Geoscience Education in the Mountain State:
CATS Environmental Earth Science Telecourse, Fall 1999,
Show 5 Transcript

CATS Telecourse
Environmental Earth Science
November 15, 1999

Dr. Bob: Greetings Everyone! Here we are at CATS Earth Science with Deb Hemler, Bob Behling. We're here tonight for a potpourri. We have a great variety of topics to discuss. Some things that we had set aside...energy and the related issues of energy might be the general topic that we'll talk about this evening. Deb, you have all kinds of announcements. There are all kinds of things going on this week.

Deb: We have a few things. Let's see...as a reminder to everybody there is not going to be a broadcast or adjunct or anything next Monday. Don't show up for class for any reason whatsoever. That's the Thanksgiving break. The following Monday, November 29th is a very critical date. That's the day when your papers are due. Not only do you need to show up for class but you need to turn those papers in. Tom says to check the web site under syllabus. He has all the due dates listed there. You might want to make sure you get on line and check that out if you need a reminder as to when the papers are due. Quiz number 4 has been canceled. The last announcement I need to make from Tom is the last broadcast you need to allow 10 extra minutes after we're off air for two things. One is you'll take a post-test for us, it is not for a grade. You took one at the beginning of the broadcast back in September and this is just an assessment for us for gaging how much you've learned over the course of the semester. Again, no grade do the best that you can on this. You will receive your final exam at that point. For the due date check the web site. Those are Tom's announcements.

Dr. Bob: Ok. Some of our announcements...It's Leonid shower time. This Wednesday night, they don't expect it to be one of the better ones. About 4 or 5 years ago there was over a 100,000 an hour. They don't expect it to be quite that level but my understanding was Wednesday night was the best potential viewing from 9 till 10 or 11 and looking east. The United States does not have the best view but the possibilities are out there for some good shows. You might also want to check your local listings. We believe that the program "The Missouri River" may be on the History Channel. Looking at the history of the Missouri River. It's either the Learning Channel or the Discovery Channel. Check your local listings.

What else? You were watching an earthquake.

Dr. Deb: For those of you that happened to tune in to one of our big networks the movie "Aftershock" was on. Aside from the fact that they mentioned that underneath New York is a web of tectonic plates and the fact that the earthquake lasted well over three minutes the focuses on the human drama. What happens when a major earthquake would happen to hit on a metropolitan area unexpectedly. Nobody in New York expects an earthquake. They mention FEMA, our friends from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Dr. Bob: The very difficult reality however is that there are people suffering again in Turkey. That is a transform fault, a strike-slip fault. It's called the Anatoli Fault System. This is not an aftershock that occurred Friday. It was 7.2 which is a pretty good size event. A good deal of energy was released. It was a separate and distinct earthquake. What we believe might be happening, we in the geologic community, is that we seem to have this hint before that the release, the stress builds, the strain and release occurs someplace but it might pull a chain of events also along the same fault or fault zone. This is not simply an aftershock. It is one of a distinct package. The time between each event is episodic. We cannot predict. The last great one was in August for example, loss of life measured in the hundreds and with the package of aftershocks in two or three other locations not even on the Anatoli fault that had occurred in Turkey, the people are living on the edge of emotions. Now the weather is very, very cold so that survivors are at enormous risk even if they had survived the quake and the collapse of the buildings. In Ecuador both volcanoes are being watched at the highest or near highest level of expectation of eruption. In Quito last Friday they had to cancel school for over 400,000 students because there's a volcano 6 miles away that is very, very active. They believe that if lava is emitted it's going to be contained in the valley that will shunt it away from Quito, Ecuador. There is a tourist area about 180 miles away from Quito and in that one they actually brought out the armed forces and evacuated everyone forcibly. The predictions are that if it blows it could bury the town in 10 minutes. There is no margin. In Peru there was another bizarre event in the foothills of the Andes, the small community was devastated by a landslide. Several dozen, 3, 4 dozen people at least have lost their lives there. The result apparently was very heavy rains. It saturated the soil. The water got down into a vent because after the event the people that survived said it sounded like an explosion and they smelled sulphur. They believe that the rain water saturated the colluvium on the slope and then it got down into the heated water, sort of like a mini geyser, and then it blew because it became super heated as you get that column of water in the pore spaces on top of the super heated, the high temperatures of the geyser like conditions. Eventually that water is going to be ejected out when the pressure is high enough. It's like working with a pressure cooker.

The aftermath of the super cyclone in India is that the death toll is in excess of 9,800. There was a chemical plant that leaked acid into basins and those basins are being used by the people to bath and now they have hundreds and hundreds of people who have chemical burns and acid burns. That tragedy is in such a poor area that the people had so very little to begin with.

