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.
1.2.2 Determination of Absolute Age of Rocks
A large number of well-established methods are now in place to age-date rocks as the main material constituting the Earth. These techniques, extracted from Attendorn and Bowen (1997), are listed in Table 1.1. They were initiated earlier than groundwater dating methods, at the beginning of the 20th century by Arthur Holmes (Holmes, 1913), because of the much greater interest in, and more importance of, knowing the age of the Earth as a whole.All methods, with the exceptions of fission track and thermoluminescence techniques, are based on the radioactive decay principle. The radioactive methods either measure the remaining of a specific disintegrating radioactive element (carbon-14 method, for instance) in the rock sample or count the daughter product of a radioactive reaction and compare it with the concentration of the parent element (potassium-argon dating, for example). Fission track dating is based on the amount of the densities of tracks created by spontaneous fission of uranium-238 in a rock sample. The thermoluminescence method is based on the emission of light from the samples as a result of heating.
1.2.3 Geological Time Table 
Relative ages and absolute ages obtained by geologists during the last two cen-turies for worldwide rock formations have helped to construct what is called the geological time table.The geological time table, also referred to as the geo-logic column or geologic time scale, is regarded as a founding block of geology and shows the sequence of geological formations in order of decreasing age. As illustrated in Table 1.2, younger formations are on top and older ones are at the bottom of the table. Timescale in geology is very large; hence geologists use a finer division of eras, periods, epochs, and ages to differentiate among various stages of the geological time table. Note that the starting and ending ages of various temporal divisions (eras, periods, etc.) in Table 1.2 have some uncertainty, increasing toward earlier times. This is why age values shown here are slightly different from the values of a recently prepared geological time scale by Gradstein et al. (2004), which may be considered as the latest version. Although the geological time table was proposed long ago by Holmes in 1913, books and papers are still being written about it, revising and fine-tuning the boundary and age range of different times (e.g., Gradstein et al., 2004; Geyer and Shergold, 2000). It should be noted that in the hydrogeological time scale, we deal primarily with the uppermost section of the geological time table, namely Quaternary.

TABLE 1.1. Various Techniques for Dating Rock Samples

Ionium (230Th) dating of deep-sea sediments	187Os/188Os dating
234U-238U secular equilibrium dating of carbonates	Tritium dating
230Th-238U and 230Th-234U dating	I-Xe dating
Uranium-Xenon dating	La-Ce dating
Uranium-Krypton dating	Lu-Hf dating
Rubidium-Strontium dating	53Mn dating
Potassium-Argon dating	59Ni dating
Argon-Argon dating	Po-Pb dating
230Th-231Pa dating	K-Ca dating
Carbon-14 dating	Re-Os dating
Sm-Nd dating	137Cs/135Cs-A chronometer tracer
187Os/186Os dating	81Kr dating
Fission track dating	Thermoluminescence technique

TABLE 1.2. Geological Time Table (Extracted with Some Modifications From Websites—See Footnote)