Mary Hingst Transcript Corrected
Hello, and welcome to Ask a Scientist, the podcast for both kids and adults to ask scientists questions about anything they want to know. There are so many scientists out there doing a lot of cool scientific research. In the news, we are constantly hearing about scientists and their new ideas and where those ideas are going to take us in the future. But just who are these scientists? In this podcast, we will learn a little more about who they are and what inspires them as scientists.
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Victoria:
Welcome back to the next episode of Ask a Scientist. Our guest this week is Mary Hingst. She is a hydro-geologist at Well Aware, a female founded nonprofit that’s bringing clean sustainable water to communities in east Africa. She’s also a doctoral student in the Water Science and Policy program at the University of Delaware, where her research focuses on coastal hydrogeology, salinization of groundwater and groundwater resource management.
Mary, thank you so much for being here.
Mary:
Thank you for having me. I’m excited to talk to you and answer some questions.
Victoria:
We are excited to hear your answers.
Is there anything that I missed in that introduction or anything you want to add?
Mary:
I think that covers about all of it. I’ll talk a little more about everything I do when we start talking some of these questions. We’re pretty good, pretty spot on with my research. So I’m excited.
Victoria:
(What is hydrogeology?)
Okay, good. Awesome. All of these questions were submitted through emails and social media by the listeners.
And we can start off with an excellent introductory question from Tim. What is hydrogeology?
Mary:
Very good question to start with. Hydrogeology is the study of groundwater. So if you look at the word you have hydro, which, you know, means water, and geo, which refers to the earth or the ground. So it’s yeah, the study of water beneath the earth surface.
Victoria:
(How do you study groundwater?)
Cool.
All right. So getting into, you know, studying ground groundwater, this next question comes from Allie. How do you study groundwater?
Mary:
Also very good question. A lot of it is we have to kind of use our best approximation and estimations about properties we learned from the soil and rocks that the groundwater is flowing through. The best way to get that data is to drill a hole. And you can extract the rocks and the soil and sediment that comes out and you look at it and analyze it and know what kind it is. And the key is to know whether or not water could flow through it. Is there enough for space? Or are there fractures that allow water to flow through it?
And then once you have, you know, wells or boreholes drilled, we install a datalogger sometimes that can record water levels or different parameters of water, like solidity or oxygen or different nutrients in it. And so we can collect that data and kind of start piecing together how much groundwater there is, what direction it’s flowing in, how much is recharged every year. It also helps us if there’s contamination, we can figure out what, you know, where might that contamination go, how serious of a threat it is.
And another big thing that’s, especially in the recent decades, has become a groundwater model. So a lot of my time is actually spent at a computer and putting data we collect from the field into this numerical model to kind of simulate how we think the groundwater system is behaving.
Victoria:
That sounds like a lot of, a lot of factors kind of go into the groundwater there.
Mary:
Yes. You have to know about the rocks, you have to know about the water, you know, your location and everything. So it’s kind of fitting together all these pieces of a puzzle to understand the system.
Victoria:
(What area of the country does your research focus on?)
Cool.
All right. And this next question is getting into some more details of your research. Lucy wants to know what area of the country does your research focus on?
Mary:
Sure. So for my PhD research, my project is centered around Dover Delaware. So I go to the university of Delaware and I’m working in part of a big project called project WICCED, which is water in a changing coastal environment of Delaware. And it’s just looking at all the water resources on Delaware. And my specific project is looking at kind of the coastline area right near Dover, Delaware, and looking at saltwater intrustion.
As I’ve gone through school and had other jobs, I’ve been worked in Michigan and in Texas and out in Oregon and Northwest, I’ve kind of worked all around the country.
Victoria:
(How badly polluted is our groundwater?)
Very cool.
And so now we’ll get into a series of questions that kind of all focus on water quality and pollution. So this first question in that category is from Chris. How badly polluted is our groundwater?
Mary:
Well, I guess that’s going to depend on your location. I would say overall, in general, groundwater is actually pretty clean on its own. There’s a lot of people that will just have private wells if they live far away from the city. And they’re able to pump the water out of the ground and drink it without having to do any sort of major treatment on it. So when you get deeper groundwater, the good thing about that is there’s just so many or layers of rock and earth soil that helps to filter out all the pollutants that a lot of groundwater comes out pretty clean.
You can have worries if you live in more of like a city setting, a very industrialized setting that, you know, we do have lots of factories that might emit a lot of pollution. You have to be concerned about contamination coming from those.
Another thing would be called like geogenic sources of contamination, which means there, there are potentially chemicals or minerals within the rock where the water occurs that form naturally. So things like arsenic or uranium. Might just be found in the aquifer material and, you know, that’s no fault of our own. It’s just there. but we have pretty good technology that can filter out these different types of things.
