A quantitative understanding of the transport of pollutants in groundwater is of great importance from the environmental perspective. Some environmental pollution scenarios involving groundwater contamination are very real. For example, one may encounter a situation where an underground storage tank is leaking hydrocarbons into an aquifer at a constant rate. Similarly, an overturned oil tanker ...

BACKGROUND Carbon storage in deep saline reservoirs has the potential to lower the amount of CO2 emitted to the atmosphere and to mitigate global warming. Leakage back to the atmosphere through abandoned wells and along faults would reduce the efficiency of carbon storage, possibly leading to health and ecological hazards at the ground surface, and possibly impacting water quality of near-surfa...

Fractured Gneiss aquifers present a challenge to hydrogeologists because of their geological complexity. Interpretation methods which can be applied to porous media cannot be applied to fractured Gneiss aquifers because flow and transport occur in fractures, joints, and conduits. In contrast, the rock matrix contribution to groundwater flow is not very important in Gneiss aquifers. Sodium chlor...

Surface water and groundwater systems are connected with the head gradient between the river and the nearby aquifer controlling the magnitude and direction of the exchange flux between the two systems. The direction of the flux dictates whether the river gains water from the nearby aquifer, or loses water to it. The exchange between groundwater and rivers is a key component influencing not only...

[1] Spring systems on the west slope of the Oregon High Cascades exhibit complex relationships among modern topography, lava flow geometries, and groundwater flow patterns. Seven cold springs were continuously monitored for discharge and temperature in the 2004 water year, and they were periodically sampled for dO, dD, tritium, and dissolved noble gases. Anomalously high unit discharges suggest...

More than 97% of the world's freshwater reserves are found in aquifers, making groundwater one of the most important resources on the planet. Prokaryotic communities in groundwater underpin the turnover of energy and matter while also maintaining groundwater purity. Thus, knowledge of microbial transport in the subsurface is crucial for maintaining groundwater health. Here, we describe for the ...

Researchers of CSIRO Land and Water in Griffith in Australia have found a way to repeatedly reuse drainage water to grow crops. In the process the system will concentrate the salt in the water to a manageable level which can then be used or stored in an environmentally friendly manner. The process, known as sequential biological concentration, is based on a novel system for Land, based treatmen...

New Zealand's gravel-bed rivers have deposited coarse, highly conductive gravel aquifers that are predominantly fed by river water. Managing their groundwater resources is challenging because the recharge mechanisms in these rivers are poorly understood and recharge rates are difficult to predict, particularly under a more variable future climate. To understand the river-groundwater exchange pr...

In the mid-1990s, a groundwater plume of uranium (U) was detected in monitoring wells in the B-BX-BY Waste Management Area at the Hanford Site in Washington. This area has been used since the late 1940s to store high-level radioactive waste and other products of U fuel-rod processing. Using multiple-collector ICP source magnetic sector mass spectrometry, high-precision uranium isotopic analyses...