Soil Gases

Table 10. Incineration Type for Various Waste Matrices Liquids Solid/Sludges Soil Gases ...

The most common way radon enters a home is when air pressure differences move soil gases containing radon through the spaces between soil particles to the foundation of the home. Just as gravity will make water flow from a higher area to a lower area, pressure differences will make... 

At many waste sites, -hexane has been detected in the landfill gases vented from the soils at the disposal sites (Brosseau and Heitz 1994 O Leary and Walsh 1995). While information in the literature is extremely limited, trace levels of -hexane are probably found in the soils or the soil gases at many waste disposal sites. u-Hexane has been identified in the soil at 14 sites and in sediments at two sites among the 60 NPL hazardous waste sites where it was detected in some environmental medium (HazDat 1998). 

In the next three subsections, we discuss the most important minerals in Earth s crust, soils, and atmosphere, and explore some of the basic concepts that help guide our thinking about their interactions with water, aqueous metal ions, organic matter, microbial organisms, and atmospheric and soil gases. 

Severinghaus J. P., Bender M. L., Keeling R. F., and Broecker W. S. (1996) Fractionation of soil gases by diffusion of water vapor, gravitational settling, and thermal diffusion. Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta 60, 1005-1018. 

Klusman R. W. and Jaacks J. A. (1987) Environmental influences upon mercury, radon and helium concentrations in soil gases at a site near Denver, Colorado. J. Geochem. Explor. 27, 259-280. 

Bukova, 1959 Anaerobic bacterial decomposition, soil gases, sewage, silt C >99% C,/C2>1000... 

Three of the near-surface data sets from Table 5-VIII are particularly convincing because the soil-gas measurements were made in basins that contained only one type of production. As shown by Fig. 5-20b, they are the dry-gas production of the Sacramento Basin (more than 450 sites), the gas-condensate production in the Alberta foothills (more than 650 sites), and the oil production of the Permian basin (more than 450 sites). Figures 5-20c, 5-20d and 5-20e show methane content (%C ), the methane ethane ratio (C1/C2), and the propane-.methane ratio (1000 x C3/C1) from the soil-gas populations over these three basins. These data clearly demonstrate that the chemical compositions of the soil gases from these three different areas form separate populations that appear to reflect the differences which exist in the subsurface reservoirs in these three basins. This correlation is particularly striking when compared with the data of Nikonov (1971), shown in Fig. 5-20a. 

As for surface soil gases, a powerful confirmation of the validity of marine geochemical data can be shown by the very close agreement between the composition of component hydrocarbons in production gases and the composition of seep anomaly gases in the same areas. Figure 5-22 shows the well database used for this confirmation... 

The geochemical data come from 239 shallow probe (1.2 metre, 4 feet) soil-gas samples collected on 500 - 1000 m grids placed directly over these two fields, with 95 sites over Filo Morado and 144 sites over Loma de La Lata. The free soil gases were analysed for methane, ethane, ethylene, propane, propylene, iso-butane and normal butane by gas chromatography using a flame ionisation detector. 

Subsequently, a period of particularly active research into the exploration value of sulphur gases yielded promising results. Hinkle (1978), Hinkle and Harms (1978) and Hinkle and Kantor (1978) used molecular sieves as passive adsorbents of sulphur gases. Lovell (1979), Lovell et al. (1980), Hale and Moon (1982), Hinkle and Dilbert (1984) and Oakes and Hale (1987) used the soils themselves. McCarthy et al. (1986) used soil gases and Hinkle (1986) used both soils and soil gases. The objective of this chapter is to present the rationale and the results of the investigations from this period. 

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