Water securitySalt on the earth
When ice and snow melt away into streams and groundwater, road salt goes with it. The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation is mindful of its salt use: It applies nearly 27,500 tons of salt every year to 779 miles of Erie County roads, including highways. Researchers have developed a map that shows elevated concentrations of salt along Trout Run, which flows into Fourmile Creek, which empties into Lake Erie, the primary source of drinking water for the 280,000 residents of Erie County.
At the edge of Behrend Fields, where a footpath leads back to a one-acre parking lot, Pam Silver bends down and scoops a handful of snow into a small plastic cup.
It’s February, 2016. Silver, distinguished professor of biology at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, hands the cup to Mali Lubic, one of a dozen biology and environmental science students who have volunteered to collect snow from 110 locations on campus. Lubic fits it into a tote with a four-acre grid mapped on the lid. Fresh snow blows around her as she seals it.
“I could do without that wind,” Lubic says.
They’ve been out here for an hour, cupping snow from the banks of Trout Run, and from the woods above it, and from a spot just beyond the track-and-field team’s shot-put pad. They have samples from the bike trail, the third- and first-base edges of the softball field, and from the base of the directional sign that guides traffic off the four-lane, $180 million Bayfront Connector that runs along the north edge of campus.
Penn State says that Silver, an aquatic ecologist, is collecting the snow to get at the rock salt that has been mixed into it. She wants to know where the salt that is washed, plowed, and blown off campus paths and roads goes after the snow melts. In the lab, she, Lubic and other students will melt the samples and measure their electrical conductivity, an indication of how much salt is in each. That data will refine a map that shows elevated concentrations of salt not only on the college’s parking lots and walkways, but also along Trout Run, which flows into Fourmile Creek, which empties into Lake Erie, the primary source of drinking water for the 280,000 residents of Erie County.
When it snows again, and the bank teller or the postal clerk or the cart boy at the supermarket, stomping through the winter slop, jokes that Erie’s winters never really end, Silver will have data that proves it.
Four months later, on an 88-degree day, she will check the salinity in Glenhill Stream, a three-skip stone’s throw from her office in the Benson Building. It will be nine times higher than it should be.
