Isotopic fractionation by diffusion in groundwater
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the last decade, isotopic fractionation has gained acceptance as an indicator of microbiological and chemical transformations of contaminants in groundwater. These transformation processes typically favor isotopically light, compared to isotopically heavy, contaminants, resulting in enrichment of the latter in the residual aqueous phase. In these isotope applications, it has been generally presumed that physical transport processes in groundwater have a negligible effect on isotopic enrichment. It is well known, however, that aqueous phase diffusion generally proceeds faster for isotopically light, compared to isotopically heavy, solute molecules, often resulting in isotopic fractionation in groundwater. This paper considers the potential for isotopic fractionation during transport in groundwater resulting from minute isotopic effects on aqueous diffusion coefficients. Analyses of transport in heterogeneous systems delimit the viable range of isotopic fractionation by diffusion in groundwater. Results show that diffusion can result in similar degrees of depletion and enrichment of isotopically heavy solutes during transport in heterogeneous systems with significant diffusion rate–limited mass transfer between fast‐ and slow‐flow zones. Additional analyses and examples explore conditions that attenuate the development of significant fractionation. Examples are presented for 13 C methyl tertiary butyl ether and deuterated and nondeuterated isopropanol and tertiary butyl alcohol using aqueous diffusion coefficients measured by the Taylor dispersion method with refractive index profiling as a part of this study. Examples elucidate the potential for diffusive fractionation as a confounder in isotope applications and emphasize the importance of hydrogeologic analysis for assessing the role of diffusive fractionation in isotope applications at contaminant field sites.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".