This grant supports development of new drilling and sampling technology to recover uncompromised aquifer sediment simultaneously with groundwater and to make this technology available to the scientific community under the auspices of the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP). The development engages an academic-private partnership to build and test a prototype Peltier cooler based freeze core system designed to recover in situ, unconsolidated aquifer matrix and fluids to depths of 300 m for subsequent geochemical and sedimentological analysis. Upon completion of the development, the freeze core system will be deployed in a ICDP-funded project to study the provenance and redox controlled geochemical processes associated with the subsurface transport and fate of arsenide species and ultimately would be available to the broader science community for groundwater geochemical and microbiological investigations globally.
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