To demonstrate that in any rather brief period of time, we've been with you now three months, all manor of things happen as a regular process on this dynamic earth. It's time to continue now with our details and perhaps we can jump over to the outline so that we can talk about what we will see today.

We'll start out with Deb. We'll talk about some classroom applications. We'll then discuss the paper and lesson plan again so we really have that solidified. Talk about our main topic, energy, as I have suggested and waste management. We finished the second exploratory this past weekend. I have an interesting package of compare and contrast in the waste management issue so we'll discuss that. We'll go to our break then return for low level nuclear waste. We are in a compact of eastern states for low level waste then talk about radon, wetlands. We told you this is a potpourri of topics. Acid mine drainage and we'll even have a little hint of that before the break as to some remote sensing that can be done. Then to remind you that the last show, November 29th, and we will feature Cadillac Desert. I urge you to have watched those first two shows. The fourth is not really even in the text. It's sort of a composite and you don't have to watch China Town either. It's there in the package and available. If you have some time to sit down some evening with popcorn. If you watch the first two I think you'll find it very interesting to really focus at the movie, not because of the actors and actresses but rather because of the material and the connections. You can really see the water issues in western water is the whole backdrop.

So...let's set out with some classroom applications. You have brought along some of your interesting materials, Adaptive Earth Science Activities. What sort of things directly can be taken into the classroom, either from what we've done on the show or the adjuncts. I know you've seen some, although we want to feature the show rather than the adjuncts. Or the exploratories, what sort of things do you want to share.

Dr. Deb: What we really have available to the participants that are out there is this "Adaptive Earth Science Activities" that's available through the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey. Check with your facilitator to see if in fact they have a copy of this. Most facilitators have been given this book through the series of semesters that we've been on air. If they don't get in touch with Tom Repine. It's our hope that this will be put on the web site eventually. I'm not sure that will be done within the next week or so. We are going to put this up on air for you.

What I want to do is mention a couple of these activities. Things that have been developed over the past few years by teachers in the State of West Virginia that could be applicable to this environmental geology class and some topics that they've addressed. (Puts first one on overhead.)

This one has been submitted by Elise Adkins, down in Logan County, and it's a weathering activity. It's very simple and it's applicable to many grade levels. What you're looking at is taking different samples and during the course of the semester subjecting that sample to water flow. The students over time are measuring the mass of this rock to see if there is a decrease and then comparing it to other rock samples. There's a sample of differential weathering that might occur in rocks which of course you can apply to slope failures, landslides, etc.

Dr. Bob: Do you need a drying oven of some sort or just air dry it?

Dr. Deb: No, they just air dry it. It's very simple. They just let it dry over time, next week they do it again, the next week they do it again and so it's a long term type things. It's also a good idea to get students involved in long term type research. Things that longer then 50 minutes or 90 minutes is nice.

Dr. Bob: I suppose it could also be done if you pour a little vinegar over some things.

Dr. Deb: There are activities that compare different rocks in vinegar as well.

Dr. Bob: Vinegars a lot safer then using hydrochloric acid. Besides the kids can really tell that's it's something. Or lemon juice.

Dr. Deb: If you're gonna use vinegar it's a nice idea to just take a baby food jar and submerge the rock in the vinegar itself. You can see the reaction better. There's a concentration of vinegar there. It's not like you're pouring little drops like you do with acid. It's easier for the kids to see that they're bubbling up.

I'll go to the next one. This is called the "Groundwater Flowmeister." This was developed by Tim Butcher who is no longer a teacher in West Virginia but as a result of developing this activity, is now with Science Kit and Boreal. He submitted this to Science Kit, they thought it was a great idea and they developed a kit out of it. Tim received some funds from this and was asked to promote this flowmeister around the country. He liked it so much he's working for them. The original activity was in fact developed for RockCamp and is described here. You can either purchase through Science Kit or you can make it yourself out of the materials you see listed. It's just demonstrating how groundwater flows through a system. If you've ever seen Project WET and Roseanne Long at WVSTA bring that huge groundwater flow model in, this is a miniature version of that. It's a nice, relatively inexpensive way of achieving the same results on a smaller scale. It's a microscale groundwater flow demonstrator.

Dr. Bob: We have some at the university for our students to use and they get very expensive. For the essential aspects of things, what works best is often the elegant response is a simple response.

Dr. Deb: This is very simple, it just uses a plastic shoe box, some clay, gravel, a plastic cup, and the squirter off of a Windex box or something of that nature. Use whatever works as a pump showing that you're pumping groundwater out. You use dye as your pollutant. There are various demonstrations you can do of this.

Another one gets back to what Bob was talking about, using vinegar. This one was developed by Michele Lomano at Hedgesville Elementary School. It's referring to Karst lands or this acid dissolving of limestones underground. The students again are using diluted hydrochloric acid but you could achieve the same results using vinegar if you had lower elementary kids.