I would say one thing people might keep hearing about recently is PFOS, which are these kind of long chain, we won’t get into the specific chemistry. But these molecules that were developed to be part of things like Teflon and these anti-stick compounds and also for firefighting foam, and finding out they might be carcinogenic and cause cancer and bad for health. And they seem to be kind of everywhere. They’re really small. And they’re finding them all over the country and groundwater sources. But one good thing about that is if you are worried about that contamination actually activated charcoal filters, like a Brita filter can actually filter that out pretty easily. So one thing you might want to think about, but it can be easily cleaned up and filtered out of your water.
Victoria:
Oh, interesting. I actually just got a Brita filter a couple of days ago, so that’s really good to know.
Mary:
Yeah. As long as you remember to change the filter, that can take out all the PFOS.
Victoria:
All right. Yeah, will pay attention to the little indicator light.
Mary:
Yes.
Victoria:
(What is being done to fix it?)
All right. I think we kind of touched on this with the Brita filter. But Della wants to know, in terms of pollution, what is being done to fix it?
Mary:
Yeah, I would say the main thing to be done is you have to stop it before it happens. So have better regulations and enforcement on, you know, areas where you might get pollution. So again, if you have like faculty or oil refineries, that might be emitting pollutants. You have to prevent those from actually getting into the groundwater system at the source.
We are getting pretty good technology for filtering out all types of contaminants on a very large-scale level. So if you have connected to a public water supply, that water should be really clean. And even if you have a private well, you can get in-home filter systems. That can take pretty much anything out of the water.
Victoria:
(Is one area of our country worse for ground water pollution?)
Okay, cool.
And another question about groundwater pollution, Max wants to know is one area of our country, worse for groundwater pollution.
Mary:
I guess it’s going to depend on what type of pollution you’re looking at. So again, if you have, I live right now in Philadelphia, and along the East coast, you have a lot of oil refineries in these chemical processing plants. So those are going to, you know, ground water might have higher concentrations of petroleum byproducts in it. Whereas if you move to the center of the country where there’s a lot of agriculture, the irrigation happening, they’re applying a lot of fertilizers, water there is likely be higher in levels of nitrate or phosphorous, things that you find in fertilizers.
So it’s going to depend on the area of the country and what’s happening at the surface, that would get into the groundwater.
Victoria:
(If you dump bleach into your backyard, how much is the damage to the aquifer and how far deep does it have to go before it is filtered?)
Oh, that makes sense. Makes sense.
All right. And this is kind of an interesting thought experiment here. This question comes from Sierra. If you dump bleach into your backyard, how much is the damage to the aquifer and how far deep does it have to go before it is filtered?
Mary:
Okay. But yeah, that’s a, that’s a good question. I’ll try to talk broadly about kind of a subsection of hydrogeology is looking at contaminant transport. And so that gets into dealing with, you know, tracking pollution as it moves through the ground and into the groundwater.
So one thing you would have to know is, you know, how much bleach are you pouring into the surface? It’s just a cup or something, and it’s probably not going to cause too much damage. If this is happening repeatedly, or it’s a really big volume, it’s gonna pose more of a risk. I would say the main risk would actually just be towards the grass and the plants on the surface.
When you have to consider is what is the soil or like the top sediment made out of, is it like clay, which, you know, might prevent it from seeking deep into their surface. Cause clay is very low permeability, so water cannot flow through clay very easily, it just kind of gets trapped in the pores But if you have, you know, very sandy soil at the top, it might percolate into the ground surface very quickly.
Another thing would be to know where your water table is at, so where is, are you actually getting saturated sediments? Where is it that you could actually pump water out of the ground? A lot of times, you know, if you’re higher in the mountains, that is going to be pretty far down. But if you’re in a coastal area, the water table may only be a few feet beneath the ground surface. So that would increase the risk of contamination and aquifer is, you know, how close is the water to the surface?
Victoria:
(How do you manage groundwater resources?)
Oh, okay. That makes sense.
And this next question is from Zach getting into kind of more of the management side of things. How do you manage groundwater resources?
Mary:
Very excellent question, and something that, you know, is still studied and debated by lots of people.
I would say managing groundwater resources is like managing any other resource and maybe an easy comparison to think of like a bank account. So, you know, if you want to have a budget, you know, and want to, you know, not get in debt, you have to know how much you’re putting into those source and how much you’re taking out.
So you think of like a savings account, that’s your aquifer. It needs to know how much water is already in the aquifer, you know, at that one moment. And so again, you can get some estimates if you have water levels, if you know what kind of rock material composes the aquifer, how much pore space in that, you could get an estimate of how much is in your savings account, so how much water’s in the aquifer.
