地下水年龄

PREFACE

In the important fields of hydrogeology and groundwater resources, new scientific, technical, and legal questions are constantly being posed, and the resolution of a large number of these problems requires some understanding of the residence time/age of groundwater. It is now half a century that groundwater age dating is carried out regularly and forms an important part of some of the hydrogeological/groundwater investigations. During these years “groundwater age” has steadily been coalescing into a potent and much respected field. The application of groundwater age data, being traditionally concerned with the flow rate calculation, recharge estimation, and renewabil-ity of the groundwater systems, has now expanded to include items such as the calibration of groundwater flow and transport models, the management of dry land salinity and the study of groundwater pollution. There are now over 20 direct and indirect methods based upon a large number of isotopic and con-servative tracers to age date young, old, and very old groundwaters with an age range of a few days to tens of millions of years. In addition, simulation of groundwater age distributions has recently received considerable attention for monitoring the quality of groundwater and for predicting the fate of solutes and contaminants in the aquifer systems.
This important field of knowledge, however, has not received adequate attention in terms of books published to describe its many aspects. Although there are a number of scattered book chapters that include limited aspects of this topic, no single book has so far been produced to include its many fasci-nating angles in an integrated manner. Our intent is to fill this gap, appropri-ately presenting a half-century of progress and thus to play an important role in the further development of this still relatively new discipline. It should act as a major reference for any work that includes groundwater age or related subjects. The book includes a thorough discussion of groundwater age, which will help the audience fully digest the topic and plan research upon it, and it will form reference for anyone who has an interest in advanced subjects such as groundwater tracers. It is the first book devoted solely to this topic.
Groundwater Age is the first book to incorporate and synthesize the entire state of the art of knowledge about the business of groundwater dating includ-ing historical development, principles, applications, various methods, and likely future progress in the concept. It is intended for professionals, scientists, grad-uate students, consultants, and water sector managers who deal with ground-water and seek a comprehensive treatment of the subject of groundwater age. No similar book currently exists. Primary readers include graduate students, researchers, and university faculties working in water resources, earth sciences, and environmental studies. It will be useful for advanced undergraduate stu-dents, consultants, and high school teachers. We have attempted to present modern knowledge and cutting-edge research in a simple and clear language, such that it will be of interest to anyone with a passion for new technologies and modern sciences.
Chapter 1 discusses a variety of concepts and aims to provide essential definitions of the basics needed in understanding groundwater dating science. Topics covered in this chapter are wide-ranging and hence they may seem less coherent and somehow scattered. This is the nature of introductory chapters of books of any kind. The history of groundwater dating science and the pio-neers, major contributors, well-known people, worldwide related laboratories, important publications and theses, and extensively dated aquifers are dealt with in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 covers a large number of applications and uses that are made from the groundwater age-data. This chapter is specifically useful for consulting companies and resource managers. Chapters 1 to 3 are original and their subjects have not been previously covered in any book. How to do dating is the subject covered by Chapters 4 to 6. These chapters have been written with this in mind that for the majority of the dating methods, the available literature is vast. Even general groundwater textbooks such as Freeze and Cherry (1979), Domenico and Schwartz (1990), and Hiscock (2005) as well as a number of public domain websites contain good sections on this subject. Therefore, age-dating methods are comparatively brief. Each method could have been expanded into a chapter leading to a larger book, yet not offering information presently available in the literature. Also, we have in dating chapters minimized our attention to the hostile parameters such as mixing, dispersion, and corrections, which are covered in Chapter 7. These three chapters are considered partially original. Chapter 7 is a mathematical description of the dating subject, which covers some very recently acquired knowledge related to age and life expectancy distributions. It discusses the deficiencies and incompleteness that are associated with reporting a single value as the age of a groundwater sample. New mathematical approaches are introduced in this chapter to model age and residence time distributions in samples comprising billions of water molecules originating from various groundwatersheds. Chapter 8 aims to cover stimulating new topics and those topics that have not been dealt with in other parts of the book, due to the spe-cialized nature of Chapters 1 to 7. It tries to take the reader beyond the present-day knowledge and discusses a wide range of issues we hope will inspire creative thinking about the subject. The last two chapters are also orig-inal, not available in any book before the present one. Finally, decay curves of various dating isotopes and some useful information about noble gases and various measurement units are placed in the appendices. There is much here to satisfy and stimulate readers!