Dr. Bob: Note the safety warnings there.

Dr. Deb: Safety is in fact noted in red.

Dr. Bob: That becomes tricky then for them.

Dr. Deb: It's a simple activity comparing the chemical weathering of rocks using these acids.

The next one is the deep ocean currents. This was developed by Sally Morgan at East Fairmont High School and anytime we talk about El Nino and La Nina we're talking about ocean currents. This is a very applicable. We're talking about in this particular case is densities and the effect of density in oceans. You essentially develop a density column which we do a lot in the classroom but we fail to connect it always to many, many things. Density can be related to layers of the earth, ocean currents. There are many, many applications for density. We've got to make sure we make those connections.

Dr. Bob: It's rather interesting too, I happened to pick up the newspaper today in Pittsburgh, every Monday they have a science page, and one of the issues was scientists looking at a new, deep ocean current ribbon. Up through the Atlantic and then down into the Indian Ocean. Any of these ocean currents whether they're surface or deep have a enormous potential for the transference of heat. We know on the surface for example the effects on England and Great Britain, in general being a high latitude position, but because of the Gulf Stream they are bathed during the winter in much warmer surface waters. Now that's the surface phenomenon but still, it has great effects for us and the additional aspect of that is that the conditions for this coming winter look to be a lot like last winter. That La Nina is going to stay with us one more year. It would be interesting in your classrooms to go out and work with the kids and say, Ok. What do you remember about last year? What was it like? Let's go back and look at the newspapers and build the history. When did we have the snow fall. How much snowfall? Now we'll start predicting what might happen again and then come April or May, go back and compare and contrast and see what your predictions are like. What did La Nina do to us here in West Virginia?

Dr. Deb: Or go back and graph the amount of precipitation received over various years and then go back and track when was an El Nino year and when was a La Nina year.

Whenever we talk about an environmental geology class we always incorporate hazards and one particular activity that wasn't really developed by us but really has been promoted by Paula Waggy and myself is contour mapping earthquake intensities. You can do this very simply in the class using historical earthquakes and what people felt in these newspaper accounts of historical earthquakes. In this particular one we used the Giles County earthquake. Students simply read the newspaper accounts. They get a copy of an unabridged Mercalli Intensity Scale. They read those and then figure out what the relative intensities of those are, plot them on a map of West Virginia and then plot the contour maps.

Dr. Bob: The Mercalli Scale is predicated on that. It's what you experienced, you being the generic person out at distances away from the center, what they experienced. If possible to recreate the time when they experienced it. If you can get that information. For example, it's great if the clock stops and you just say, "This is when the clock stopped." You gather that information as to how long that wave took to get through the deep body waves in the earth. Giles County in Virginia, we do not in West Virginia have a great number of epicenters, that is the place on the surface directly above the place where the rock broke. It was brittle below the surface and it cracked. That's what creates the shaky motion. However, I have the occasion over the past two weeks to talk with some geologists who are looking at some very recent young rocks in West Virginia, down in Paula Waggy's area in Franklin County, the igneous rocks. They're young geologically speaking. The radiometric dates hover around 40 million years. Some of them are faulted and when those faults occurred are very interesting and problematic situation because geologically speaking we think of West Virginia as having it's great times of upheaval and change during the Allegheny and Orogeny at the end of the Paleozoic. That since we have broad brushed paint and said it has been a period of erosion. But...this group of scientists from the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey were at the meetings in Denver. This is why science meetings are so interesting and intriguing. In looking over one of the displays they saw that there was an epicenter in the 1850s or so in West Virginia. They thought let's think about this. Is it possible that that type of epicenter may have displaced this igneous rock just a few inches. These exercises have a real basis and fact and the exercise here was generated several years ago and now we're coming to perhaps apply the fundamental aspects of an exercise such as this to interpreting the geology.

Dr. Deb: The facilitators probably have a copy of this at least most facilitators that have been with us over the last several semesters have one already. If it's a fairly new facilitator that we just brought on board then they might not have a copy yet.

Dr. Bob: While we've been talking here and working the early part of the show, behind the scenes they've found the TV schedule. It says Thursday, Friday, and Sunday. Some of the early information that I had heard was that it was on Wednesday but this seems....so check again.

