Monitoring & Remediation.

A site was contaminated decades ago and the plume has been evolving ever since — invisibly. You're handed the site with the plume hidden. Characterize it, then clean it up.

✎ Adaptable template🏅 Semester capstone👥 Teams🏆 Scored & ranked📈 Advanced

The objective

Characterize a hidden plume under budget, then design and justify a cleanup based on your own characterization — the full hydrogeologist workflow, compressed into a semester.

What you learn

The coupled cost of characterization and remediation, decision-making under uncertainty, and why early sampling choices quietly determine whether the cleanup can ever succeed.

How it works

Open the site — the plume is invisible. You see only the geology and the budget.
Spend characterization budget on sampling locations (each one costs) to find the plume.
Build your conceptual model of the plume from what you actually found.
Design cleanup from your characterization — not the truth — then run it. The hidden truth is revealed and scored.

How you win

You're scored on the real outcome against the hidden truth: did your cleanup actually work, and what did the whole campaign — characterization plus remediation — cost?

Score = final compliance vs. hidden truth → then rank by (characterization + remediation cost)

Constraints

A single combined characterization + remediation budget
Every sample and well draws from that same budget
Regulatory cleanup target and deadline

Deliverable

A characterization plan and your interpreted plume
A cleanup design
A reflection on where your characterization misled you

Make it yours — for instructors

Every number here is a starting point. Change the site, the budget, the deadline, or the scoring rule to fit your course — then publish your version to the instructor network as a new seed problem for others to adopt and adapt.

Before you start

New to this? Watch the Groundwater Contamination concept lesson first.

Launch IGW-NET — start the challenge →Watch the concept lesson