Environmental Forensics

Exponent's environmental forensics services enable you to accurately determine contaminant sources and remediate effectively.

Exponent employs environmental forensics to research chemical release histories and identify sources of environmental contamination. Reconstruction of past environmental events relies on an understanding of multiple factors — time frame, contaminant types and amounts, and sources of chemical releases — and is used to investigate and uncover valuable insights about contaminated sites, pollution sources, and petroleum and natural gas leaks.

Environmental forensics science has been applied to contamination scenarios ranging from remote arctic environments to urban sediments. The chemical condition of the environment (i.e., the background or baseline) is central to any investigation and helps scientists determine the presence of any additional contamination, understand chemical release histories, and identify sources of environmental contamination. Questions requiring environmental forensic applications usually relate to understanding the extent, duration, and responsibility for environmental contamination in a regulatory and or legal context. Environmental forensics is also integral to environmental due diligence for mergers and acquisitions and remediation cost recovery. Techniques such as chemical fingerprinting, chemical fate and transport modeling, hydrogeological investigation, reconstructing operational histories, and statistical analyses, among others, are at the heart of many of our investigations.

Exponent's environmental forensics scientists have consistently been at the forefront of environmental research — developing, applying, and publishing about new investigative techniques. Our team offers a broad range of environmental forensics services to industry leaders, attorneys, and governmental agencies.