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are indebted to the following people or organizations, across the world, who in one way or another helped us to compile this book.
J. Rose from John Wiley and Sons for his editorial handling and for his very quick reactions to the many questions asked by the authors. R. Purtschert from the University of Bern, for his time to show the underground laboratory at the University of Bern and for the discussions. D. J. Goode from the USGS for giving permission to use materials from his Ph.D. thesis. K. McGuire from the Georgia Technical University and R. E. Criss from California Institute of Technology for providing some papers and information about the use of stable isotopes of water in dating young groundwaters. L. Sebol from Golder Asso-ciates, Canada, F. Cornaton from the University of Waterloo, D. Pinti from the University of Québec, D. Hunkeler from the University of Neuchatel, and W. Deutsch from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for their review of a chapter of the book. T. Vitvar from IAEA Vienna for information about his Ph.D. thesis. L. D. Cecil from the USGS for reviewing part of the manuscript and for providing an electronic copy of his Ph.D. thesis. B. G. Katz from USGS for his help in obtaining CFCs and SF6 data. E. Busenberg for providing CFCs and SF6 data. D. Nelms from the USGS for his information about the suscep-tibility/vulnerability mapping using age data. C. Bethke from the University of Illinois for his initial positive response to an email by G. A. Kazemi con-firming the need for such a book and also for his assessment of the proposal later. P. G. Cook from the CSIRO, Australia, for providing some information regarding age-dating young groundwater by 36Cl/Cl. B. T. Verhagen from the University of Witwatersrand for his information about dating laboratory facilities in South Africa and elsewhere.

Elsevier, Springer, Nature publishing group, Geological Society of America, Geological Society, London,American Institute of Hydrology (AIH),TPS, and many authors for permission to reproduce copyrighted materials. Janet Lehr for her help to gather information and references. The friendly and scientific environment at CHYN, University of Neuchatel, has helped greatly in deliv-ering the manuscript on time. We especially have to thank Ms. Elisabeth Kuster, Librarian, for timely provision of books and papers and for her help in translating from German texts.

1 INTRODUCTION

The aim of this chapter is to provide the reader with the basic definition of some of the terms and concepts essential to understanding groundwater age science. We start with a brief introduction about age and lifetime (in general), geochronology, and geological time table. We then attempt to clearly define and illustrate a number of core concepts such as groundwater age, ground-water residence time, groundwater life expectancy, isochrone map, turnover time, etc. A table is presented that includes mean residence time of water in various compartments of the hydrologic cycle, such as in oceans, in rivers, in the atmosphere, and in groundwater systems. Definition and preparation of groundwater’s isochrone and life expectancy maps are a short topic followed by the definition of a large number of terms synonymous to groundwater age and residence time. It is recommended that the reader starts with the preface of this book, where a general discussion about groundwater dating can be found.

