Protecting Your Water

Reported January 2008

BERKLEY, Calif. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- The same seismic waves picked up by a seismometer during an earthquake now has a new use -- finding problems at the source of your drinking water.

Like a scene from Erin Brockovich, these scientists are searching for contaminants in ground water that may cause cancer. Looking for amounts of trichloroethylene, or TCE, even smaller than a needle in a haystack.

“If you were to take this amount of TCE that we have here could contaminate an Olympic swimming pools worth of water,” Jil T. Geller, Ph.D., UC Berkeley, told Ivanhoe.

Geophysicists and earth scientists from the Lawrence Berkley National Lab have a better way of locating that contamination. Here trouble does come in waves.

“If we inject a liquid contaminant, will we see it change in the signature of the acoustic or seismic wave,” Dr. Geller said.

That change in the returned seismic wave reveals the exact location of the contaminant -- even if it is only microscopic amounts.

“Currently what's done is they punch many many many bore holes into a site and sample and analyze very slow and very time consuming, they turn some of these sites into Swiss cheese basically," Dr. Geller said.

This new technology may change the way spills and leaks are cleaned up, changing the cost most of all.

"You want to get to the source and to get rid of the source, instead of treating 10 olympic pools of water you can go to the source and remediate that," Dr. Geller said.

“One way to do that is to put seismic sources in one well and receivers in the other and we try to image what the earth looks like in between them.” Jonathan Ajo-Franklin, Ph.D., UC Berkeley, told Ivanhoe.

These cables can be dropped up to 6,000 feet below the Earths surface.

“Its called an electric crystal, where if you squeeze it causes a change in voltage, we record those changes of voltage back up on the surface.” Dr. Ajo-Franklin said.

Seismic technology tested here in the US -- but the benefits may someday have a global impact.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Jil T. Geller
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Berkeley, CA 94720
(510) 486-7313
(510) 486-7313
jtgeller@lbl.gov

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