Also I had heard a 8 o'clock starting on Wednesday and that might fit into the scheme of things because the History Channel rolls these...Steven Ambrose, it's a marvelous story. A writer whose work you may have read, his work especially in World War II, "A Bridge Too Far." His most recent work to become a classic of interviews with the common Americans who served in World War II. "Undaunted Courage" is the specific situation where he and his family for vacations would follow Lewis and Clark's trail. He had taken his children out and camped in these different areas, finally as his children had matured to their early 20s they said why don't you write about this. "Undaunted Courage" is a highly recommended book. I use that in my course when we talk about western water because I want the students to read about, in effect, aspects of the original diary of Lewis and Clark. To read about what it was like before we did anything to it. The Missouri River has often been referred to as the one river that has had more change brought about then any other single river in the United States or perhaps in the world. Other countries are hell bent on changing that, the Yangtze River for example, but the Missouri River has been dramatically changed for a great deal of it's length. I have not seen the show but I can only imagine that it's going to have some very important components for it.

Dr. Deb: A side note on that...something really interesting for anybody whose into archeology. They've been try to track Lewis and Clark's campsites. What they've done is that they took mercury tablets to try to cure venereal diseases and so when they go to these camp sites they're looking for concentrations of mercury. If they think they have a potential Lewis and Clark that is what they are using pretty much to determine whether or not they're on the right track.

Dr. Bob: This has been a common practice, issuance to anyone related to the armies of the time and so forth. The remote sensing and the proxy information leads us as a segway to some that's ongoing as we speak up in Preston County in looking at some aspects of the effects of mining. Do you want to share that, you live up in Preston County and you've got the information packet. What so often has to be done, you have to tell the people what you're doing and get them to agree to what you're doing. When you spray for the Mediterranean fruit flies you just don't fly over everyone. There's a case of that going on in Illinois where they had been spraying for that fly and people are sick. After the fact it gets real difficult to explain what has been done. Here's a case where it doesn't really interfere with the environment but you better know what's going on. It's not an invasion.

Dr. Deb: Certainly there's this helicopter that keeps flying very low level over farms in Preston County and they made it fairly apparent to the residents there what they were doing. You never fly over farms and not tell them because they're just barely brushing the tops of the tree lines. They're getting up close and personal. You get up close and personal with somebody's private land like that and they wonder what they're doing.

This is exactly what they're doing in Preston County, they've got what they call the "bird" which is their sensor. It's called a dighem 5 which is a digital electromagnetic detector but it's drug by the helicopter over the tops of trees. They're choosing this time of year particularly because of several things. One, is the leaves are off the trees. Two, the air is cool and the groundwater is warm. It's another detection that they're doing which kind of plays into this. Three, there's no snow yet. We don't want snow cover on the ground. What they do is drag this over the trees and they're looking for conductivity. What we know about acid mine drainage is all the minerals that are in the water and the acid is going to be a higher conductor then regular groundwater.

Dr. Bob: Conductivity is just all the dissolved ions. We've done this many times on the ground. We do conductivity work instead of setting off charges. Setting off explosive charges and trying to find stuff and looking for the depth of the different horizons, it gets people a little unease. Then we use thumpers. The thumpers actually send a shock wave down. Both of those are seismic remote sensing. We've gone also to resistivity type and conductivity. Resistivity is a little bit different. Some of you may have gone hunting for earthworms for going fishing. You just plug it into the wall on a wooden handle, you watered the back yard all day and then you go with this wooden handled probe and you stick it in the ground and set a charge, the earthworms come popping out of there real fast. They don't like that at all. The resistivity is another method and the conductivity you have to have wet. If its dry or its above the water table you're not going to get good information there but you could find the depth to the water table. That works real well.

Dr. Deb: This works up to, I believe, 300 feet below the surface. It's fairly sensitive. You have to be just above the tree tops, not through the trees, but you have to get fairly close. They can also use this as resistivity. They can use it to determine whether there are gravel beds and things, for aggregate.

Dr. Bob: In that sort of situation what you're looking as is very permeable materials versus less permeable materials. Water is going to flow in the permeable materials and then you have to have some map to be created and then you have to interpret the map. What we have on the overhead now is a variety, very dramatic colors. This was a rather rapid fly over where the "bird" is slung beneath the helicopter. They talk here about the warm, orange-red colors on the map, areas of high conductivity. Sort of like the infrared type. Hot areas are red, blue areas are cold, if you were to use infrared photogrametric methods taking picture. Here they also have the cool or green blue colors representing lower conductivities. To show that there are contaminated areas from lakes and the drainage out of the containment pond, the dam leakage situation, the leakage out is this plume of purple. That sort of acts like a point source pollution but subsurface and therefore can be addressed as a point source solution. In the groundwater trade we have point source solution and nonpoint source solution. Spraying your field with insecticide is a in a way a broad solution to the situation and the point source becomes the whole field but we would refer to it in a broad spraying with insecticides that that would be a nonpoint solution source of pollution. This type of thing is ongoing at the present time.

