Estimating the transport and fate of chemicals released into the environment is an interesting and challenging task. The environment can rarely be approximated as well mixed, and the chemicals in the environment often are not close to equilibrium. Thus, chemical transport and fate in the environment require a background in the physics of fluid flow and transport, chemical thermodynamics, chemical kinetics, and the biology that interacts with all of these processes. We will be following chemicals as they move, diffuse, and disperse through the environment. These chemicals will inevitably react to form other chemicals in a manner that approaches – but rarely achieves – a local equilibrium. Many times these reactions are biologically mediated, with a rate of reaction that more closely relates to an organism being hungry, or not hungry, than to the first- and second-order type of kinetics that we were taught in our chemistry courses.

To which environmental systems will these basic principles be applied? The global environment is large, on the chemical transport and fate scale. We will attempt to apply the mathematics of diffusion techniques that we learn to the atmosphere, lakes, rivers, groundwater, and oceans, depending on the system for which the material we are learning is most applicable. To a limited extent, we will also be applying our mathematics of diffusion techniques to transfer between these media.