MRI: Acquisition of a Leading-edge Portable Geoprobe System with Subsurface Sampling, Logging and Imaging capabilities for Geoscience Research and Education

The acquisition of a Geoprobe 7822DT system with direct-push (DP) soil, sediment, and groundwater sampling tools and logging and imaging capabilities will serve the research and educational needs of TAMU-CC and South Texas. The tightly coupled local and regional economic interplay of the Gulf Coast's natural resources (i.e., regional oil/gas and commercial and recreational fishing industries) has increased prosperity and resulted in industry and population growth in South Texas.

This comes with concerns over contamination of the already limited groundwater resources and questions about ecosystem and environmental health. The geoprobe is the industry benchmark equipment that improves the investigator's capacity to adapt to changing research problems, whether they are focused on environmental, geotechnical, or exploration work.

The new mobile, small footprint geoprobe systems, accommodating a variety of tooling and imaging capabilities, offer capabilities for obtaining high-resolution geologic, hydrogeologic and geochemical information of the shallow subsurface soils and rocks. An understanding of vertical changes in sediment types, water content, and conductivity, and the high-resolution chemical makeup of water stored in the ground, helps determine prominent water and pollutant migration pathways and locate areas that need attention for remediation purposes, for instance.

The geoprobe system will provide students in the region, with a large majority from underrepresented minority groups in STEM fields, with hands-on experience and practical training necessary to make them competitive in the job market.

This leading-edge geoprobe system includes DP drilling capabilities for well/piezometer installation and coring, discrete aseptic water and sediment sampling, and DP mapping instrumentation for formation permeability, lithology, and water content. This geoprobe system will complement the efforts by researchers (faculty and students) at TAMUCC, and other South Texas academic institutions, using ultrahigh performance chemical and biological analytical instrumentation, by increasing their capability to obtain discrete and aseptic samples in a variety of environments.

There are many benefits to obtaining high-quality and high-resolution field data using the Geoprobe 7822DT with auxiliary coring, aseptic sampling, probing and logging tools, including among others: an understanding of the detailed microstratigraphy that controls flow and solute migration; the provision of samples from which accurate physical, microbial and chemical properties can be determined; an in situ determination of contaminant mass distributions and partitioning, particularly within highly heterogeneous substrates and enabling unambiguous and precise characterization of the water storage and pore structure characteristics of any earth formations. These high-resolution depth profile physical characterizations will lead to advances in the scientific understanding of mobilization and transport of contaminants from soils to groundwater to surface water and the long-term chemical cycling within the groundwater-surface water/seawater transition zone.

In TAMUCC's region, there has been sparse research on the presence, fate and impacts of anthropogenic chemicals in the soil and groundwater from domestic, agricultural, and industrial uses. An in-house Geoprobe will drastically enhance the capabilities of both researchers at TAMU-CC and those within the region leading to integrated holistic approaches to environmental research.

Data obtained from these capabilities is foundational for scientific research in different STEM fields such as geology, biogeochemistry, and engineering. By supplementing the existing chemical characterization capabilities with the proposed Geoprobe System, the scope of research that can be conducted at this Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) will be expanded.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.