Inside a government lab near Washington D.C., Denise Akob holds up a glass jar filled with water. At the bottom of the jar is what looks like sand.
“It just looks like mud from any old stream—it’s got this brown color, it’s rocky, the water is still really clear,” says Akob, a microbiologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.
The sediment is from a clean streambed. It’s been inside the bottle for 90 days.
Akob holds up a second bottle with sediment and water in it, but this one’s not so clear. Inside of it is sand a from a stream in West Virginia that was polluted by a leaking oil and gas wastewater impoundment.
Read the entire story at the website of our partner The Allegheny Front.