Dr. Deb: (looking at another picture on overhead) It's just another false color image of another example of how this could be used. This has been used in the Everglades. What you are seeing is saltwater intruding into the glades. As you pump more and more freshwater out of the aquifer, the saltwater is also located adjacent to the everglades and intrudes into the area because of the loss of freshwater.

Dr. Bob: The freshwater is like a pod under the land. After all the land isn't that far above sea level. The sea level acts like a water tower and it has a head on it for water to come down through the sediments. For example, (cross section on the overhead) as to happens to cross section. There's the land surface, here's the water surface, of course the land surface goes down at some angle below the waves. There is a water table and then this water is fresh and there's a pod because somewhere down here the sea water has saturated and has high conductivity. That's why when you said false color they use the colors that the reds and orange are high conductivity, sea water. Lots of ions in it. The freshwater lacking in the ions. If you put down wells, some wells get very deep, and you start drawing this up what happens is this pod of freshwater is diminished unless it rains a tremendous amount and exceeds the amount of withdrawal. At a point in time, (draws a new water pattern) at the base, not a water table anymore, but it is the margin and sea water has come in here and this well and this well are in a heap of trouble. This one's still ok. That one's still pumping. This water has salt water incursion as a problem. Is there a solution for that? Drill another well. You can start pumping but you would not be able to inject fresh water to push that salt water back out. You've got some problems there to deal with.

That leads us to the fact that although that particular case was not a suggested as to be the topic of anyone that I know of so far for the term paper. A case came up in the field the other day at the exploratory and was about Craigsville. Craigsville a community that has seen growth over the past few years, but for the past few decades the community is on a situation where the bedrock was just gently inclined back to a high mountain peak, Cottle Knob. We're talking about a location just off 10 miles east of route 19 in Nicholas County. Very close to Summersville. The bedrock was tilting about 6 degrees and the community was spread out and then there's a mountain over here. There's a very thin layer of sands and colluvium on this surface. At the foot of the mountain is a thicker wedge. All the people that were living up here had individual septic tanks. There was no community sewage collection. Where was all this draining? Down to the lowest part of town and there was no stream cutting across. In the town, one little stream went that way and one little stream went that way. It was a drainage divide. You couldn't have placed in a more incorrect situation to have everyone depend on septic systems. The people down here with gardens whose vegetables grew real well but you may not have wanted to eat them all. Furthermore, the locals there would say, there would be times you couldn't see a haze but you knew the gasses were there. The little streams that led off on either side in the downhill you couldn't even walk next to them on the warm days in summer. The smell and the aroma and hepatitis, a number of people had hepatitis. Someone on the field trip confirmed that her grandmother lived there and she had hepatitis. Those types of things are just very subtle. That's an excellent project to write up. More than one person could choose something like that, and that out of the groundwater. They could look back in the newspapers. The community built the sewer treatment only about 6 years ago. About 4 years ago now have they collected everyone's material. Our leader down there, James Giles, said at the school they had a septic tank but before they let the kids out for recess they'd have to go out there to see if it was safe to let the kids out on recess. The rock is just very close to the surface so the sand distributed out was their only leaching bed. There were days when they said no recess outside today even though the sun is shining now the septic tank isn't letting us outside. With that information they could look at newspapers. They can gather verbal discussion, sort of a verbal history, go out and talk to some folks. What about the lesson plan? What would be good in the lesson plan like that?

Dr. Deb: Depending on what it was you were trying to get your students to get out of your particular paper there are a variety of things you could do. For example, someone called me today and talked about the fact that you could do something with densities or separating liquids or whatever or you could do something as sophisticated as investigating septic tanks or waste disposal systems. You could investigate what a proper treatment plant should look like and compare it to the same effect you're getting out of a septic tank. How does nature filter these types of things?

Dr. Bob: Maybe you incorporate a field trip.

Dr. Deb: A field trip. What I did with chemistry students some years ago, which really works with a consolidated situation, I had students all over Preston County and once we had gone over or introduced this topic of waste treatment, they knew what should be an effective waste treatment plan. They then went back to their respective communities and they themselves had to contact the person in charge of the waste treatment and get a tour or an outline of exactly what the community was doing to treat the waste. They then had to come back and do a class presentation on that. It was amazing what the various communities in Preston County were doing to treat their waste. Some of them had nothing to treat the waste with because they were still trying to acquire farms to get their waste treatment plant on line.

Dr. Bob: Or you incorporate the flowmeister.

