Tuesday, Mar 17, 2009
Frank Dunnivant and Jake Ginsbach
A Whitman college professor’s and his student’s recent discovery could result in cutting out the months of testing it now takes environmental scientists to predict pollution releases at dredging operations to almost nothing – to less than one hour.
“It will be one of the landmark publications of my career,” said Frank Dunnivant, an associate professor of chemistry about his and senior Jake Ginsbach’s research findings.
What is now an arduous six- to nine-month-long testing process – pioneered by Environmental Protection Agency scientists and others in the early 1980s to predict the amount of pollutants released into the water from contaminated sediment during a particular dredging operation – would take only minutes to estimate using the Whitman team’s method, which is based on a model that resulted from about five years worth of research.
Ginsbach ’09, Dunnivant’s research assistant, said their model will also result in better, more precise projections for the regulators who determine appropriate pollution controls at dredging sites– and that will result in better allocation of government and private resources. “They will be able to make better regulatory decisions,” Ginsbach said.
Dunnivant said now the EPA typically doesn’t use the current lengthy testing methods because of time and funding constraints, opting instead to take a worst-case scenario approach to a Superfund site or other waterway dredging operations.
Basically the EPA proceeds with the presumption that “almost everything in the re-suspended sediment is going to be in the water … But researchers know that’s not true,” Ginsbach said.
And with that approach, the EPA might be requiring unnecessary, expensive environmental safeguards during a dredging operation or may not allow the dredging operation at all – even though in some dredging operations,depending on the sediment composition, contaminants will remain locked in the sediment and not be released into the water, according to the Whitman team’s findings.
Dunnivant said the key is the amount of natural organic material present in the sediment. The higher the percentage of organic material in sediment, the lower the level of pollution in the water phase.
He said it’s been known for about 40 years that organic material absorbs contaminants, such as DDT and PCBs. But what is new – what the Whitman team found out in the last two months – is the crucial role natural organic material plays in “desorption” of those contaminants – meaning the rate at which contaminants are released from the sediment back into the water. Depending on the sediment’s composition, the contaminants, which are hydrophobic and will “cling” to organic material, could very well still be in the sediment when it is re-suspended and/or removed from the water.
It’s areas where the sediment is mainly inorganic material, sand, silt and clay, for example, that dredging becomes more environmentally dangerous because the contaminants can’t strongly attach to inorganic material. And so during dredging the contaminants re-suspend in the water, affecting water quality, fish – and also air quality, as the hydrophobic particles volatilizes from aqueous to a gaseous state.
All of that, in addition to the damage dredging does in every situation, he noted– damage such as destruction of fish spawning beds, the covering of crabs and lobsters and other organisms on the bottom of the waterway.
Dunnivant said their discovery was made after five years of testing sediment samples from around the nation, east coast, west coast, estuaries, lakes and streams. He gave Ginsbach a data set, “five years’worth of data and told I told him to see if there was a publication in it.”
He remembers Ginsbach walking into his office a couple months ago with a big smile on his face.
“I had no idea of the magnitude,” Dunnivant said.
He said he imagined the data would give them a range of rates, a better way of predicting. But, amazingly, the research results – under peer review,though Dunnivant is confident it’s ironclad – show there is just one factor needed to determine how fast contaminants will be released.
Dunnivant said he thinks they discovered this first because others’ past research attempts were of shorter duration resulting in significantly fewer samples to test. And he credits Ginsbach – the “best student I’ve ever had.”
Ginsbach, who grew up in Wyoming riding horses, fixing fences, team roping, playing violin and aspiring to be a professional rodeo cowboy or bullfighter, ended up with different aspirations in high school. It was while he was thinking about a law career and was at a debate camp at Gonzaga University that a Whitman College student serving as a lab leader at the camp told him he should think about attending Whitman.
Ginsbach, whose mother is a college math teacher, said he intended to focus on math, science and debate. And for awhile, he considered majoring in philosophy.“That’s the Whitman experience,” he said. “You get involved in everything.”
“But then I took a chemistry class,” said Ginsbach, whose professional goal is now being a lead investigator at a major research university. And now the chemistry lab is pretty much his life.
“He found his calling,” Dunnivant said.
And the large graduate-student programs have found him.
Ginsbach, who in addition to this research, has authored two e-textbooks with Dunnivant, among other accomplishments – and when he moves on from Whitman this spring to take on graduate work, he has his choice.
He is being pursued by all the major graduate programs: MIT, Penn State;University of Michigan; University of Illinois; University of California,Berkeley; and Stanford University.
— Virginia Grantier
