Tracers in groundwater

Osmond JK, Cowart JB (2000) U-series nuchdes as tracers in groundwater hydrology. In Environmental tracers in subsurface hydrology. Cook P, Herczeg A (eds). Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, p290-333... 

Sanford, W.E., Shropshire, R.G., and Solomon, D.K., Dissolved gas tracers in groundwater Simplified injection, sampling, and analysis. Water Resour. Res., 32, 1635, 1996. 

Krouse and Mayer (2000) present an in-depth review and several case smdies of the use of stable sulfur and oxygen isotopes of sulfate as hydrologic tracers in groundwater. In addition, the use of sulfur isotopes for investigations of hydrological processes in catchments has been reviewed by Mitchell et al. (1998). Thus, what is presented here is just a brief overview of the application of sulfur isotopes in hydrologic studies. 

Neumann K. and Dreiss S. (1995) Strontium 87/strontium 86 ratios as tracers in groundwater and surface waters in Mono Basin, California. Water Resour. Res. 31, 3183-3193. 

Cook P. and Herezeg A. (2000) Environmental Tracers in Groundwater Hydrology. Kluwer, Boston, Dorderecht, London. 

Vengosh A. and Spivack A. J. (2000) Boron in Ground Water. In Environmental Tracers in Groundwater Hydrology (eds. P. Cook and A. Herczeg). Kluwer, Boston, Dorderecht, London, pp. 479-485. 

The use of fluorescent tracers in groundwater studies is important for following the route of the water flow from specific injection sources. In recent work, [1] tracers such as Rhodamine 6G have been shown to be detectable after argon laser excitation at 488 nm over a distance of typically 100 m at 10 ppb (10 pg L" ) concentrations. By increasing the laser power to a few milliwatts, tracers can be detected at ca 1 ppm over distances as long as ca 1 km. 

As more sensitive analytical methods for pesticides are developed, greater care must be taken to avoid sample contamination and misidentification of residues. For example, in pesticide leaching or field dissipation studies, small amounts of surface soil coming in contact with soil core or soil pore water samples taken from further below the ground surface can sometimes lead to wildly inaccurate analytical results. This is probably the cause of isolated, high-level detections of pesticides in the lower part of the vadose zone or in groundwater in samples taken soon after application when other data (weather, soil permeability determinations and other pesticide or tracer analytical results) imply that such results are highly improbable. 

Cherdyntsev W (1971) Uranium-234. Israel Program for Scientific Translations, Jerusalem Cochran JK, Masque P (2003) Short-lived U/Th-series radionuclides in the ocean tracers for scavenging rates, export fluxes and particle dynamics. Rev Mineral Geochem 52 461-492 Copenhaver SA, Krishnaswami S, Turekian KK, Shaw H (1992) and Th series nuclides in groundwater from the J-13 well at the Nevada test site implications for ion retardation. Geophys Res Lett 19 1383-1386... 

Nelson, R. W., Reisenauer, A. E., Application of radioactive tracers in scientific groundwater hydrology, Radioisotopes in Hydrology, Tokyo Symposium 1963, p. 207-230, Inter. Atomic Energy Agency, Vienna. 

The presence of some surfactants or their by-products in the aquatic environment has been considered as a potential marker of pollution [45, 325]. Thus, the presence of alkylbenzene sulfonates in groundwater has been used as an indicator of the age of the groundwater [358]. Linear alkylbenzenes can act as tracers of domestic waste in the marine environment [34,35,359,360] and trial-kylamines as indicators of urban sewage in sludge, coastal waters, and sediments [17,33,45,325, 327, 346,361]. Analysis, identification, and characterization of surfactants are extensively reviewed and discussed by Aboul-Kassim and Simoneit [314], while pollution problems associated with these compounds are reviewed by Aboul-Kassim and Simoneit [356]. 

Wiedemeier and coworkers (1996) have suggested two methods to approximate biodegradation rates in groundwater field studies (a) use a biologically recalcitrant tracer (e.g., three isomers of trimethylbenzene) in the groundwater to correct for dilution, sorption, and/or volatilization and calculate the rate constant by using the downgradient travel time or (b) assume that the plume has evolved to a dynamic steady-state equilibrium and develop a one-dimensional analytical solution to the advection-dispersion equation. 

Radium has four natural radionuclides in aqueous systems, 226Ra (t /2 = 1,620 y), 228Ra (tm = 5.76 y), 224Ra (tV2 = 3.66 d), and 223Ra (h/2 = 11-4 d). Radium makes an excellent tracer in coastal systems because it has a highly particle-reactive Th parent. Radium radionuclides can be used to measure groundwater inputs to coastal waters and to model residence times in estuaries. 

Mazor, E. (1992a) He as a semi-quantitative tool for groundwater dating in the range of 104 to 10s years. In Isotopes of Noble Gases as Tracers in Environmental Studies, IAEA, Vienna, 163-178. 

Because of greatly contrasting low tritium levels before thermonuclear tests and because of the distinct peak tritium levels that occurred in the atmosphere during 1962-1965, tritium has been used as an environmental tracer in the studies on surface water budgets, groundwater age and flow velocities, groundwater recharge, and dispersion and diffusion in aquifers. A 1989 study detailed the distribution of tritium... 

If the initial concentration of in the atmosphere is not known, an alternative dating method is to analyze waters for both and He. Because decays to He, it is possible to use the tritiogenic He component of He in groundwater as a quantitative tracer of the age of the water since it was separated from the atmosphere. 

Aravena R. and Robertson W. D. (1998) Use of multiple isotope tracers to evaluate denitrification in groundwater case study of nitrate from a large-flux septic system plume. Ground Water 31, 180—186. 

Kendall C. and McDonnell J. J. (1993) Effect of intrastonn heterogeneities of rainfall, soil water and groundwater on runoff modelling. In Tracers in Hydrology, Int. Assoc. Hydrol. Sci. Publ. 215, July 11-23, 1993 (eds. N. E. Peters et al.) Yokohama, Japan, pp. 41-49. 

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