And that you need to know how much new water and kind of like new money is coming into the aquifer. So call that recharge, and recharge is mainly composed of precipitation. So when it rains or snows and that water seeps into the ground. That’s recharging the aquifer. And the amount that can reach the aquifer varies, you know, done by the type of rock material the water has to pass through, how deep the aquifer is and stuffs. So it can be, you know, only like 5% of all the rain, or it could be 25% of all the rain.
And then, of course, you have to know how much is then leaving the aquifer, how much are you taking out of your savings account. So that is discharged. Main thing of that could be pumping. So if you’re using the water you want to monitor, you know, at what rate are you taking the water out of the aquifer. So usually you can get a little flow meter on your pump and it will tell you how many gallons per minute are you pumping out. So you just have to keep a tally of that going to make sure you’re not pumping out more than is going in.
You also have some natural discharge happening as the water is just naturally flowing through the aquifer from higher pressurized areas to lower pressurized area. So usually that means water flowing to surface water, can discharge to surface waters, so it can be rivers or streams or lakes of flow out to the ocean.
So it’s just, yeah. It’s knowing how much water do you have to start with, how much are you going to be using, and how much are you going to be replacing and trying to keep that replacement and storage always above how much are you using, so you don’t begin to deplete the water levels.
Victoria:
(What is the rate of aquifer water consumption? Is it increasing?)
That makes sense. Very logical.
All right. And getting into kind of some of that, the, you know, balance of water in the groundwater. Allie wants to know what is the rate of aquifer water consumption? Is it increasing?
Victoria:
One of those other questions, kind of like, you know, what, which part of the country has more pollution. And it’s going to vary all across the country. Some areas might be using a lot more water than they were 10 years ago. Some might be using less water.
One thing that could cause you to use less water would be like efficiency. So, you know, replace any leaking pumps or have better equipment that uses less water.
With climate change happening and kind of, you know, it’s being harder to predict where we’re going to get the precipitation. So some areas are getting a lot more rain. They’re probably, their aquifer levels, their groundwater levels are probably increasing. In other areas, especially like the west coast in California, Oregon, Washington, they’re in a severe drought right now. So all their aquifer level, their ground water levels are dropping.
It depends on the part of country. I think overall there has been an increase in groundwater use compared to using surface water. So a lot of places just use surface water for their drinking water sources or for any sort of industrial application. But again, as you know, snowpacks on mountains are shrinking and we’re getting less precipitation in some areas, that surface water is becoming less reliable. So, some places are switching to using more groundwater. So again, that could be increasing groundwater levels.
Yes, if they want like a, a general specific rate, usually if you do any sort of estimation on how much water is being used, it’s, you can assume anywhere between 50 gallons to 150 gallons per person per day, to get an estimate of how much water might be use.
Victoria:
Wow, that is a lot of water.
Mary:
Yes.
Victoria:
(What can we do to reduce our water use around the house?)
Oh man.
And now we’ve got a great follow-up question to that. Speaking of how much water we use every day, Sierra wants to know what can we do to reduce our water use around the house.
Mary:
I would say the biggest thing is to just be mindful your use. So be aware of when you’re using water and how much you’re using. There’s always the easy things, you know, if you’re brushing teeth or washing the dishes, don’t just mean the water running constantly. You can shut that off. If you have a chance or your parents have the chance to replace, you know, different appliances or toilets, you can get, you know, the more efficient use one. Actually I think dishwashers have improved significantly since they were first invented and use pretty little water now. You know, be careful how long you take a shower and stuff.
Another thing would be think about, I guess you consider it secondary water use or indirect water use. So really, you know, creating electricity uses a lot of water, power generation uses water. All the products you buy, water is going to be involved in pretty much any sort of aspect of manufacturing and either for power generation or, you know, for creating different materials. So I think people, you can easily find on the Internet if you do a search, you know, you can do with your carbon footprint, you can also look at your water footprints, especially like the foods you eat and stuff, you know. There’s a kind of a push away from meat and dairy, but some of those replacements, like have you stopped drinking cow’s milk, but if you use almonds milk, almonds are actually a very water intensive crops. So the water balance might not be pretty similar between those two. So yeah, I would consider also, you know, besides your direct water, like pretty much everything you do involves water. So really think about your consumption overall.
Victoria:
Oh, wow. I’d never thought about anything besides like directly when the water’s coming out of my faucet. So that’s really good to know.
Mary:
Yeah. It’s, they always say water is life. And really water is everything, it’s going into pretty much every aspect of anything you use. There’s somehow water involved in it.
