Quantitative Chemical Mass Transfer in Coastal Sediments during Early Diagenesis: Effects of Biological Transport, Mineralogy, and Fabric

Abstract

LONG-TERM GOALS. Current multicomponent reactive transport models developed to study early diagenesis in nearshore environments are limited by their rudimentary mathematical descriptions of biologically-enhanced solute transport (bioirrigation) and biologically-enhanced particle transport (bioturbation). The longterm goal of this study is to develop models employing stochastic and inverse methods to quantify the spatial and temporal variation of bioirrigation and bioturbation in nearshore sediments and to incorporate information derived from these models into the multicomponent reaction transport model STEADYSED (Van Cappellen and Wang, 1996). This will greatly improve our ability to quantitatively describe early diagenesis in shallow-marine environments. OBJECTIVES. The overall objective of this study was to quantify the effects of bioirrigation and biologically-induced mixing of particles on the early diagenesis of shallow-marine sediments. Specific objectives for FY99 included (1) the development of a stochastic model to describe bioirrigation intensity as a function of sediment depth in spatially and temporally heterogeneous environments using macrofaunal burrow densities and morphologies, (2) the development of an inverse nonlocal-transport model to describe bioirrigation intensity as a function of sediment depth based on vertical profiles of chemical species, and (3) the extraction of depth profiles of bioirrigation intensity for a field site using both the inverse and stochastic models.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 30, 1999
Accession Number
ADA628887

Entities

People

  • Carla Koretsky
  • Philippe Van Cappellen

Organizations

  • Georgia Tech

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Abstracts
  • Algorithms
  • Applied Mathematics
  • Chemistry
  • Coefficients
  • Earth Sciences
  • Environment
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Geochemistry
  • Marine Chemistry
  • Mass Transfer
  • Mineralogy
  • Particles
  • Sediments
  • Simplex Method
  • Transport Ships
  • Water

Fields of Study

  • Environmental science

Readers

  • Coastal Oceanography