BACTERIAL biofilms thriving in contaminated aquifers act like underground batteries, generating electrical signals that could help engineers pinpoint the source of pollution.
Measuring the spread and chemical make-up of contamination in groundwater is costly and often imprecise. Engineers have to drill wells, and run the risk of damaging the very aquifers they want to evaluate.
Andre Revil and Veronique Naudet of CNRS, France’s national agency for scientific research in Aix-en-Provence, and their colleagues have in the past measured potentials of up to 400 millivolts between electrodes stuck into the ground above an aquifer that had been contaminated by a landfill.…