Victoria:
(How much does fracking affect groundwater?)
Wow. Lots, lots to think about.
All right. And we’ll get back to some groundwater questions. This next question comes from Max. How much does fracking affect groundwater?
Mary:
That’s always a hot topic to discuss. So I talked to, I have a friend who is also a member of my research group, used to work on water quality due to fracking. And so this can kind of vary as well. A lot of fracking where it takes place or in more rural areas. So the number of people it affects might not seem that big because there’s not that many people living around the fracking area. But those who do have issues might have very significant issues. So again, you know, it’s talking about like improved efficiency with water use and improved technology for monitoring pollution. We’re getting kind of reduced impact from fracking to water because they’re able to monitor any sort of leaks or seals that might be happening around a well casing.
And I think actually instead of, you know, how bad it is for water quality, it actually uses a lot of water itself. The fracking process use millions of gallons of water to create these fractures in the rock surface. So a lot of times more people notice that they just no longer have water, that their water supplies disappearing. Because these energy companies come and drill wells and take out all that water and inject it further down into the ground to extract oil and gas. So that’s one thing I don’t think it’s talked about a lot is just the amount of water used in fracking itself.
Victoria:
Wow. And correct me if I’m wrong, that water can’t be treated and reuse after fracking, right? Like if it’s been used for fracking, it’s just contaminated and we can’t use it for drinking water or anything else after that.
Mary:
Well, a lot of times it’s just left in the ground. It uses to push out all the propellant to all the, all the secret formulas and all the standard effecting materials that companies inject, when they do pump out the oil, sometimes you get water into it, but it’s going to be hard to kind of yeah, separated out and filter it and stuff. And so, you know that’s going to cost money and most companies probably aren’t going to want to invest in that. They just want the oil and gas.
Victoria:
(How has the excessive ice melting and rising sea levels throughout the world affected coastal water quality and salinity?)
Yeah, that makes sense. That’s what they’re interested in.
All right. And some other questions about other things besides fracking that have, that might be affecting our water. Joe wants to know how has the excessive ice melting and rising sea levels throughout the world affected coastal water quality and salinity.
Mary:
That’s what I could talk a lot about, because this is the focus of my dissertation, my research I’m doing for my PhD. So I focus on saltwater or seawater intrusion.
And so what a lot of people fail to realize, and you just talk about sea levels rising, and you always think about you’re flooding the surface of these areas, the land surface disappearing. But actually that water is also going into beneath the surface and actually is probably extending further inland in the subsurface than it is at the surface. And that’s because saltwater is denser than freshwater. And so, if you don’t have pumping, if you don’t have sea level rise, you kind of you’re in a steady state. Usually, there’s enough fresh water going out from the land surface that it keeps the salt water, you know, no pun intended, but it keeps it at bay. So it keeps it off into the ocean. And even sometimes you find, you know, a freshwater extends very far off from the land surface into kind of beneath the ocean floor. But once you start increasing sea level, so you get sea level rise from all the melting glaciers, or if you start over extracting the freshwater easy too much that you throw the balance of it, kind of seesaw, a freshwater saltwater out of whack and you get more seawater that’s heavier and it can put you kind of form this wedge of salt water that extends beneath the land surface.
And so when I am studying saltwater intrusion in Delaware, I’m trying to figure out, you know, where’s that contact, where is that freshwater saltwater interface and how far beneath the surface does it extend? And is it going to start contaminating wells? You know, are we going to start pulling up saltwater when we thought we were using freshwater?
So, yeah, that’s a very important thing to think about is sea level rise doesn’t just occur at the surface. It’s also, you know, pushing saltwater beneath the land surface as well.
Victoria:
Wow. I never thought about that. That is really cool to think about.
Mary:
Yeah. And it’s a global problem. It’s every continent, pretty much all around. California has been dealing with saltwater intrusion issues, you know, for well over a hundred years. Also, you know, any island is going to have this as a major issue. You know, France, New Jersey, the Mekong Delta, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, like there’s areas all around the world that have been dealing with this for a very long time. And it’s a huge issue it’s going to, I think, severely impact just a lot of aspects of the world society, because we’re losing our freshwater resource.
Victoria:
Yikes. Is there a way to get rid of the salt to like desalinate if that’s the term?
Mary:
Yeah. So, desalinization was, you know, it kinda was a thing back several decades ago, but it was so expensive and energy intensive that it kind of fell out of favor. But now as we’re running out of options, it’s becoming very popular again. And especially in areas like the seas around Israel, they rely a lot on desalinate water. In California I think is looking to open up more desalinization plants. They’re getting better with, you know, it not being so energy intensive. but an issue is then what do we do with all the salts? We’re going to have a lot of this and it’s not just dry salt. You can sprinkle on your food. It’s going to be this like really thick brine. And we have to figure out that, okay, what do we do with all of this? So.
