The chemistry of Earth is unimaginably complex, a tangled web of interdependencies magnificently complicated by soil, atmosphere, water and life.  Upon this, humans are presently building very rapidly towards a population of eight billion, and then well beyond even this.  Resource pressures in all sectors (energy, water, food, raw materials, etc.) will continue to increase worldwide.  Very unfortunately, pollution is a ubiquitous consequence and a serious problem for all; roughly 10 million people die prematurely, every year, from environmental pollutants.  Many governments either cannot afford to control and/or mitigate environmental pollutants, or choose to simply ignore or turn away from these for political reasons.  Given this, there are at least three timely points that will be considered in this talk. First, despite many decades of intense study, we still are not aware of all of the important pollutants in our environment.  This is particularly true for nanomaterials in the environment that can be very difficult to find and understand.  In nature as well as in engineered environments, nanoparticles are most often ephemeral, changing their composition, key aspects of their atomic structure, and their size and shape with time.  Even subtle variations can dramatically change their properties and the way they interact with living things.    Second, accidental discoveries, curiosity science, and crossing disciplinary boundaries will continue to pay important dividends in attempts to keep us safer, and this is particularly true for nano-pollutants.   And third, centers like NanoEarth at Virginia Tech, where much of the work for this talk was accomplished using a staff of nano-environmental scientists, are invaluable.  Given everything above, this talk also explores the remarkable legacy of Jim Davis who for more than four decades has built an extraordinary and robust scientific platform of the partitioning of aqueous species at mineral-water interfaces using highly intelligent conceptual models and countless laboratory measurements, progressing all the way to reactive transport models and simulations of laboratory- to field-scale realities.   This not only gives explanations of the movement of many pollutants in the subsurface, but it extends into trusted predictive science, as well as vital insight into passive reactive barriers and also bioremediation strategies.  This body of knowledge will continue to greatly impact nano-environmental science.

Nano-environmental science as an emerging field, with a tribute to Jim Davis and his enduring legacy

255th National Meeting (2018)

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