Fate and transport of free-phase and dissolved-phase hydrocarbons in peat and peatlands: developing a conceptual model
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Physical and chemical, and pore-scale to field-scale properties of peat soil affect the migration of non-aqueous phase liquids (NAPLs) and dissolved-phase solutes in contaminated peatlands in a way not anticipated based on the current understanding derived from their behavior in mineral soil systems. Peat pore surface wettability, which is determined by pore surface chemistry, has strong hysteresis and shows hydrophilic and hydrophobic behaviors during water drainage from and water imbibition into pore spaces. This leads to high residual NAPL saturation in pore spaces. Systematic reduction of pore radius size with depth associated with greater peat decomposition in a typical peat profile leads to an increase in NAPL-entry capillary pressure and a reduction in peat permeability with increasing depth. The former leads to stronger capillarity in deeper peat horizons, causing resistance to NAPL percolation compared to that in shallow ones; along with decreased permeability with depth, this results in higher NAPL mobility in shallower peat. The cumulative effect is preferential horizontal migration of NAPL in shallow less decomposed peat horizons. Occupation of peat macro-pores by NAPL dramatically decreases the effective water permeability and leads to lower rates of water infiltration and groundwater discharge in the contaminated area. With respect to dissolved-phase hydrocarbons, the dual porosity structure of peat soil, which exhibits larger pores and higher effective porosity near the surface, also favours preferential transport in the surface peat layer, and leads to increasing solute retardation with depth. In addition, adsorption of hydrocarbon solutes onto natural dissolved organic carbon present in peat pore water influences the effective adsorption of hydrocarbon solutes onto peat by reducing the apparent adsorption partitioning coefficient. The concepts and evidence presented in this manuscript suggest both free-phase and dissolved-phase hydrocarbon have restricted mobility in peatlands. On this basis, in large peatlands where ecological function is not notably impacted, a case can be made for allowing natural processes to degrade the hydrocarbon, rather than the common response of digging up and disposing of contaminated soils, which destroys the ecosystem function.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".