Geography, Geology and the Environment

My research is concerned with understanding the potential for contaminant attenuation at the groundwater-surface water interface (hyporheic zone) of gaining rivers; a key requirement in the UK’s implementation of the EU Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC). The project is based at an instrumented reach of the River Tern in Shropshire (Helshaw Grange) which was selected by NERC in 2002 as a type locality in their lowland catchment research (LOCAR) program. The research is in collaboration with the Environment Agency and aims to quantify the risk to surface water posed by a groundwater trichloroethene (TCE) plume and excessive nitrogen detected in the Permian sandstone aquifer which supplies much of the discharge in Tern basin as groundwater baseflow. The project will employ a fibre-optic distributed temperature sensor network (based on Raman scatter) to quantify groundwater-surface interactions in the hyporheic zone, at reach scale. Temperature observations will be combined with multi-level stream bed pore water sampling for TCE, daughter products (cis-1,2-dichloroethene and vinyl chloride), nitrogen species, biogeochemical indicator solutes and dissolved organic carbon to determine the significance of natural attenuation processes occurring at the site. Reactive and conservative fluorescent tracer techniques will be applied to quantify residence times and the metabolic activity of reactive zones. Experimental data will be used to calibrate and validate a reactive transport model and quantitative risk assessment for the River Tern. The project is supervised by Dr. Stefan Krause and Dr. Nigel Cassidy, with external collaborators at the Environment Agency.

I am a member of Keele’s Research Institute for the Environment, Physical Sciences and Applied Mathematics (EPSAM).

Figure: Multi-level in-stream piezometers for depth-discrete hydrochemical sampling, after installation in June 2009.