Groundwater flow age distributions: Understanding open pit mine hydrology

这个项目旨在改进对地下水年龄的估计。了解地下水年龄对可持续管理至关重要，环境示踪剂越来越多地用于这一目的。然而，地下水样本不可避免地是不同年龄的水的混合物。由于对大多数示踪剂来说，示踪剂浓度与年龄之间的关系不是线性的，不同的示踪剂可以产生不同的样品平均年龄。该项目旨在确定是否有可能通过使用不同的环境示踪剂进行测量来确定地下水年龄分布的时刻。该项目还旨在检查含水层内的非均质性程度是否可以通过不同示踪剂获得的年龄之间的差异来确定。这个项目旨在解决使用地下水化学来估计水年龄的最大问题——地下的混合过程是未知的。解决了这个问题，就可以更准确地估计地下水流速和含水层补给速率。据估计，地下水产业每年为澳大利亚经济贡献68亿美元，该项目将有助于地下水资源的可持续管理。

This project aims to improve the estimation of the age of groundwater. Understanding groundwater age is critical for sustainable management and environmental tracers are increasingly used for this purpose. However, groundwater samples are inevitably mixtures of water of different ages. Since for most tracers the relationship between tracer concentration and age is not linear, different tracers can produce different mean ages for the sample. This project aims to determine whether it is possible to determine moments of the groundwater age distributions from measurements made with different environmental tracers. The project also aims to examine whether the degree of heterogeneity within the aquifer can be determined from the disparity between ages obtained with different tracers. This project aims to tackle the largest problem with using groundwater chemistry to estimate water age – that mixing processes in the subsurface are never known. Solving this problem will allow much more accurate estimates of groundwater velocity and aquifer recharge rates. The groundwater industry contributes an estimated $6.8 billion per annum to the Australian economy, and this project will contribute to the sustainable management of the groundwater resource.