Measurement of dissolved metals in Brewer Lake, Arkansas

CHED 202

Myles Patrick Murray, murraymp@hendrix.edu and M. Warfield Teague, teague@hendrix.edu. Department of Chemistry, Hendrix College, 1600 Washington Avenue, Conway, AR 72032
Brewer Lake, a 1200-acre water impoundment in central Arkansas, supplies drinking water to Conway, Arkansas and surrounding towns. Recently, extensive gas-well drilling has begun in the Fayetteville shale in northern and central Arkansas, including the 36-square-mile watershed of Brewer Lake. Students of the Department of Chemistry, Hendrix College, Conway, Arkansas are currently sampling and analyzing the lake's water to determine if the run-off is changing the water quality. In this study atomic absorption spectrophotometry is being used to measure the following dissolved metals: Fe, Ni, Cu, Zn, Pb, Cr, Mn. The instrument is a Varian Model Dual AA Analyzer (flame and flameless) with autosampler and SIPS. Results of the analyses will be presented.