Borden Site Contamination Study

Background:

With tremendous effort and dedication, a group of scientists managed to actually measure contamination around the Borden Site in Canada over a period of 1038 days – nearly three years – and show the actual path of real contaminants and tracers. The goal of this experiment was to better understand how organic contaminant transport and non-organic contaminant transport are different. Tracers are solutions that have nearly zero chance of physically or chemically interacting with other substances or physical aspects of the aquifers.

The following images show how organic and non-organic contaminants moved over the span of 633 days. Chloride (in blue) is the non-organic contaminate. Carbon Tetrachloride (in green) is the organic contaminate.

Questions:

 1) What directions are these contaminants moving?

2) In these graphics, you only see contamination at one distance from the surface. How do you think contaminant concentrations change with different depths from the surface?

Advanced Questions:

1) Do these plumes look similar to those shown in the 2D or ADE examples? If no, what factors do you think play into these differences? 

2) How to the tracers described previously help scientists understand contamination?