1.1 AGE AND LIFE TIME

Every living and nonliving entity on the planet Earth, and indeed within the entire universe, whether natural or artificial, has a particular age. For example, an animal has an age, a car has an age, a bolt has an age, a factory has an age, a tree has an age, a soil particle has an age, a mountain has an age, a road has an age, and so on. Age for some entities is the length of time that has elapsed since the moment they were created until the present time if they still exist, that is, if they have not died or have not been transformed into another form with another name. For instance, the age of a second-hand car is from the year it was built by the factory until the day one wants to know its fabrication date to purchase it. For some other entities, the reference date of the age “birth-day” is not their creation time, but their appearance on the surface of the Earth. The age of a child, for example, is the time passed since he or she was born. In this case, the age of the child in question does not include the 9 months’ duration he or she spends as an embryo in the womb.
Similarly, all living and nonliving entities are assigned lifetimes (there is no single thing that lasts forever). The lifetime is the length of the time between their birth/creation and their death/demolition. It is, therefore, impossible to know the lifetime of a person before his or her death. The concepts of age and lifetime are illustrated in Figure 1.1. For human-made equipment, the lifetime can be defined as the time interval between its fabrication and the time it is no longer capable of performing the function it was built to fulfill. The lifetime of “a bolt” equals the time it was built by the factory until it is no longer good enough to be used as a bolt, perhaps it is broken or its threads are not in good shape. One should also be aware of the term “Date” and avoid confusing it with age or lifetime. Date is usually employed to specify a partic-ular day; for example, 23 August 1996 is a date. It does not show any particu-lar age or lifetime. Some other particulars are associated with the age and lifetime of humans.These are place of birth, place of death, and place of burial. Not all these are applicable to, or important for, entities other than human beings.

Figure 1.1. Human age and lifetime. Note that lifetime is only one number for each person, but age varies depending on the date we want to know it. In other words, each person has many ages but one lifetime. Also note that terms like “infant,” “child,” and “young” are semiquantitative ages.

1.2 AGE DETERMINATION IN GEOLOGY (GEOCHRONOLOGY) AND IN OTHER DISCIPLINES

Hydrogeology and groundwater are primarily a branch of geology and Earth sciences; hence a brief overview of the field of age-dating in geology needs to be initially presented. Attempts to determine the origin of Earth, a topic of interest for many scientists, for common people, and for philosophers, started with the beginning of civilization (Ringwood, 1979). However, it was not until the late 17th and early 18th centuries that observation-based knowledge led Abraham Werner, James Hutton, and especially William Smith to lay the foun-dation of the historical geology (Kummel, 1970), a branch of geology that dis-cusses the age and history of the Earth. Despite the long history of intensive research, the precise age of the Earth is still a topic of intense discussion (Dalrymple, 1991). It is now estimated to be over 4.5 billion years (Faure, 2001). Further, considerable uncertainty surrounds the age of the universe, which recent estimates put at between 11.2 to 20 billion years (Krauss and Chaboyer, 2003). Geochronology is the title of the discipline that deals with age-dating of the Earth, rocks, minerals, and perhaps rocks of other planets.
Age-dating also has a long history in archeology and in many other fields such as estimating the age of various materials like woods, trees, glasses, wines, etc. See, for example, Wagner (1998) and Arnold and Libby (1951). A large number of methods based upon physical, biological, and chemical principles have been developed for this purpose. In fact, estimating the age of people is also a recognized expertise and is required in some criminal investigations, in estimating the age of a vehicle’s occupant mainly for complying with children’s safety requirements (e.g., Moeller, et al., 2002), in determining athletic eligi-bility (whose official reported age is in doubt) to play in some categories of sports (e.g., for playing for the FIFA World Youth Championship), in identi-fying young people who are in the age range of compulsory military service but have not done it, an exercise called Nazar Begiry (summoning by obser-vation) in Iran, and in doing much more.
1.2.1 Absolute Age and Relative Age
In historical geology, two equally important concepts are the key to evaluat-ing the issue of timescale in geological processes and stratigraphy. These are absolute age and relative age. Absolute age is the age of a rock sample, a stratum, or a geological formation (in numbers) that has been determined, in most cases, using radiometric decay principles. Absolute age is usually reported as a number, e.g., 20.6 million years, 128 million years, etc. On the other hand, the relative age of a geological stratum is inferred by its position in the stratigraphical sequence or its relation with a particular geological struc-ture. The principles of stratigraphy (such as superposition), tectonics, and structural geology are employed to obtain the relative ages of various geo-logical entities. Relative age is reported with terms like younger or older than a particular age, that is, relative age studies do not yield a specific age number. They indicate whether a particular geological formation or a geological event is older or younger than another one. For instance, Permian is above, and therefore younger than Carboniferous, but this tells us nothing about the age or the duration of either of these two periods.