Wells Drilled On Campus To Give Geology Students An Edge

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- For the University at Buffalo Department of Geology, "hands-on" in a lab apparently isn't hands-on enough.

That's why excavators are drilling four, 50-foot wells on the North (Amherst) Campus so that students can learn about hydrogeology -- the study of how water and other liquids, such as pollutants, move through the shallow subsurface -- up close and personal.

According to Matt Becker, Ph.D., assistant professor of geology, these wells will provide students with valuable experience that most other students won't have until they land jobs in industry.

"What we will be doing with these wells is not part of bread-and-butter geology," Becker said. "Most undergraduate and graduate geology classes do very basic pump tests and hydraulic tests and water sampling. There are probably only a handful of schools in the nation where people are running these kinds of advanced tests, pumping from isolated intervals in the well and using non-toxic chemicals as tracers to track the probable pathway of pollutants."

These techniques provide detailed pictures of how water and contaminants move through fractures in rock.

Becker said these open-hole wells will allow students to send down tracers, specialized pumps, video cameras and flow meters to characterize the fractured rock. Other probes will be used to characterize the chemical properties of the groundwater.

Greg Baker, Ph.D., assistant professor of geology, will use these wells to train students in "borehole geophysics," the science of using sound, radiation and electromagnetics to understand the properties of rock.

"We will be focusing on how groundwater moves through fractures in rock, a process that is not very well-understood, and that is of critical importance to cleaning polluted sites in Western New York and elsewhere," said Baker. "The purpose of both the teaching and the research we'll be doing at these wells is to develop tools and technologies for use at other sites where there may be contamination."

The wells give students a chance to run "packer" tests that isolate specific intervals in the well; these tests will help them understand the complex hydraulics of fractured rock.

"They also provide us with a way to teach them how to do tracer testing, where we track harmless chemicals that act like pollutants in groundwater," Becker said.

While drilling wells on-campus for teaching and research is a trend that is just starting at many universities, UB has had hydrogeology wells on-campus for about a decade, Becker said. The current excavation project was necessitated by new campus construction projects located on the site of the old wells.

There are many advantages to having wells located on-campus, Becker noted.

"With on-campus wells that the students can just walk to, it's much easier to integrate that work with the regular labs," he said. "You can meet at the wells, run some tests, then return to the lab to interpret your results. Otherwise, you have to schedule a special time, like a Saturday morning, to get everyone out to the site."