Dr. Deb: You could use the flowmeister, in fact, if you put a septic tank and somebody's well is drilled right adjacent to it what is going to happen to it. There are many, many things you can do in conjunction with it. The thing you have to remember is, with this lesson plan you need to give me three things. One, tell me what exploration you're going to use with those students to get them involved with the topic. What hands on activity, what minds on activity can you get them to engage in whatever lesson you are trying to get across to them. Two, how are you going to present that topic to them once you've gotten them engaged and once you've preassessed what they know and find out what they are curious about? How are you going to teach that? How are you going to approach that? What are you going to talk to them about? Third, the application phase. How are they now apply that knowledge to a new situation to demonstrate proficiency with that information?

Dr. Bob: On the exploratories in both cases, Parkersburg and Summersville, we went to greater or smaller landfills. They were dramatically different. Another type of experiment you might do is take a two liter pop bottle. Take off the label, clean it off so you can see it, and then build a type of modern landfill. It is difficult to get that seal around the base, but if you use heavy mil plastic you can use modeling clay and seal and then use some sands and so forth and you can put in vegetable coloring or jello powder and it really is dramatic. You don't have to put in garbage and that. At one time I was using a cherry jello because there's so much sugar in it you don't see the color, but a little color goes a long way and as you start putting water on top of it as rainfall and it leaches through, it gets red because it had just enough color in there and seemed like it came from nowhere. Third and fourth graders liked that a lot.

We're almost to the break time. I'm going to jump one piece a bit in our outline because we're going to talk about wetlands later.

Deb, in Preston County in the highland areas you have quite a bit of wetlands? What characterizes a wetland? How can you identify a wetland up in Preston County or anywhere in the state?

Dr. Deb: Anytime any classification system is used to identify a wetlands there's really two things are referred to. One is the soil and two is the vegetation. The fact that water is there is a given, otherwise it wouldn't be called a wetland. It doesn't have to be there all the time. Water is a criteria is not actually used to classify the wetland, it's the soil and vegetation that result from the water being there consistently or inconsistently.

Dr. Bob: Doesn't have to wet all the time?

Dr. Deb: Right. It just has to affect the vegetation and soil in some way shape or form.

Dr. Bob: We often talk about mottling in the soil. Sort of the dark colors and light colors. Greens and reds. When it's oxidized you get the reds and the oranges.

(Technical difficulties, joined in progress) articles, the title of it was "Safer than a spouse." That is, sleeping with an individual who is giving off radiation is more of a level of radiation emission then burying low level waste in great quantities outside of town because of the distance you are from that material. Real interesting ways of looking at these things. The low level waste and the repository situation is an issue that we have not yet come to grips with in this country in a full way. Individual states are storing some of their low level waste because they went along. They said when they got together with an adjacent state everyone was pointing the finger at the individual large state, Texas for example. Texas built their own. They have worked on this for a number of years already. Always a geologic repository. The potential of firing any radioactive waste into the sun was immediately put in great scrutiny because we were having difficult and assurance of getting the rockets out of our atmosphere without explosion. Burying them in Antarctica didn't make a whole lot of sense. The transportation, if there was any accident and the release of heat you'd have melt, then you'd have an incredible problem to address that issue to Antarctica. No one country owns Antarctic continent. You can't buy a piece of Antarctic continent. There is a treaty such that there are pie shaped wedges that historically relate to certain countries, but Russia and the United States never were countries that had claims to the southpole. Therefore, they were the two countries, back in the 1950s, that initiated a way to finding a treaty for the peaceful use forever of Antarctica. Well, forever will depend on whether there are great resources of oil or gas or metals that might somehow become economical deposits to retrieve. Still, the environmental issues of the Antarctic are enormous. As are the environment issues of deposited any type of waste or radioactivity in the sea floor. Corrosion, first and foremost, has always been a concern. If you watch what's going on in an infrastructure of retrieval of leaking underground storage tanks at old filling stations, the first letters are l-u-s-t. The leaking underground storage tanks. They take those tanks out, many of which were put in the 30s, 40s, and 50s and you look at those and say whoa. I'm glad they took that out because it looks rusty enough that it could give way at any second. They now put in fiberglass, unitized material that is not going to undergo the strong chemical weathering that the old metal ones were undergoing underground. If this sounds like a hodgepodge of things, you see how you pull one thread and the whole fabric shudders. Looking at energy, looking at the waste materials, looking at the transportation and storage of the energy materials themselves, in the case of oil and natural gas are major problems and concerns.

