US-Nepal Planning Visit: Surface Electrical Resistivity Surveys as a Discriminant of High-Arsenic Groundwater Risk, Terai, Nepal

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Description: This award supports the US-Nepal Planning Visit: Surface Electrical Resistivity Surveys as a Discriminant of High-Arsenic Groundwater Risk, Terai, Nepal. PI Thomas Brikowski proposes to make a planning/ test-of-concept visit to the Terai plains of Nepal to evaluate the utility of surface geophysical methods in predicting the risk of high-arsenic groundwater. The geologic conditions allowing arsenic to be mobilized in groundwater are beginning to be understood and may be directly detectable using surface geophysical techniques such as electrical resistivity (ER) and induced polarization (IP). The PI will assess the performance of ER/IP surveys in the field, thereby establishing the probability of success for a larger project aimed at determining the surface geophysical signatures of low groundwater arsenic sites.Scope: Cooperating researchers in Nepal have made substantial progress in characterizing the highly variable temporal and spatial distributrion of high arsenic groundwater in several provinces in the Terai. The US team, which includes the PI, a postdoc, and graduate student, will gather preliminary data on the feasibility of their proposed approach prior to developing a full-scale proposal for submission to NSF. Ultimately, this research holds the potential to address the Asian arsenic crisis by locating areas of probable safe water suitable for drilling, not only in Nepal but throughout all of southern Asia, where millions of people living on the tropical outwash plains of the Himalayas are exposed to chronic arsenic poisoning via groundwater.