Center Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Joseph Ryan
Joseph Ryan is a professor in the department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has won various awards such as the 2008 Boulder County Pacesetter Award, the 2006 National Notable Achievement Award, and the 2004 University of Colorado Teaching Award. He has worked with the Center of the American West on various projects including the Abandoned Mines Remediation panel and the Center's Cleaning Up Abandoned Hardrock Mines: Prospecting for A Better Future report.
Last summer, I spent four days barnstorming across southern and central Colorado with Chancellor Bud Peterson and his entourage. We met with alumni in Lamar, Canon City, Salida, Pagosa Springs, Durango, Montrose, and Gunnison, and to show the proper pride in the University of Colorado, I wore Buff insignia shirts for the whole trip!
During our stop in Durango, I met with an alum who is a board member of the Mountain Studies Institute in Silverton, who told me about a fledgling collaboration between the University of Colorado, the Mountain Studies Institute, and Fort Lewis College in Durango. Our former Dean of the Graduate School, Susan Avery, started it, and it's called the San Juan Collaboratory.
Last November, I attended a meeting of the new Collaboratory, which is now headed by Professor Jason Neff in Geological Sciences and Professor Mark Williams in Geography, and found out that one of the most troubling environmental problems in southwestern Colorado is mercury. I've been studying the environmental behavior of mercury for a decade, so these junkets were definitely worth all that driving time!
The Four Corners area is home to a half-dozen coal-burning power plants, and even though they have all worked hard to reduce mercury emissions, mercury deposition is still high downwind of these plants. All of the major reservoirs in southwestern Colorado now have "fish consumption advisories" for mercury. And in 2003, the Missionary Ridge fire just east of Durango seems to have exacerbated this problem (see the photo). Fires result in huge increases in erosion, and when the sediments of the charred landscape washed into Vallecito Reservoir after the Missionary Ridge fire, the mercury concentrations in the sediments and water increased dramatically.
The Mountain Studies Institute and the Pine River Watershed Group in Durango have been working on this mercury problem for a couple of years, and through the University of Colorado's Outreach program, I was granted funds to provide assistance. We'll have a student to help Dr. Koren Nydick at the Mountain Studies Institute with sample collection and analysis over the next two summers, and we're writing a proposal to the National Science Foundation to better understand the role of soil organic matter and fire in influencing the fate of mercury in southwestern Colorado.
