VULNERABILITY OF GROUNDWATER RESOURCES IN BANGLADESH: THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN DENSE POPULATIONS, GEOLOGIC COMPLEXITY, AND LARGE-SCALE ARSENIC CONTAMINATION
Abstract
Widespread contamination of shallow groundwater with naturally-occurring arsenic in the Bengal Basin threatens the health of tens of millions of people. We evaluate the sustainability of deep, low-arsenic groundwater as a mitigation option with numerical models that incorporate physical and chemical heterogeneity of the fluvio-deltaic aquifer system. Results
suggest that sustainability may be achieved in some areas by limiting deep pumping to domestic supply, but also highlight the risks and uncertainty introduced by the interplay between geologic complexity and groundwater extraction on a large scale.
Biography
Holly Michael holds a BS in Civil Engineering from the University of Notre Dame and a PhD in Hydrology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests include water resource management, coastal hydrogeology, groundwater-surface water interactions, and geostatistics. Some of her current projects include investigating groundwater flow into estuaries, modeling groundwater salinization due to climate change, evaluating sustainability of arsenic-safe groundwater in Bangladesh, and application of experimental economics to groundwater resources.