ISSUES AND THOUGHTS INGROUNDWATER DATING SCIENCE

This chapter deals with some new and important topics that have not been covered in the previous chapters due to the specialized nature of each chapter. First we describe the need to have more user-friendly groundwater dating methods and list a range of potential dating techniques that might be devel-oped further and employed to supplement those discussed earlier. How to translate the results of age modeling exercises into real-world, practical appli-cations is dealt with next. We then propose some new concepts and measures that might be considered as the sign of the maturity of groundwater age science. The future of groundwater dating will also be dealt with in the context of the “Future of Hydrogeology,” i.e., whether groundwater age-dating is as mature as hydrogeology or is a branch for which major advancement has still to come. The Authors’ concluding remarks about the science of groundwater age-dating are included in this chapter.
8.1 THE NEED FOR MORE DATING METHODS AND THE CURRENTLY PROPOSED POTENTIAL METHODS
In this subchapter, we briefly point to some of the less used and specific groundwater dating methods that may find wider applications in the future. The general consensus among scientists is that the number of age-dating methods is quite limited (Loosli et al., 2000). Since 50 years ago, some tech-niques for dating groundwaters have been developed, with some already losing their credibility. Tritium and silicon-32 methods, for instance, are disappearing, and Krypton-85, CFCs, and SF6 have recently come into play. Iodine-129 and 36Cl have proved to suffer from some serious drawbacks, but the new ATTA technique to measure 81Kr content of groundwater samples have created serious hopes in dating very old groundwaters by this isotope. Further, 4He and 40Ar techniques have been used to supplement very old dating methods. In general, there are many more dating methods now than there were 20 years ago, and there could be many more 20 years from now. The motivation for the development in the field of groundwater dating is the serious need, felt by the international scientific community, to know the age of groundwater. From the viewpoint of the aquifer management, it is of crucial value to have more widely and easily applicable cheap dating methods. It is also necessary to extend the application of age data and to simplify the interpretation of the presently costly research-level-only dating methods. We need to have reason-ably precise age indicators for various age categories. For example, we need methods for dating 0–100 years old, 100–1,000 years old, 1,000–10,000-year-old waters, and so on. The ideal situation would be to have a set of methods to enable groundwater professionals to date each and every single molecule of water. One such technique should, for instance, be able to reveal the very last moment that the groundwater molecule, the age of which is of interest, was subjected to the sunlight. In other words, we should be able to find out when the last time that the molecule of interest saw the light of the sun. In this regard, researchers should concentrate to find out whether sunlight leaves any recognizable impact on the water molecule. This is to some extent similar to thermoluminocene dating of archaeological materials. Now we turn to briefly discuss some of the potential dating methods that have been either proposed or applied to only a minor extent.
Radon-222 Method As stated in Chapter 4, 222Rn method can be grouped along with other methods for dating young groundwaters, but it has been sep-arated because the timescale (age) involved is much shorter than the other isotopes. Radon-222 is mostly used to determine the quantity and location of river discharge to streams (Cook et al., 2003), to delineate groundwater recharge and flow paths, and to estimate groundwater apparent ages over short timescales (Cecil and Green, 2000) and as a natural tracer to monitor the remediation of NAPL contamination in the subsurface. A good discussion about the hydrogeology of radon in an area near Conifer, Colorado, is pre-sented by Lawrence et al. (1991), where they measured the concentration of 222Rn in 46 water wells and one spring.
Radon-222 with a half life of 3.8 days is a product in the decay chain of uranium-238. It is generated by the disintegration of radium-226 (the imme-diate precursor to radon in the decay chain with a half-life of 1,620 years) through alpha–particle emission and it decays to polonium-218 by the same alpha-particle emission reaction: