Chemical heterogeneity in diffusion‐dominated aquitards
Bibliographic record
Abstract
High‐resolution measurements of the three‐dimensional (3‐D) variability in pore water electrical conductivity (EC) were obtained at a clay‐rich aquitard research site (the King site, 120 m × 70 m area) in southern Saskatchewan, Canada, using direct‐push probing technology (n = 35 boreholes). These measurements revealed complex lateral heterogeneity in the subsurface salt distributions which raised questions on the validity of the commonly used approach of transposing chemical data from distributed piezometers onto 1‐D depth profiles for interpretation and solute transport modeling. Two‐dimensional numerical modeling simulations demonstrated that distributed, nonuniform salt inputs have existed at the top of the unoxidized till aquitard for the past 3–5 kyr. The source of the nonuniform salt inputs is unclear but may be due to either variations in microtopography (<0.5 m) or variable penetration depth of surface fractures. A suite of generic solutions was developed to estimate the critical depth required to obtain chemical homogeneity in aquitards with nonuniform solute inputs and diffusion as the dominant transport mechanism. These solutions are presented for a range of sinusoidal input functions with varying amplitudes, magnitudes, and wavelengths. The solutions indicate EC distributions at the King site should be laterally uniform below a depth of around 20 m BG, which is consistent with observed EC values at the site. This study shows that aquitards with nonuniform salt inputs at their upper boundary are chemically heterogeneous above some critical depth and thus require careful attention when modeling solute transport processes within them.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".