Victoria:
Oh, yikes. Big, big questions.
Mary:
Yeah. It’s like nuclear waste. What do you do with the leftovers? So, yeah.
Victoria:
(How has global warming affected aquifer recharge rates?)
All right. Speaking of big questions, this next one is from Chris. How has global warming affected aquifer recharge rates?
Mary:
Okay. So I think I was kind of talking about this a little bit. They think with global warming, as it’s changing all our patterns of precipitation. In general, it’s thought that places that already kind of wet are just going to get wetter, but places that are dry are going to get even drier. And so that’s going to put a lot of stress on water resources if they’re not getting precipitation or these rain events, or if can rely on like monsoons, regular monsoons to recharge all the aquifers in the area.
And it’s hard to predict precipitation in general, because it’s really hard to predict cloud formation. And that’s one of the biggest struggles really don’t know where clouds are going to farm. You can’t predict, you know, where cloud is going to form in 50 years or something. So it’s hard to predict just how much recharge there is going to be.
Victoria:
(How is the hydrogeology of coastal areas charging due to urbanization and runoff quality?)
Yeah, that makes sense.
All right. This next question is from Joe. How is the hydrogeology of coastal areas changing due to urbanization and runoff quality?
Mary:
Okay. So urbanization can have a big impact on groundwater. One thing is you get these cities, you think about all the concrete that goes into them, all the asphalt, you’ve built these roads, you build these buildings. And so you’re covering up that permeable land surface. So one thing is you’re providing the water from actually going into the ground and recharging the aquifers beneath there. So you’re going to get a lot of runoff then, you get a lot of storm on off, you can have big flooding issues happening in these areas because the water now can’t go into the surface.
And a big issue with a lot of cities, especially older cities is when you have big storm events, they usually, they have their sewage system and their stormwater system can be combined. And when you get overflow, overwhelms the system and you can get a lot of sewage discharge into rivers or something because there’s not equipped to process so much. So that’s one issue as the city grows. If they don’t, you know, have their sewage treatment plant or water treatment plant growing as well, you can have these big sewage runoff events. So that’s a lot of times you live in cities like I live in Philadelphia, you know, you really shouldn’t swim in the rivers around here because they can be kind of gross and get a little overwhelmed with bacteria from that.
Victoria:
(How does your clean water system in Africa work?)
Ooh, that is good to know. No swimming in city river.
All right. So we’re going to switch gears a little bit and we’re going to get into some of the work that you do in Africa and the work that Well Aware dose. So this first question in that kind of series of questions is from Jane. How does your clean water system in Africa work?
Mary:
So you have a little background. So yes, Well Aware is a nonprofit and we kind of have, I would say very stringent rules on how we select projects to work on. So we want our projects to have as big an impact on a community as possible. So first is, you know, someone will approach us with a community they want to help, they want to give clean water to. Sometimes that’s from people within a community. Sometimes that’s from donors who just have a connection to the community. And so, when we do implement a system, we always make sure that it will be available to the entire community. So, we build systems on community on land. We don’t work with just, you know, private owners, because we don’t want any risk of them just, you know, taking over and selfishly using that source. So we built a lot of systems, like at schools or at clinics or something where people can access them and they’re going to have the greatest impact.
I would say the two main types of water systems Well Aware focuses on, on it or a deep boreholes or wells, and then also rainwater harnessing. So a lot of times people will initially just think, okay, we just, we need water, we need a well. But you know, in some areas a well isn’t going to help you. You might not find a lot of groundwater, especially in Africa, it’s very old rocks and some of these rocks, you know, are igneous and metamorphic rocks that water doesn’t flow through. So you could just be drilling a 200 meter well and never hit water.
So, you know, we, we do our research first. So, okay, is there likely going to be groundwater in this area? And if not, then we try to propose a rainwater harvesting system, then be able to filter that water. If we do think we might be able to drill a well in that area. So we started doing kind of a desktop search, so pull previous geological studies to learn about the rocks in the system, learn about, and if you can find about the hydrogeologic properties of those rocks or how much water might be on there.
And then we connect with a licensed hydrogeologist over in one of the countries and they perform a field survey. So they go out to the field and they have to take note of what’s going on in that area, are there other boreholes in the area because those can be your best source of information of, you know, if there’s lots of boreholes in the area, like if you drill one, you’re going to get water, but there aren’t any that might be because of a reason.
