.

• Road Salt (part 1)

  Oct 28, 2011 2:45 pm1012 views

  With winter just around the corner, I thought Id run a few posts on road salt, something Ive been studying for a while. Take a look at this figure, which shows the amount of road salt purchased annually for the past 70 years or so:

• Selenium and Fish Mutations

  Feb 27, 2012 11:15 am698 views

  An article in the February 23, 2012 edition of the The New York Times caught my eye. The title is "Mutated Trout Raise New Concerns Near Mine Sites." The article describes results of a study in southern Idaho monitoring creeks impacted by a phosphate mine. The pictures of mutated trout offspring are disturbing, to say the least:

   

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  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.

• Soda Consumption vs. Bottled Water

  May 18, 2012 9:45 am771 views

  This isn’t really a water quality issue, but an article in the Business Section of the New York Times on May 16, 2012, reported that soda consumption is declining in America. That’s good news, right? Except that the decrease in soda consumption is almost completely balanced by an increase in bottled water consumption (since 1998). Seems like we Americans just like to buy bottles. Actually, the bottled water consumption has leveled off in the past few years, although it is still at an historic high. Why do we spend $1.29 for a bottle of water, when we can fill a glass or bottle from a tap and get water with at least as good quality, for fractions of a penny? Convenience, I guess. Or we are complete slaves to marketers.

• 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.

  

• Some Good News on Nitrate, from Denmark

  Jan 6, 2011 3:00 pm853 views

  With the possible exception of arsenic, nitrate is the most widespread pollutant of groundwater. Unlike arsenic, which is primarily a naturally occurring contaminant, elevated nitrate concentrations are almost always due to human activities, primarily in agricultural settings. Tilling of soil, application of synthetic fertilizers, and livestock manure are the primary sources of nitrate. As all residents of Illinois surely know, there is a lot of agricultural activity in the state, mainly corn and soybeans. And because of this, there are surface water and shallow groundwater resources in Illinois that suffer from excess nitrate (and other forms of nitrogen).

• Successful Private Well Owner Outreach for the Water Survey at the 2018 Illinois State Fair

  Sep 4, 2018 5:15 pm166 views

  Hundreds of children and adults were educated by Illinois State Water Survey staff about groundwater and wells at the 2018 Illinois State Fair in Springfield. Staff from the Groundwater Science Section shared space in the Private Lands Programs tent for 10 days in Conservation World. This was the first presence by ISWS at the State Fair in more than a decade.

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  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.

• "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.

• 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.

• 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. 

• The First Arsenic Post

  Mar 9, 2011 2:15 pm966 views

  Arsenic is one of the most common natural contaminants of groundwater in Illinois, and weve done several studies on it, so I anticipate Ill be writing a lot of posts about it on this blog. I was prompted to write one today because of the recent discovery of a high arsenic area near Champaign. As was reported in our local paper, The News Gazette, Sunday February 28, 2011, a domestic well in Tolono that was recently sampled had an arsenic concentration of about 300 ug/L, about 30 times the drinking water standard of 10 ug/L (equivalent to 10 ppb), and the highest arsenic level Ive ever seen in Illinois. By 50%!

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  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.

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  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.

• The Second Arsenic Post (Tolono)

  Sep 29, 2011 10:30 am417 views

  My first arsenic post last March reported on the discovery that there were high arsenic levels in groundwater near Tolono, IL. We recently finished a small study of the area and are preparing a short report. Well be presenting the results at a public meeting at the Tolono Town Hall on Tuesday, October 4, 2011, at 7 PM.

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  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. 

• Update on European Regulation of Estrogens

  Dec 7, 2012 9:30 am43 views

  In a post last May, I wrote about the European Commission’s intent to regulate the synthetic estrogen compound ethinyl estradiol (EE2) under the Water Framework Directive. According to a recent article in Nature, those regulations will be not approved by the European Parliament. Intense lobbying by the water and pharmaceutical industries has apparently convinced the European Union member states that the financial costs are too much.

• 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.

• Viruses in Deep Groundwater

  Nov 5, 2010 3:30 pm243 views

  When I was an undergraduate, which really wasnt that long ago--okay, 30 years ago--the prevailing wisdom was that there wasnt life below the soil zone. The idea was that since all life was based on energy from the sun (another assumption thats no longer valid), you couldnt have life too far away from the suns reach. Well, we have found microbes pretty much everywhere weve looked, and the question now is where will we NOT find life.

• Visit the ISWS at the 2018 Illinois State Fair!

  Jul 13, 2018 10:15 am165 views

  The Illinois State Water Survey will be participating in the 2018 Illinois State Fair in Springfield, IL with a booth shared by the Private Land Programs Tent in Conservation World, which will be open daily from Friday, August 10th to Sunday, August 19th from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.