MCL

1. The highest number to which Julius Caesar could count.
2. Newest Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavor: Mint Chocolate Licorice.
3. Acronym for Maximum Contaminant Level, the maximum permissible level of a chemical or radionuclide contaminant in water that is delivered to any user of a public water system. MCLs are set as close to MCLGs [maximum contaminant level goals, the level of a contaminant in drinking water below which there is no known or expected risk to health] as feasible using the best available technology and taking cost into consideration. MCLs are enforceable standards set by the US Environmental Protection Agency or the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Perched water table

1. Art-deco furniture piece characterized by a raised, flat surface with built-in depressions to hold beverages.
2. Feeder designed for classy but thirsty birds.
3. The water table of a relatively small groundwater body in the vadose zone, above the general groundwater body. (A water table is the upper boundary of a free groundwater body at atmospheric pressure.)

Percolation ponds

1. Small bodies of water preferred as habitat by particularly perky animals, like leaping frogs and darting fish.
2. Puddles of coffee that form underneath leaky coffeemakers.
3. Ponds (usually man-made) designed to allow wastewater to percolate slowly into the ground. The ponds act as holding facilities while gravity allows the water to percolate or seep through the soil or other unconsolidated medium into the local water table and lower aquifers. Also called infiltration pond.

Sole-source aquifer

1. A body of water formed in the depression created by a dinosaur footprint.
2. A water cooler manufactured at a shoe factory.
3. An aquifer is underground porous geologic medium that is saturated with water and is sufficiently permeable to conduct groundwater so as to enable its extraction. A sole-source aquifer provides a minimum of 50% of the water for its users in a situation where no other source of water could reasonably replace it. Under the Safe Drinking Water Act, the U.S. EPA can determine that an area has an aquifer that is the sole or principal drinking water source for the area and, if contaminated, would create a significant hazard to public health; thereafter, no federal financial assistance can be used for any project that would contaminate the aquifer through a recharge zone so as to create a significant hazard to public health.

vadose zone

1. Point in time halfway between wakefulness and slumber, often characterized by talking in one's sleep about environmental cleanup technologies. Mainly afflicts civil engineers and environmental activists.
2. A tourist spot in Virginia where people go to get cured of insomnia.
3. Unsaturated region of rock and soil located beneath the land surface and above the water table.

(For definitions of additional terms, see the glossary contained in the IEER report Poison in the Vadose Zone.)

 

 

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Answers: c, c, c, c, c