Naturally occurring (geogenic) groundwater arsenic contamination is a problem of global significance, with noteworthy occurrences in large parts of the alluvial and deltaic aquifers in South and Southeast Asia. To address this problem tremendous research efforts have been dedicated over the last two decades to better understand the sources and distribution of arsenic-polluted groundwater. Now, an Australian team of scientists from Flinders University, CSIRO and the University of Western Australia, together with their colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag), have used computer modeling to integrate much of what has been learned over the years into computer simulations that mimic the complex interactions between groundwater flow, solute transport and geochemical reaction mechanisms. Such models are important to analyze field observations, to unravel which chemical and physical processes play a role, and to predict the behavior of arsenic within aquifers—where and when pollution may occur in the future. The results of their study have now been published in the latest issue of Nature Geoscience.
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Source: Phys.org