Well, let me switch to a new tact now...radon. In the multiple step decay of uranium to lead. Whether it's U238 or U235, along the way is the gas radon with a very short half life. Radon is present to greater abundance in certain rocks. Uranium rich rocks and it stands to reason if radon is a radiogenic daughter of a parent in the multistep decay of uranium that radon is going to be present in rocks that have uranium. Granite has some uranium. Uranium mines from the 1950s on, we were mining uranium because we were trying to generate more and more materials for nuclear power and other nuclear related issues. The radon is a gas. It decays by giving off an alpha particle which is pretty chunky. An alpha particle is a helium atom stripped of its electrons, if you could picture that. It's a nucleus of two protons and two neutrons. It's pretty chubby and chunky and kind of small but if that radon gas molecule becomes attached to a piece of dust and then you inhale it, you then have the potential for the radon and it's half life to decay in your lungs. That's where great concern was expressed. Look we need some good data. We need epidemial logical data, a big multi syllable word that simply means the doctors and the scientists get together and find out who got sick where and when. Is there a pattern? Does the pattern in this case relate to radon? The Environmental Protection Agency said, and they were joined with other federal agencies, a great group to look at with respect to radon would be uranium miners. After all they would be exposed to a lot more uranium working in the tunnels in Colorado and elsewhere out west and to be surrounded by the breakdown of the radiogenic process in rock that's two billion years old. There's a lot of products in there that have short half lifes and there's uranium. They got all the data and they calculated some figures with respect to how many cases of lung cancer might occur each year in the United States as a result to an exposure of radon. Years later someone asked a better question. "How many of those miners smoked?" They said, we hadn't asked that question and now many of them are gone. We don't have that type of data. The refinement of the data is that, if you smoke and are exposed to radon then there's a great increased probability of running into problems with respect to lung cancer. If you don't and never have then exposure to radon is not going to be as potentially damaging to you as a individual. The probability of lung cancer for a nonsmoker exposed to modest amounts of radon is very, very low. The question is, can a country establish a baseline such that anything above that base of radon exposure has to be eliminated and cleaned or you move the people out. In Canada and Scandinavian countries where they're living in a granite environment, or till glacial deposits made up of the granite environment, they allow greater exposures. Why? Because they are surrounded by so much of it that if they were to create and dictate a low level as a maximum, the amount of gross national product of the country to go into solving this problem is just staggering. It's not going to bring the country to it's knees. It is weighted so that other countries allow a much greater exposure then we do. Radon can also get into ground water. The only case that I know of where a well was shut down was on Pike's Peak. It's a granite rock and they were really hot with radon dissolved in the groundwater. They had the people stop drinking it and they brought in water to that particular single family situation. Also what happens is that there needs to be all sorts of treatment. Publications, Pennsylvania and West Virginia has a little bulletin in conjunction with the EPA. This is "Pennsylvania's Consumer Guide to Radon Reduction." In these publications there are cartoons, the house, a slab on a grade, there's a basement, there's one with a crawl space, different foundation types. Have people understand what is going on. Many of us never had radon problems because our houses leaked like sieves. It was cheaper when they were built in the 30s, 40s, and 50s to just buy more fuel. You didn't even have insulation in the roof much less in the side paneling. If you had the home repaneled then you probably put on additional insulation, R-5 or whatever, then put the panel over the insulation. The insulation was over the pre existing coverage of the house, slats, aluminum or whatever. Times have dramatically changed because now our energy is much more expensive. The natural ventilation on the one hand how radon gets into the house through cracks in the floor, through openings around pipes or windows in the basement. If the house breaths then the radon is expelled. Speaking of breathing, there are also aspects of what do you do if you have to sell it or buy a home. I'm going to live in that home. There's a buyer's guide and a seller's guide. Whose there lurking over ones shoulder in both cases but the person whose going to put up the loan. The one whose the financier of this situation. You have to run tests to determine whether this home has high radon concentrations. If you're a smart buyer you'll want to find out. Some states have requirements that in order for a home to be sold and financed it has to have a radon testing. Does it cost money to clean up? Yes. You want to be very careful, investigate the individual or individuals that might come around to your door to sell the process of radon alleviation of high level of radon numbers. Perhaps you've also heard the comment or the term "a sick building." I talked to an engineer over this past weekend and for awhile while his children was growing up he stayed in one place and became part of that larger school districts engineering team and they had a sick building on their hands. A vast number of youngsters and teachers were getting sick. It turned out that when they chose the aggregate to mix with the cement to form concrete the used material had an extraordinarily high radon content. The building had a high radon content but that wasn't the reason people were getting sick. It was Fifth's disease. If you're familiar with chicken pox and measles and some of those other diseases of kids, Fifth's disease was the fifth disease identified by the early Roman's, I believe. Fifth's disease is a very contagious situation. You get sores and open wounds in the mouth. It's a lot like measles therefore it's very, very contagious and easily spread. The end to that story was they found the radon and they cleaned that up but it cost the school district a pretty penny to do that. There are other cases where the uranium rich spoil from mines out in Utah and elsewhere in the west were used to form the concrete in the streets of Salt Lake City and elsewhere or were used to form the mortar of the concrete or even formed bricks in homes that were used by those folks who just don't have a heck of a lot of money. Often Hispanic or Native American heritage in the American southwest they were living in homes built of those types of materials. The federal government had to go back in and take those materials out and rebuild some of the homes because they were using radioactive materials.

