IS THERE A CORRELATION BETWEEN THE LOCATION OF GEOLOGIC STRUCTURES AND PRIVATE WELL WATER CHEMISTRY: A VIEW FROM NORTHERN MT. DESERT ISLAND

Studies have shown that consuming even very low levels of arsenic can have harmful, long-term health effects. The ongoing “All about Arsenic” collaborative project, initiated by the MDI Biological Laboratory (MDIBL) and Dartmouth College, aims to simultaneously collect water chemistry data from privately owned wells in Maine and New Hampshire while also enabling high school educators to supplement existing groundwater curricula with a focus on a locally relevant topic: arsenic abundance in drinking water. The project was initially funded through an EPA Environmental Education grant and is currently funded through a NIH Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA). As an extension of this large project, researchers from College of the Atlantic (COA) designed a sampling event to look at the spatial distribution of well water components with respect to the local geology. Over 75 participants from the northern portion of MDI volunteered to have their private well water tested during December 2016. A second sampling event will occur during the winter of 2019 to supplement the 2016 data. Preliminary results suggest that groundwater components do generally correlate with geologic features such as bedrock types and fault locations, however not currently in a predictive way.