WaterTalk: The controls of surface water-groundwater connectivity in a critical zone context

As part of the Water Institute's WaterTalks lecture series, Kamini Singha, Professor in the Department of Geology & Geological Engineering and the Associate Dean of Earth Resources and Environmental Programs at the Colorado School of Mines, presents, "The controls of surface water-groundwater connectivity in a critical zone context."

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Earth’s “critical zone,” the zone of the planet from treetops to base of groundwater, is critical because it is a sensitive region, open to impacts from human activities, while providing water necessary for human consumption and food production. Quantifying water movement in the subsurface is critical to predicting how water-driven critical zone processes respond to changes in climate and human perturbation of the natural system.  Here, Prof. Singha specifically focuses on the efficacy of the hyporheic zone—the zone of surface water and groundwater mixing— in two ~1 km stream reaches within the Bonita Peak Mining District, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site located near Silverton, Colorado, USA.  High concentrations of trace metal(loid)s exported from abandoned mine wastes and acid-rock drainage pose a risk to the health of aquatic ecosystems. To determine if and when the hyporheic zone mediates metal(loid) export, her team investigated the relationship between streamflow, groundwater-stream connectivity, and subsurface metal(loid) concentrations.

Speaker bio

Dr. Kamini Singha is a Professor in the Department of Geology & Geological Engineering and the Associate Dean of Earth Resources and Environmental Programs at the Colorado School of Mines.  Her research interests are focused in hydrogeology and environmental geophysics. Dr. Singha is an award-winning teacher, a recipient of a U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER award and the Early Career Award from the Society of Environmental and Engineering Geophysics, a Geological Society of America Fellow, and a former Fulbright Scholar. She served as the U.S. National Groundwater Association's Darcy Lecturer in 2017.  She earned her B.S. in geophysics from the University of Connecticut and her Ph.D., in hydrogeology, from Stanford University. 

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