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Tim Grundl

Tim Grundl

Professor

346 Lapham Hall
(414) 229-4765
grundl@uwm.edu

PhD: Colorado School of Mines
MS: Northern Illinois University
BS: University Of Delaware

Specializations: Groundwater for contamination, evironmental issues & regulations, lake & groundwater element cycling

Research:

I am currently involved in multiple lines of inquiry. The first is a comprehensive look into the overall geochemistry of the deep sandstone aquifer in eastern Wisconsin and the upper Midwest in general. This aquifer is the pre-eminent source of groundwater within Wisconsin and Illinois. The resource is being over utilized and is coming under increasingly severe stress. Various geochemical conditions are limiting the usage of this aquifer including high radium. Many communities are over the EPA mandated limit on the amount radioactivity that can be supplied to their customers and the interest in this topic is high. The last of the Pleistocene ice advances injected a large pulse of fresh Pleistocene water into this aquifer and through the use of noble gas and stable isotope data we are in the process of unraveling the dynamics of this one-time event. Glacial-groundwater interplay is of great interest to glaciologists and hydrologists alike and has water supply implications as this water is "mined" for our drinking water supply. The final aspect of this work is a study to ascertain what effects would occur if treated effluent, complete with a high chloride load and a variety of emerging contaminants is used to recharge the aquifer in an effort to reduce the effects of overpumping.

Another line of inquiry is the development, in collaboration with other colleagues, of a suite of in-situ probes for the rapid, screening level detection of contamination in harbor sediments. Sediment borne contamination is the major source of contaminants to the surface waters of the United States and part of the reason that sediment remediation has not occurred very rapidly is the expense and large-scale disruption associated with remediation. Remediation efforts would be much more focused and inexpensive if a better means to initially characterize the extent of contamination was employed. Current techniques depend on expensive networks of discrete sampling sites that can be 100s to 1000s of meters apart. Our probes allow real-time identification of PAH and heavy metal contamination in harbor sediments for a fraction of the effort involved in the typical coring and subsequent lab analysis that is in use today. These probes are mounted on a cone penetrometer rod and induce contaminant fluorescence using laser or x-ray excitation (for PAHs and metals respectively). We intend to move into the use of X-ray fluorescence for the detection of PCBs in these same sediments.

Smaller background projects include:

  • A look into the degradation of certain organic contaminants by ferrous iron (Fe2+). It turns out that Fe2+ is a relatively potent reductant for some contaminants when it is complexed to any of a variety of minerals or when it is complexed to the hydroxide ion in water (ie. as FeOH+). I have been looking specifically at FeOH+ catalyzed degradation of nitroaromatic compounds (ie. explosives residues).

  • The potential to use global environmental databases (climate, soil type, bedrock geology, etc.) as tools to predict areas of naturally occurring groundwater contamination. This work is being done in collaboration with Swiss colleagues at EAWAG and is working well with arsenic, fluoride and selenium.

  • A study into the movement of lead and other heavy metals in soils. We are using a Civil War battlefield with well known battle lines to give us clear constraints, both

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