Partrac GeoMarine Inc., the Houston based Marine Survey and Consultancy company, has won a 3-year contract to demonstrate a new tool for mapping the in situ distribution of Contaminants of Concern (COCs) in aquatic sediments.
The award is part of the Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP), the US Department of Defense’s (DoD) environmental technology demonstration and validation program.
Partrac, together with its Netherlands based partner Medusa Explorations , will deploy the new instrument at up to three contaminated DoD Superfund sites to map the distribution of COCs such as Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs), Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) and heavy metals, e.g. mercury, lead, zinc.
Commenting the latest news, Dr. Patrick Friend, Partrac GeoMarine’s Business Development Consultant (Americas) , said: “ We are really excited to be bringing this new instrument over from Europe to be used in the US. This technology is a potential game-changer in the way that contaminated sediments are mapped, and can offer significant cost and safety benefits over traditional contaminated sediment sampling and mapping methods”.
The new instrument coming to the US is a specially adapted aquatic gamma spectrometer developed by Medusa Radiometrics.
According to Partrac, this is a passive instrument that measures the natural geochemical signature of sediments which can then be related to the sediment contaminant content.
The tool works equally well for both naturally deposited and dredged sediments in all aquatic environments – marine, riverine and lacustrine.