An excellent outcome from atmospheric atomic bomb testing

Human ingenuity surprises me again and again, especially the efficiency in which we can annihilate each other. During the 1940’s and 1950’s the superpowers were focused on increasing the efficiency in the way they could destroy everyone on the planet. It was a very worthy goal (yes that was a joke) and to achieve maximum efficiency they needed to conduct atmospheric tests of their bombs. Sometimes, unforeseen obvious benefits other than the benefits of death and destruction of humanity can arise.

I have recently been thinking about groundwater in the Richmond River area for which I have been consulting sections of a PhD thesis written by Leonard Drury in 1982 (Drury 1982). Drury's comprehensive thesis included qualitative identification on the age of groundwater in aquifers in the Richmond River by using an unstable isotope of hydrogen called tritium. Hydrogen is an atomic component of water (the H in H2O) but hydrogen actually comes in three natural forms based on the number of neutrons are in the nucleus of the hydrogen atom. These different forms are called isotopes. Hydrogen naturally has one neutron or less commonly two neutrons (called deuterium) and very rarely three neutrons (called tritium). In nuclear explosions the third isotope tritium, is created at concentrations much higher than the background. The reason why tritium is rare naturally is that it is only formed in the upper atmosphere but is unstable and loses the extra neutrons to become a smaller isotope over a period of time.

Half of the tritium in a given amount of water (or whatever) decays over a period of 12.5 years (this is called a half-life). Which means that over 25 years there is only a quarter of the original tritium left, 37.5 years one eighth, 50 years one sixteenth etc. Since tritium is not naturally occurring there is no practical use to measure for tritium unless you can introduce it into a system as a tracer and then measure its behaviour. This means that a large ‘slug’ of tritium was created during the 1940’s and 1950’s during atmospheric nuclear testing. Therefore if you can look for tritium in groundwater and if it is not present you can assume that that groundwater has been in existence for more than 50 years, i.e. it was present in the ground before any nuclear tests. If you detect tritium in several locations in an aquifer the relative abundance of the tritium will give an indication of the age of the water and whether mixing is occurring between old groundwater and new groundwater. It won’t give you an exact date but it will let you know a lot about behaviour of an aquifer.

The trouble is time is running out. The half-life of tritium means that as time goes on the ability for us to accurately measure the smaller amount of the isotope means that one day we won’t be able to use this as a technique. I was aware that time was running out on using tritium as an effective groundwater tracer but I was not aware how soon. I have had a few chats with an academic at Southern Cross University one of which was about using tritium, he said we actually only have about 5 or 10 years left to which I jokingly suggested to him that we should reset the tritium clock with some more atmospheric nuclear explosions! To which he informed me that actually there appears to be some more tracers that can be used following the Fukushima Nuclear Accident.

Bibliography/References:

*Drury, L.W. 1982. Hydrogeology and Quaternary Stratigraphy of the Richmond River Valley, New South Wales. University of New South Wales, PhD thesis.
*Moran, J.E. & Hudson, G.B. 2005. Using Groundwater Age and Other Isotopic Signatures to Delineate Groundwater Flow and Stratification. University of Illinois.
*U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), 2004, Stable Isotopes and Radiochemicals, in National Field Manual for the Collection of Water-Quality Data, Chapter A5 Processing of Water Samples. USGS Techniques of Water-Resources Investigation

What is meant by some of these names (1)

I have a habit of blasting people with technical jargon sometimes and I keep forgetting that I'm a bit of a geology geek and sometimes I'm hard to understand. So I thought it might be wise to have a quick comment on some of the names that I use. There are many different types of geological names. The main types (in my opinion) are:

1. geological ages;
2. mineral names;
3. rock names; and
4. rock unit names

But just to complicate things each of these can be broken up with further names for instance:

Geological ages from the International Stratigraphic Commission.

1. geological ages: the age Cenozoic era (65.5 million years to the present) includes smaller age periods called the Quaternary (present to 2.6 million years ago), Neogene (2.6 million years to 23 million years) and Paleogene (23 million years to 65.5 million years) periods. These too can be subdivided.

2. mineral names: minerals like quartz and feldspar will be familiar to most since they are the two most common minerals on earth but these can be broken down further based on slightly different chemical properties. Feldspar can also be called plagioclase (if it is richer in the elements sodium and calcium - [chemical formula NaAlSi₃O₈ to CaAl₂Si₂O₈]) or orthoclase (if it is richer in the element potassium [chemical formula KAlSi₃O₈]). Needless to say, these mineral names too can be subdivided.

3. rock names: you've probably heard of basalt but what about hawaiite, mugarite, tholeiite and benmorite? Well, these are just fancy names for different basalts based on slightly different mineral compositions. E.g. tholeiite has quartz (due to higher silica) and hawaiite has olivine (due to low silica). Thank goodness, these basalts are rarely subdivided any further.

4. rock unit names: One I will refer to regularly on this blog is the Lamington Volcanics. This is a unit that refers to all the rock sourced directly from the Tweed Volcano (Mount Warning area) and the Focal Peak Volcano (Mount Barney area). Itself it contains sub-units such as the Lismore Basalt which is mainly comprised of basalt (mainly of the tholeiite type) that was erupted during the Cenozoic era (Neogene to Paleogene periods). Yes, some of these units can further be subdivided.

When you get right into geology it becomes evident that it can be quite tricky. But most of the trickiness comes from learning all the names not from understanding what actually happens with rocks! I will continue to occasionally post on nomenclature in the future. In the mean time you may find some help in the glossary.