And they also use geophysical survey methods, so they can put these different types of probes on the ground surface, and that can send either an electrical signal or a magnetic signal. Deep into the Earth’s surface and based on like how long it takes that signal to return and what that looks like, tell us, you know, are there fractures meet the surface that might have water, and where the, how deep we might have to drill for a well.
So we try to be pretty thorough and as certain as we can, you know, if we’re going to drill a well, that it’s going to be successful. And then that’s just a matter of, yeah, we, we drill the well, we equip it, you know, we make sure we get the right size pump for how much water it can produce. And then we get the system up and running and then we kind of turn it over to the community, make sure, you know, they know that’s their system. And then they kind of can take pride and ownership and using this to make it as sustainable as possible.
Victoria:
(What countries are you working in in Africa?)
Oh, wow. That’s amazing.
Let’s see. This is from Max. What countries are you working in? In Africa?
Mary:
So Well Aware focuses on East Africa, they started with working in Kenya and that’s where a lot of our projects have been. And since then, we’ve done a few projects in Tanzania. We just drilled our bore hole there back in 2019, which I got to oversee was really exciting. And, we’re starting to look at maybe partnering with other organizations in Ethiopia and Uganda, they’ve done some site visits over there and we’re looking at some projects over there. And we also were able to assist another organization in South Sudan. So last year, actually, it was right, right before the world shut down, we were over there myself and two of our team members were over there helping drill their first solar powered borehole there. They usually just do hand pumps that we’re helping them kind of increase the size of their wells that they drill. But I think in general, Well Aware is going to stick in kind of the East Africa region.
Victoria:
(How do you determine where your clean water systems are installed?)
Awesome. All right.
This you touched on a little bit, but if you have anything more to add to it. Lily wants to know how do you determine where your clean water systems are installed?
Mary:
Sure. Yeah. So you make sure one it’s, you know, where people would like it, you know, we don’t go looking for projects, you know, people ask us to go. And so, a lot of it too, you know, for drilling a well, you have to figure out, you know, are you going to get water out in this area. And it’s a combination of doing kind of desktop studies, looking at reports that have already been published on this area, and then doing some field investigations as well.
Victoria:
Cool. And how do people get in touch with Well Aware? Like how, do you do marketing or is it just word of mouth?
Mary:
I think it’s been a little bit of both. We have a website. And sometimes people just, I guess, you know, in these communities are looking for anyone to help. And if they do a search, sometimes we come up and we have project requests forms that people can fill out for the communities. And that we take a look at and assess to see whether or not, you know, our kind of community sustainability model fits with what they’re asking for. And then sometimes we just have, you know, donors who I think have heard from word of mouth of other people who have worked with us, a protest with helping communities that they have connections to.
Victoria:
(Do you get to go to Africa to work?)
Okay. Cool.
All right. And this next question is from Weston. Do you get to go to Africa to do work?
Mary:
I do. And I’m really excited. I finally get to go back in the middle of July. So maybe by the time people are listening to this, I will just have been coming back from my trip. And I think that will be my seventh trip. So before last year we, I was going about two or three times a year. So I try to go as much as I can. Luckily being in grad school, my schedule is a little more flexible right now. So, you know, we have a summer trip coming up. We’re going to try to do three wells, which is quite a bit, I think before we’ve only done two at a time. So we’re going to try to get, make up for our lost time from last year and then hopefully go back at the end of the year as well. So.
Victoria:
Awesome. That’s so exciting.
Mary:
Yes, it’s great to travel there. And so, you know, you meet the community and you really get to see the impact that clean water can have on people. Take it for granted here so often in the U S you know. Even in my small apartment, I can go turn on water, I think that like three different four different sites, you know, whereas these communities, a lot of times people are having to walk four or five kilometers to fill up jugs of not very clean water. So, bringing access to clean water, just the impact on communities is immense. It helps with education rates. It helps with disease rates. It helps with economic prosperity. So water is very important.
Victoria:
Wow. Yeah. I can’t imagine, you know, and that makes me realize what privilege I have to be able to just take my water bottle here and, you know, walk 10 feet to fill it up.
Mary:
Yes.
Victoria:
(How did you get into hydrology as a female in a male dominated industry?)
Yeah. Wow.
All right. And now we’re going to switch gears. We’ve got a few questions here, coming up all about you and your career. So the first question in this category is from Sierra, also a woman in science, a friend of mine. How did you get into hydrology as a female in a male dominated industry?
Mary:
I could always talk a lot about this And I’ll try to, I kind of have a few different takes on it I would say I’ll start with.