That brings us to our final few minutes of discussion. Finally, before I leave this discussion of radon zones, let's run to the computer and scroll down and see...this is on the government, EPA government, and it's the map of radon zones in West Virginia. The highest zone greater then 4 pecocuries (sp) per liter in all of West Virginia we are well within the standards, but some of these zones, why are certain parts of West Virginia more susceptible then others or have higher levels? The highest are the reds. The reds along the eastern part, there's a lot of shale exposed in that area and they are black shales. That means they probably have uranium in them. Up in here...the rocks of the Pennsylvania also include a great deal of shale. Dark shales quite often. The orange colored rocks are a variety of both middle and upper Pennsylvanian and then down in this region we're dominated by clastic sedimentary rocks. A lot of silica. That seems to have a much lower concentration but the county wide pattern does not address where limestone might be shown. Limestone may be higher or lower. We don't have glacial till but we have outwash along the Ohio Valley. All along this border here there's a potential for sands and gravels in the terraces to contain granite boulders. There might be concern locally. The bottom line is this...you can't tell from a map such as this where the real dangers lie but you can access this and get this basic information, www.EPA.gov and then, look like an iaq or laq/radon then you look for the individual states.

The last issue, wetlands and acid mine drainage. Now wetlands, throughout the United States, there are freshwater and coastal wetlands. We don't have to worry in West Virginia about the coastal environments, we don't have saltwater and according to John Denver's song we're stranger to blue water. The freshwater wetlands in the United States and marshes, the saltwater, we have destroyed over half of the total acreage that existed in the 1700s when serious settling of the United States began. Over half has already been destroyed. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has jurisdiction over wetlands and the no net loss plan was to require that if a request came in by a developer or to build highways or a variety of things to take out a wetland. Surface mine operation wants to use valley fill in an area that they had to rebuild a wetland to match the size at a very minimum in acreage. If that wetland that was to be destroyed was so very valuable for production even of furs, or plants, species. If there's an endangered plant or species you're not going to get a permit. It should be protected. There's a recent article in Sunday's Pittsburgh Press, a multipage article. I have the article to demonstrate that it was quite substantial, two pages on the wetlands issue. The bottom line was that the Army Corps of Engineers has only turned down 1 permit and that happened to be in West Virginia out of the Pittsburgh Corps of Engineers office. Then there's another office out of Huntington for the southern part of the state. It implies that they're not very good watchdogs. Everything gets ok'd. It's a time to develop. A number of years ago they gave a permit to a housing development that wanted to build in the Baltimore area in the wetland out in the salt marsh area. They said we don't want you digging this up. Ok, we'll put the building on stilts. They said, Oh, good idea. That won't destroy the wetland but I tell you there were plenty of those plants that were in permanent shade that weren't going to grow and it was going to change. Nationwide, if you include a recent study that looked at Florida, an iffy package to go in with Pennsylvania and elsewhere, that 50-90% of the wetlands that are built fail. They certainly don't mimic the original wetlands. Wetlands are sponges to help prevent floods, they're productivity for things that are edible and plants and animals to be sure. They help down and keep down erosion because they are a mat. They're like kidneys, because acid mine drainage, you can put in some pollutants and the plants and the soil and the overall acid environment in those wetlands will fix the pollutants in place. Iron for example, you can use wetlands and cattail marshes and there's uptake of iron. It's primarily in my studies as I've looked at it, the research is that the iron turns out to be coatings on silt and clay size particles because the cattails don't take up the iron but the iron gets fixed. Manganese doesn't work that way. Manganese doesn't get taken out by the wetlands. You can overload a wetland, you can kill a wetland. Along highways if you build a wetland to help with the chemistry if you have the water rushing on down over limestone into a wetland you're going to kill it because you're bring basic water over the limestone into an acid environment and it's going to kill the wetland which wishes to be an acid environment.

Well we've reached the end of today's potpourri. We'll add a few more topics and revisit a couple of these things next time. We'll be reading "Cadillac Desert" and again we'll be talking about marshes, water, and wetlands, acid mine drainage in places. Although Cadillac Desert is mostly the western United States we going to revisit the eastern United States because we have tired old rivers that have undergone over a century and a half of use and poor stewardship history. We'll also look a bit at the Great Lakes. So until next time...I've enjoyed being with you again as always. It's always a great day for a field trip! If it gets a little nippy out you just move faster. It's good brisk oxygen. It's always a great day for a field trip! Until next time, take care, see you soon.

WVGES Education Specialist, Tom Repine (repine@wvgs.wvnet.edu)

Page last revised: November 1999

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