Celine Lim reports that Canadian hydrogeologist Dr. John Cherry credits his stellar career in groundwater research, protection and management to a series of fortuitous incidents in his early years as a professional. The Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize laureate shares his journey with Eco-Business. It was 1967, Prof. John Cherry had just joined the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, as the first groundwater professor in Canada when he was accosted by a young woman, the only female in the entire engineering department. The American student, Barbara Lund, explained that, after spending a summer as an assistant at a nuclear facility outside Winnipeg, she suspected its waste-burial pits were leaking and contaminating the groundwater. Groundwater makes up 95% of the usable water on the planet and more than half of the global population depend on it for their livelihood. This water can be found in the spaces between rock particles (of sandstone) and fractured rock underground.
Prof. Cherry told her it was not his area of research. He was going to specialize in the natural chemistry of groundwater, not its contamination. But Lund insisted he was ethically obligated to consider it. That incident completely changed the direction of my career, he recalls in a recent interview with Eco-Business. Back then, the science on contaminant hydrogeology, studies on how moving groundwater transports dissolved contaminants was just beginning. Prof Cherry used methods that were available to him, geologic test drilling, tracer-injection experiments, and mathematical simulations of the groundwater flow pattern. He eventually developed new field measurement approaches as well as methods combining drilling and subsurface instrumentation with conceptual modelling, moving forward groundwater research.
In the U.S., Dr. Jay H. Lehr, the U.S. first Ph.D. in groundwater transport at the University of Arizona and then at Ohio State, was moving forward such research as well incorporating sand models, small and large at OSU that demonstrated the behavior of laminar flow during pumping a well.
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