First, just kind of important to remember, really not that long ago, everything was just a hundred percent male. All industries, all areas of work. It was only the men who were allowed to work. So it’s actually still fairly recently that women were even allowed to start entering any sort of work field or science or study. So I try to, you know, remember that, you know, people say, well, it’s male dominated. Okay. Well, it’s just, you know, it’s going to take time for women to catch up because it hasn’t been that long, you don’t even have the chance or possibility to get involved. So I kind of think of it as you know, I’m just early to a party and I just have to wait for more people like you to show up. so that’s one thing to think about.
Say, I didn’t know. I wanted to be a hydrogeologist until I became one. I always like math and science and I’m so grateful I had an excellent mom growing up who really pushed math and science on me. And I just asked her, I was like, well, you know, why, what caused you to do that? And she goes to that, I just think it’s important that, you know, if you’re going to be successful in the world, you need to understand how it works. It’s like, oh, it’s really true. You know, everything is now in science, you know, any product use, it was created, took science to create it. You know, you use math every day and not thinking about it, you know, paying bills or measuring stuff for cooking. So it’s just really important to know that.
So when I got to college first, I didn’t know what I really wanted to be. I like math and science and so it’s like, well go into engineering and engineering. And when I got there, I was like, okay, like this, but I was also stuck in a dark chemistry lab in the basement. I was like, ah, get out. So, I just looked through all the majors available. I got my undergrad at Michigan State and Geology kind of jumped out at me because it’s math and science, but you got to go outside, you have to go on these field trips and you have to go outside class to collect your data. So I just, I switched into it without even taking a class and fell in love with it. And it’s been great. All my research for my master’s and undergrad was always geochemistry and I had to take a hydrogeology class in undergrad. It wasn’t my favorite class and the professor who taught it even said, this is, you know, this isn’t what I’m passionate about. He loves teaching glaciology. So that was a great class to take.
But I kind of randomly found a job as a hydro-geologist in Portland, Oregon. And loved it immediately, you know, realizing how important water is to people, just, you know, it’s something I always liked helping people, so it’s great. I get to do math. I get to be science, and to help people, get to travel with Well Aware, it’s all great.
And of course, you know, along the way, sometimes you meet those people who don’t think you should be there because they’re kind of maybe part of the older crowd who, you know, they are just, they got used to how things were, you know, with everyone else looking like them. But I think, you know, as time progresses, you know, all the fields are becoming more diverse, especially even now, you know, we thought like, okay, they’re kind of diverse, but we realize that, no, we need to increase more females, people, any sort of people of color, just try to get as, you know, as much diversity as possible, because I think that’s when you’re going to start having kind of the best collaboration and ideas, and you get people from all different types of backgrounds who can think about problems that you never once considered. So you could even relate it to like water for granted, you know, you take people from a small community in Kenya, their view of water is going to be much different than what we view watering. So I think when you can collaborate with a diverse field, it’s just going to increase the knowledge and progress the field exponentially.
Victoria:
(What is the scariest thing you have learned from your research?)
Yeah. That’s really wonderful.
And so getting into just some kinda kind of fun questions about your work. Jane wants to know what is the scariest thing you have learned from your research?
Mary:
Ooh, I guess. As my dissertation research goes is I wasn’t aware of how big or widespread of a problem saltwater intrusion was. And so when you get to reading about it, how it’s just, you know, all of the globe is affected. All these people are affected and the impacts it can have is kind of scary to realize, you know. It’s this issue, now I always was aware and you know, sea level rise sea level rise and flooding. But I, you know, almost like ignorant as a hydrogeologist of knowing how bad it was, you know, contamination of groundwater. So that’s been kind of scary to learn.
I would say, kind of the Well Aware aspect, one scary thing to learn is how many water projects or water systems fail that are implemented by a lot of nonprofits over there. And a big issue those non-profits don’t utilize people like me, like hydrogeologists and engineers to help them design their systems. They just kind of pay for someone else to do it without any oversight. And, you know, they might drill a well where wells shouldn’t be drilled or, you know, install the wrong equipment and then the systems fail. And these people are once again, left without water. So that’s been scary. I think it’s like 40 to 60% of systems fail within two to five years.
Victoria:
Wow. That is really scary.
Mary:
Yes.
Victoria:
(What is the most interesting thing you’ve learned?)
Cool. Oh man.
And this next question is kind of the flip side of that. Tim wants to know what is the most interesting thing that you’ve learned?
Mary:
Oh, I was just asked this as part of my written qualifying exam. I guess the most interesting, I kind of related it back to, I didn’t know, just the magnitude of saltwater intrusion as a problem. And also one thing was I wasn’t very familiar with tides. I knew what tides were, but I had no idea how important they would be in what I’m studying. Cause tides kind of, they’re constantly changing where the coastline falls and also in a coastal region, especially Delaware that’s really flat, is when you have a high tide at that saltwater, we measure in some of these strains migrates up 10, 20 kilometers in land, which kind of blew my mind. I didn’t, you know, I was thinking of tides and so, you know, it’s just at the beach, but know how far out the saltwater goes through riverside stuff kind of was eye-opening to me.
