Adam Weinberg

New Mexico Water Resource Division, USGS, New Mexico

The internship I completed this summer was with the New Mexico Water Resources Division (NMWRD) of the United States Geological Survey (USGS). The internship was a valuable experience, and the experiences made possible by my living in New Mexico were potentially equally as important to my growth as a student and a person.
The NMWRD of the USGS is responsible for monitoring and studying the water resources of the state of New Mexico. The NMWRD has flow-rate gauging stations at streams and rivers, as well as at various points in Albuquerque’s system of arroyos that prevent flooding by channeling run-off from storms away from streets and neighborhoods. Unlike other USGS departments, NMWRD receives contracts from firms and other government departments to conduct scientific studies. The department receives a significant amount of funding from these contractors, called cooperators. As USGS faces increasing federal budget cuts, the department will become increasingly dependant on these cooperator funds.
The two projects I worked on were cooperator projects with the military and with a mining company called MOLYCORP. The first project I was involved with was research on historical water-quality in a number of springs and pools that are home to an endangered species of pupfish on the White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico. Through this project I became somewhat familiar with GIS software, and learned to overlay geographical information with environmental resources and property lines. This enables me to identify which of the pools and springs in which the pupfish live are located within the Missile Range. Having identified the pools for which we needed information, I dug through a number of past USGS reports for the relevant data.
I spent the bulk of my time on the project with MOLYCORP. After completing the pupfish project, we traveled to Red River, New Mexico, a small resort town northeast of Taos, to conduct slug-tests in a number of wells. MOLYCORP has mined the metal molybdenum, a metallic element that resembles chromium and tungsten, from its property in the town of Questa. The mine has reached the end of its useful life and is in the process of closing down. In creating a mine closure plan, MOLYCORP needs to meet a number of environmental requirements, including the quality of water flowing out of the mine property. The statute is such that the firm must either meet stringent clean water standards, or demonstrate that, after treatment, the water flowing out of the mine has the same water quality as it would have been had there been no mining at the site. MOLYCORP had never tested the water prior to mining the property, so the NMWRD and a number of independent contractors have been hired to assess what the likely water quality was prior to the mining.
The primary role I played in this very extensive project was to help my supervisor construct slugs from PVC pipe, and to help conduct slug tests in a number of wells at the test site in Red River. For the remainder of the internship I was responsible for running the data generated from these tests through ground-water hydrology analytical models. The statistics generated from this work provided a picture of certain ground-water flow properties in the rock underlying the site. I ran the new statistics through another mathematical model to predict how much drawdown we could expect from conducting a pump-test at the site, given a certain size pump for a variable amount of time. My final task was to go back to the site with a coworker to run the pump-test.
My learning objectives for the internship were partially met. I was scheduled to measure well water levels in southern New Mexico, but this did not work out. Water level measuring was completed in Red River trips, so I did get some of experience through that. One of my primary objectives was to find out whether hydrology is a field that I would consider for future graduate studies. In this respect my internship was successful, as groundwater resources research is a field that I now expect to become increasingly exciting as I gain a better technical understanding of the science. The internship certainly exposed me to aspects of ground-water hydrology that I had not even considered for my senior project. Though I still have a great deal of work and thinking to do before I begin, I believe I now have a better chance of successfully completing the project than I did prior to the internship.
For my senior project I will conduct a ground-water hydrology study in a portion of the Connecticut College Arboretum. I will sink a number of wells into the ground and then study properties of the groundwater flow. Properties I expect to track will be height and fluctuation of the water table, direction of the groundwater flow, and, depending on the type of wells I use and the equipment available, I would like to conduct tests similar to those I worked on in Red River to determine other properties of the groundwater flow within the soil.