River PAHs: Fall Sampling in the Rockies

River PAHs Characterization Part 3: 2017 – Red Deer Lakes, Sulfur Springs and an abandoned coal mine

This is the third in a series of blogs on river PAHs (Blog 1 and Blog 2 on River PAHs are here). The aim of our investigations is to answer the question “where did the PAHs come from that were present in all of the Alberta and Saskatchewan rivers?” In…

River PAHs Characterization Part 2: 2016 – Foothills to Prairies

In the first post of this series on River PAHs characterization, I described the background to why Court and I have spent many hours driving across Alberta from border to border to collect sediment samples from the rivers of southern Alberta. We knew that if we were going to answer…

Weatherproof Paper for your Legal Field Notes

River PAHs Characterization Part 1: An Introduction

For the last few years we have spent a lot of our free time collecting sediment samples from rivers across southern Alberta and characterizing these for Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs). Often driving many hours across prairie gravel roads for a single good sample, it quickly became a passion of quality…

Biogenic Toluene – Where does it come from?

In the first post of this series, I described the basis for how we became involved in determining a method for the detection of a natural, biogenic source of toluene. In this post, I describe how the process works and provide some thoughts on how to conduct an investigation. The…