Harry J. Simpson
Understanding the geochemistry of natural waters lies at the heart of designing effective environmental policies on many issues. For a number of years, I have worked on the Hudson River, where large influxes of nutrients, toxic chemicals and anthropogenic radionuclides can be considered as inadvertant tracer "experiments" that permit critical riverine/estuarine processes to be unraveled, and thus provide guidance to mitigation strategies. Examples include the influence of waste-water treatment discharges in the New York City area, as well as residual polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and toxic metals in Hudson sediments, on future water quality of the system.
Some of my research on natural waters in addition to the Hudson include: impacts of human activities on rivers in Australia and Egypt, forecasting of river discharge probabilities in relation to the El Niño/Southern Oscillation for Australia and other regions, chemistry of precipitation in urban industrial regions, which may stimulate additional growth of regional forests, and mobilization of arsenic in groundwaters near contaminated sites in the NE USA, and in groundwaters of Bangladesh.