Abstract
For a long time it was understood that the extent of the arsenic (As) enriched groundwater is confined within the lower Ganges plain and delta in eastern India. However, during the last few years, reports of elevated As in groundwater of different parts of the middle portions of the Gangetic plain, upstream from West Bengal, in U.P. (Ramanathan et al. Geol Soc Am Program Abstr 38(7):241, 2006) and Bihar, got published. Subsequently, As contamination was detected in foothills of Himalayas in Nepal (Shrestha et al. J Environ Sci Health Part A 38(1):185-200, 2003), which is a sediment provenance for many of the tributaries of the Ganges, and also in the Indus alluvial plains in Punjab and Sindh provinces of Pakistan (Nickson et al. Appl Geochem 20(1):55–68, 2005). In spite of some surveys on As distribution, there is a lack of hydrogeochemical knowledge about the distribution, extent, severity, source and cause of the contamination in these areas. However, initial estimates show that the poisoning might be widespread and several million people may be at risk.
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Acknowledgement
The author acknowledges the help and support received from the collaborators Bridget Scanlon (University of Texas at Austin, USA), Alan Fryar (University of Kentucky, USA), Dipankar Saha (Central Ground Water Board, India), Ashok Ghosh (A.N. College, India), and Sunil Chaudhuri and Ranjan Mishra (T.M. Bhagalpur University). Funding for fieldwork for the study was obtained from the Jackson School of Geoscience Initiative fund at the University of Texas at Austin. Analytical and computational help for the study were provided by the University of Texas at Austin, University of Kentucky and University of Arizona. The author acknowledges the help provided by Barindra Lal Mukherjee, Murali Singh and Kareya Lal for field sampling, and Dr. Phil Bennet (UT Austin) for gas sample analyses.
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Mukherjee, A. (2015). Hydrogeochemical Evolution in the Different Shallow Aquifers of Central Gangetic Plain and Kosi Alluvial Fan and Their Implications for the Distribution of Groundwater Arsenic. In: Ramanathan, A., Johnston, S., Mukherjee, A., Nath, B. (eds) Safe and Sustainable Use of Arsenic-Contaminated Aquifers in the Gangetic Plain. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16124-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16124-2_1
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