2 地下水老化研究的历史

This chapter includes a chronology of groundwater dating studies using iso-topic and geochemical tracers from the earliest methods/applications like tritium to the latest ones such as CFCs and SF6. It names various methods and explains how they have evolved. All book chapters, M.Sc. and Ph.D. theses, and professional reports that have been produced in relation to groundwater age are cited and a few back-bone journal papers are introduced as compre-hensive references. Worldwide institutions where groundwater samples can be dated with relevant information are introduced, and well-known people in this field and their accomplishments in terms of the evolution of various methods of age-dating are described. This chapter has been designed to equip the reader with a full historical perspective and a complete picture of the topic. It is necessary because this is the first ever book devoted solely to the ground-water age concept.

2.1 地下水年龄学科的先驱——最早出版物的顺序

In 1952, Willard Frank Libby (December 17, 1908–September 8, 1980), a Chemistry Noble laureate, published his famous book Radiocarbon Dating.In that book, which was re-edited soon after in 1955 and has been translated into German, Russian, and Spanish, Libby neither discusses nor mentions the term “groundwater age.” However, in a two-and-a-half-page article he wrote a year later in P.N.A.S. (Libby, 1953), Libby introduced the term “storage time” of water. Though he did not specifically mention storage time of “groundwater,” he actually meant it because he went on to elaborate further by adding “the determination of ‘tritium in wells’ should reveal whether their ultimate sup-plies are closely connected to the rainfall.” It must be added that in the earlier section of the same article, Libby introduces an Age of Rain concept and defines it as the “time elapsed since precipitation.” However, no words like groundwater age are used in Libby’s article. For clarity and due to the impor-tance of this article, its first page has been scanned and reproduced here as shown in Figure 2.1.
In our estimation, the first ever scientific piece of writing to include/cite the term “age” for groundwater is most probably that of Begemann and Libby (1957). Again, they do not specifically mention “groundwater age,” but they write “average age of the main body of water,” by which they really meant the average age of the groundwaters emanating from the thermal springs, i.e., the main body of water was thermal groundwaters. The last 6 lines of the abstract of their article (page 277) read (reproduced with permission from Elsevier):

Studies of the circulatory pattern of hot springs have shown that the waters of several hot springs studied are rainwater that has been stored for relatively brief periods. Study of groundwater has shown that in large areas the water issuing from wells dug for normal use is older than 50 years. It appears that the technique of studying the tritium content of well-water is quite likely to prove to be of real value in studying underground water supplies and in the prediction of their susceptibil-ity to drought as well as depletion by pumping and the possibility of replenish-ment from rain or snow.

In page 292 of their article, Begemann and Libby define average age: “Average age is understood to be the age corresponding to the average tritium content and represent the time elapsed since the waters last fell as rain or snow.”
Based on the above explanations, it is, to a high degree of certainty, pos-sible for us to call both Friedrich Begemann and Willard Frank Libby co-founders of the groundwater age science. These two were from The Enrico Fermi Institute for Nuclear Studies, University of Chicago, USA. However, it should be reiterated that W. F. Libby published a large number of articles as well as a book on the subject of age-dating by radiocarbon. As pointed out earlier, Libby won the Noble Prize in chemistry in 1960 for his method to use carbon-14 for age determination in archaeology, geology, geophysics, and other branches of science. It should immediately be added that the paper by K. O. Münnich (1957) in German is the oldest research that we can find to include measurement of 14C in groundwater samples. Münnich’s work, however, does not include words like groundwater “age” or groundwater “dating.”Therefore, K. O. Münnich, although an authority in the field of groundwater dating through his substantial later publications, cannot be specifically called the