How trash heap yields treasure
Environment: Buried landfill in Norman may offer clues for researchers about what could happen if harmful substances leach from refuse
Company's plan to drill petroleum wel
How trash heap yields treasure

By John David Sutter

Published: September 14, 2008

NORMAN — At first glance, you'd never know this is likely the most studied trash heap in the world. You probably wouldn't know it's a landfill at all.

On the south side of Norman, the city's dormant landfill hides from the public eye behind trees and marshes and beneath sunflowers and grasses.

It's what's below the surface that interests scientists from all over the world, though. Over the past three decades, they've installed more than 1,300 water wells at the site to draw a three-dimensional picture of the "plume” of pollutants that leach out of the bottom of the landfill and creep closer every day to the Canadian River, downhill and to the south.

"There's probably not another landfill as heavily equipped for monitoring in the world,” said Jason Masoner, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who manages a team of researchers at the site.

Norman's landfill is similar to hundreds of thousands across the United States and throughout the world. As such, it gives researchers clues into the environmental impact of closed landfills everywhere.

That research may be in jeopardy because an Oklahoma City oil and gas company, Hughes Gas System, has a plan to drill two petroleum wells on Norman's landfill site. Scientists who work at the landfill have mixed feelings about the proposed drilling. The city has delayed drilling until 2010 to give researchers time to adjust, said Shawn O'Leary, Norman's public works director.

The city entered into the agreement in 2007 unaware of the research on site, he said. Hughes Gas System agreed to delay its plans, he said, but the obligation to drill couldn't be broken.

Hughes Gas System declined a request for comment.

Some are nervous that the drilling will stunt science's understanding of landfill pollution; others say it will give researchers an unprecedented chance to find out the environmental impacts of oil drilling.

"I worry about it, but as it hasn't occurred yet it's hard to get that worry up,” said Joseph Suflita, a professor of microbiology at the University of Oklahoma.

Kim Winton, director of the U.S. Geological Survey Water Science Center in Oklahoma, praised the city of Norman for allowing the government to conduct so much research on its land. She said the proposed drilling will give researchers a new opportunity and won't take away from work that's been done.

There are two main schools of thought concerning landfill cleanup. One says people will have to dig up toxic materials and dispose of them some way other than putting them in an underground vault. The other says Mother Nature is remarkably good at cleaning up a toxic mess all on her own.

The Norman landfill research has lent support to the second line of thinking.

"I'm not saying this landfill is safe, but compared to most landfills it's a success story in that we are seeing that nature is attenuating the contaminants in a very efficient manner,” Masoner said.

The organisms that eat up the trash are the focus of much study. They've been more successful than expected at keeping contaminants from the landfill away from the nearby Canadian River. Still, research has found that the landfill does contaminate the groundwater.

More than 1,700 weekly samples are used to catalog the DNA of microorganisms involved. Masoner said the effort is like the human genome project of the bacterial world — it's an unprecedented effort to examine how the organisms work.

"Each sample is like a little village or a community, and each community has its own geochemical signature. And the microbes, they learn to live in that community and the ones that do well multiply,” he said. "We're going to get to see these communities put together like neighborhoods in a city — and that's just not been done.”

"Each sample is like a little village or a community, and each community has its own geochemical signature. ... We're going to get to see these communities put together ... and that's just not been done.”

Jason Masoner

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