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Woods Hole Field Center Diving Team Completes Deployments for Water Investigations
The Woods Hole Field Center dive team—including Dann Blackwood, Ken Parolski, Barry Irwin, and Chuck Worley—successfully completed a series of deployments and recoveries of passive-vapor-diffusion samplers in three local lakes on Cape Cod during the late summer months of 2001. This project was a cooperative effort conducted with team leader Denis Leblanc of the USGS Water Resources (WRD) office in Northborough, MA. The project is part of an ongoing study by WRD to evaluate the spatial distribution, concentrations, and ultimate fate of organic pollutants discharged years ago by the Massachusetts Military Reservation. Pollutants have seeped into the main unconfined ground-water aquifer, which currently supplies many Upper Cape Cod towns and communities with potable water. Owing to the cape's unique glacial history, the top of the ground water, or water table, is generally indicated by the surfaces of local lakes or ponds. WRD has enlisted the expertise of the WHFC scientific dive team for planning, logistical, and field support of the lake studies in an effort to better understand the migration of pollutants in the ground water of the Upper Cape Cod water supply. Diffusion samplers were intermittently installed and recovered from the surface sediment of Snake Pond in Sandwich, MA, along 11 subsurface transects from August 10 through October 17, 2001. Scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), using a mobile gas chromatograph, accomplished onsite analysis of components associated with explosives from a nearby artillery range on Greenway Road. A total of 10 sub-bottom transects of samplers were also emplaced and recovered from the sediments in Moody Pond in Mashpee, MA, during the weeks of September 6 and 26, 2001. These samples were likewise analyzed onsite by the EPA for ethylene dibromide (EDB), which is considered a carcinogen at low concentrations. Additional samples were also collected from Ashumet Pond in Mashpee as a followup to a 1998 USGS study delineating the area and nature of volatile organic compounds discharging into the lake. Results of these analyses will soon be integrated into current knowledge of the transport and fate of dissolved organic compounds within the ground-water supply of Upper Cape Cod and so will assist ongoing remediation efforts.
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in this issue:
Cape Cod Lakes Sea-Level Rise & Coastal Disasters Restoring Louisiana's Coastal Ecosystems  |
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U. S. Department of the Interior | U.S. Geological Survey
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