Title:

Measuring Road Salt Concentrations in Water Bodies Around UNH

With snow storms comes the use of sodium chloride to treat roads, but with the use of road salts comes runoff. This runoff then infiltrates water bodies, harms the ecosystems present, and pollutes groundwater. It can reduce plant growth in these water bodies affecting the overall biodiversity. It is an overall concern because it creates high salinity levels in water. In our research, we studied the concentration of sodium chloride in water bodies around UNH. We worked closely with the UNH Water Quality Analysis Lab, where they used ion chromatography to gather anion and cation concentrations, and provide us with the sodium and chloride concentrations of our water samples from the Oyster River and College Brook. Our goal was to see that waterbodies closer to the road would have higher sodium chloride levels and that as the temperature increased the concentration of sodium chloride would decrease.

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