Groundwater in Illinois

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3 New Hydrogeologists

Nov 18, 2019 5:00 pm195 views

The Groundwater Section at the Illinois State Water Survey is pleased to welcome three new scientists to help with the research and service work we are doing: Cecilia Cullen, Mike Krasowski, and Allan Jones.
Meet Our New Hydrologist: Tyler Pierson

Dec 19, 2018 3:45 pm388 views

Tyler Pierson has joined the Groundwater Science Section at the Illinois State Water Survey. He will be working on the Illinois Department of Transportation project in the Metro East area. He is replacing Mark Anliker, who retired November 1, 2018.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Water from Where? The Complex Web of Water Use in Illinois

Nov 6, 2017 3:45 pm2206 views

Scientists at the Illinois Water Survey have developed an interactive map of where every community in Illinois gets their water from.
4,000 Year-Old Pollution

Oct 12, 2017 11:45 am125 views

We've been polluting for a long time.
The Private Well Class, Five Years in the Making

Oct 2, 2017 4:45 pm314 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.
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.
Groundwater Depletion in Chicago’s Southwestern Suburbs

Aug 29, 2017 11:30 am2863 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.
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.
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.
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.
Large Study of Bacterial Water Quality in Sub-Saharan Africa

Nov 17, 2016 10:45 am27 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.
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.
Thermal Pollution

Oct 28, 2016 10:15 am3166 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Microplastics in Table Salt

Nov 19, 2015 2:30 pm497 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.
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.
Teflon Regulations

Sep 4, 2015 3:45 pm87 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.
Neonicotinoids in U.S. Streams

Aug 20, 2015 4:15 pm148 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.
Shade Balls

Aug 13, 2015 4:15 pm330 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.
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.
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.
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.
How Much Oil is Spilled Annually?

May 8, 2015 9:30 am372 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?
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.
"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.
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.
$fracking rig$

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.
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.
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.
Drinking Our Own Pee

Jun 17, 2014 3:00 pm71 views

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

Jul 19, 2013 2:30 pm18132 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.
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.

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