Researchers with UW SRP Project Four are lending porewater peepers to colleagues at the University of Puget Sound
Jim Gawell and other researchers from UW SRP Project Four are providing porewater peepers for a study of lakes in Pierce County by Jeff Tepper at the University of Puget Sound. Along with the loan, they provided a demonstration of how to set up and deploy the equipment.
The first of the lakes to be studied with the porewater peepers will be Lake Waughop Lake. Fieldwork will begin in early July.
The porewater peepers were built by UW SRP researchers with the help of students at Bellarmine High School in Tacoma, WA. They were designed to provide a way to measure small scale (4 cm) differences in dissolved arsenic (or other element) concentrations above and below the sediment-water interface.
A vertical series of 14 rows of vials, capped with 0.2 um filter membranes, is loaded into a rugged housing and placed half-way into the lake bottom. The peeper equilibrates with dissolved constituents over 2 weeks, after which it is retrieved and the individual vials are analyzed. This data is critical for estimating the transport of contaminants from sediments to overlying waters.