Earth and Environmental Science

Dr. Ian Spooner was one of 5 authors who, on behalf of the Canadian Society for Civil Engineering were awarded the 2022 Donald Stanley Award for the best paper in environmental engineering.  The paper was entitled Evaluating the movement of dissolved porewater species through a marine sediment 51 years after establishment of a pulp and paper effluent stabilization basin and was published in the Canadian Geotechnical Journal.

The  research was part of a multi-university research initiative at Boat Harbour, Pictou Co. Nova Scotia that has been supported by Build Nova Scotia. Boat Harbour is a marine estuary that was converted to a wastewater stabilization basin for treatment of primarily pulp and paper effluent. As a result, the basin was immediately converted to a “freshwater” environment and subsequently accumulated a thin layer of black, organic-rich sediment containing varying amounts of dioxins and furans, metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and petroleum hydrocarbons. The authors were studying  changes in sediment porewater chemistry changes that have occurred over 51 years of operation of the stabilization basin with the intent of better understanding why contamination has been minimal into the underlying natural marine sediments.

The authors of the paper were (in order) Craig B. Lake, Xiaofei Song, Ian S. Spooner, Hayden A.Tackley, Tony R. Walker, and Rob C. Jamieson. Lake, Song, Tackley and Jamieson are in the Department of Civil & Resource Engineering, Dalhousie University, Spooner is in the Department of Earth & Environmental Science at  Acadia University,  and Walker is in the Department of Resource and Environmental Studies, Dalhousie University.