A German scientist, professor and world record-holding endurance swimmer spoke Thursday in Chattanooga, as he continues an effort to swim and survey the waters of the entire length of the Tennessee River.
Andreas Fath, a professor of chemistry at Germany’s Furtwangen University, hopes to raise awareness of how important water quality is by collecting data as he swims. He’s also hoping to break another world record.
Fath plans to complete the entire 652-mile swim within 31 days. At the end of each day, Fath will get out of the water in a different city along the river. He and his team then conduct several water quality tests based on parameters collected during that day’s swim, and some of the samples are sent to the university in Germany for further testing.
Today, Fath will swim into downtown Chattanooga, nearly 182 miles downstream from Knoxville, Tenn., where he began on July 27. He has 470 miles to swim before reaching Paducah, Ky., where the river joins the Ohio River. As he swims into Chattanooga, a group from Chattanooga Open Water Swimmers will join him for the last two miles of swimming before he gets out at the Chattanooga Pier at around 1:30 p.m.
Swimming is not all that consumes Fath’s day. On Thursday evening, he held a presentation in the Tennessee Aquarium’s River Journey Auditorium. There, he explained how he collects data and shared results from his 2014 “swim for science” in the European Rhine River. He completed that 765-mile-long swim in 28 days.