Victoria:
Wow. Yeah. I never knew that. That’s incredible.
Mary:
Yeah.
Victoria:
(Where in the world is your favorite water?)
Wow.
All right. And then this is our last listener question, a very fun question from Weston. Where in the world is your favorite water?
Mary:
I guess that depends on what kind of water we’re talking about.
My favorite body of water, I would say is Lake Michigan. I grew up in Michigan, so we had to go camping and along Lake Michigan and I love it because you get the big sandy beaches, but you don’t have the gross salt water taste.
In general, say any source of clean water. I would always promote, you know, do you want tap water or bottled water? And I always get this question asked a lot too, is like, well, is bottled water safer? No, I always go for tap water. It has to be, it’s regulated more often, It’s held up to stricter regulations has to be tested constantly, versus bottled water, which is pulling the water from the same sources, like when you’re getting your tap water from, but just sticking it in a plastic bottle and stuff.
So tap water and Lake Michigan.
Victoria:
Awesome. And that was the end of the listener questions, but I have a couple of questions for you. So first, for, I know that Well Aware has some classroom programs. And so I was wondering if you could speak more about those.
Mary:
Yeah. So for anyone who’s interested, teachers or students who want to get their classroom involved, like we Well Aware has a program called classrooms for clean water, and it links you with the nonprofit and we can come do kind of more specific presentations on our work, going over there and talking about specific projects, and he showed us some videos from the communities and kind of teach you more about the details of how our system works.
And it also, you can get involved with some of the fundraisers we do. So every April we have our biggest fundraiser. It’s kind of fun called shower strike, where you pledge not to shower until you reach certain goals. So we have lots of classrooms who participate in have helped to raise a lot of money and, you know, fund some of these projects. And then, we usually have to connect them with schools over in the countries, those schools that we’re working at and kind of, you know, sort of develop almost like a pen pal relationship to keep them updated on the progress that, you know, that they’re, the clean water that was brought to them by the classrooms and the US you know, how is that affecting them and impacting their lives.
Victoria:
Oh, wow. And if any of the listeners are interested in having in their classroom participating, how can they get in touch and request that?
Mary:
So, I think the easiest way is to go on the Well Aware website wellawareworld.org, and there should be a link for classroom involvement.
Victoria:
Awesome. And I’ll make sure that we have a link to the website in the description of the episode. So listeners can just click on that from the episode.
And then the last thing is, this episode will be coming out in August and August is water awareness month, is that right?
Mary:
Yes. So, one big thing that happens during August is now we have world water which is sponsored by different international institutions that usually take place. And it’s just people all over the world come together to discuss, you know, all these different types of water issues, or different types of technology that could be used to improve access to clean water and just water sustainability in general.
So I think that the main sponsored organization is SIWI, it’s the Stockholm International Water Institute. So if people want to learn about, I think they might have some virtual events happening again this year. If people want to get involved, they could look up that website as well.
Victoria:
Very cool. And I’ll put a link to that website in the episode description too.
So, all right. And this is kind of how we end most Ask a Scientist episodes, is we’ve just spent the last hour or so talking about questions that the listeners have for you, but do you have any questions of your own for the listeners?
Victoria:
Oh, I would task listeners to figure out where does their drinking water come from? I think that’s something a lot of people don’t really consider, what is the actual source of the drinking water. So if you were part of a municipality, they should have a website that should tell you where their sources of water come from. They also should tell you, show you water quality reports so you can know what’s in the water you’re drinking. If you have private wells, different state organizations like your Department of Environmental Quality, or you might have even a Department of Water Resources, they should have records of all the well logs of any well that’s been drilled in the state and it’s kinda neat to like look up yours and see the material, see, you know, what is your well actually look like, and where’s your water coming from?
So I would ask you, all listeners, where is your water coming from?
Victoria:
Oh, that’s awesome. I will figure that out too. That’s a good question. Something I’ve never really thought of before.
All right. Well, thank you so much. This was great. I learned a lot. I hope the listeners did too. And I really appreciate you coming along and taking the time to talk with us today.
Mary:
Thank you so much for having me. This was great. Yeah, I love encouraging anyone who might be interested in any science, definitely follow that passion, follow that little curiosity. Cause it’s, once they start learning, it’s just endless of what you can keep learning, and it’s just, you know, I’ve loved it and I think it’s, I’m always like, I love being involved in science.
Victoria:
Me too.
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