Event

The Department of Earth & Environmental Science

University of Pennsylvania

Invites you to attend a EES Seminar Series

Friday, October 28th - 3:00 PM

"From the stratosphere to the rhizosphere:  A case study in environmental forensics"

Among the many hazardous anthropogenic contaminants present in our environment, some also have natural sources.  One such contaminant is perchlorate, an oxyanion of chlorine that has many practical uses and has recently been found as an abundant component of Martian soils.  Following recognition of the widespread occurrence of perchlorate in drinking water supplies across the US during the late 1990s, efforts were made to identify sources of perchlorate by measuring its chlorine and oxygen isotope compositions.  Three principal sources (one synthetic and two natural) could be clearly discriminated isotopically.  This attracted the attention of the environmental legal community as a potential tool by which to apportion liability for groundwater contamination, leading to the introduction of perchlorate isotope data to the federal court system as a key line of evidence. 

Dr. Neil Sturchio

 Professor and Chair

Department of Geological Sciences

University of Delaware

Neil Colrick Sturchio received his Ph.D. (1983) in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Washington University with emphasis on petrology and geochemistry.  He was a member of the scientific staff of Argonne National Laboratory from 1983-2000 where he performed research pertaining to nuclear waste isolation, mineral-water interface processes at the molecular scale, volcanic-related hydrothermal systems, and geochemical reactive transport phenomena.  He was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society of America in 1997.  From 2000 to 2014 he served as Professor and Head of the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he established and directed the Environmental Isotope Geochemistry Laboratory.  Since 2014, he has served as Professor and Chair of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Delaware, where he established and directs the Environmental Isotope Science Laboratory.  His principal research interests include stable and radioactive isotope tracer studies of geochemical reactions and transport phenomena as well as synchrotron radiation studies of mineral-water interface processes.