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Fluid flow through clayey soils: stable isotope and mineralogical evidence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2018

L. S. Doser
Affiliation:
Department of Geology & Geophysics, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA
R. E. Ferrell Jr.*
Affiliation:
Department of Geology & Geophysics, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA
F. J. Longstaffe
Affiliation:
Department of Geology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada
P. M. Walthall
Affiliation:
Department of Agronomy, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA
*
2Corresponding author

Abstract

The evaluation of clays as barriers to fluid movement can be improved by geochemical methods that provide ways to examine the reactivity and weathering of minerals in soils and sediments. X-ray radiography, X-ray powder diffraction, and stable isotope geochemistry provide new data from field locations in the Mississippi River Delta of Louisiana indicating that the clays are not effective barriers to the vertical migration of fluids in the shallow subsurface. Systematic changes in the mineral assemblages, the soil structure and the δD and δ18O values of time clay fractions can best be explained by an alteration sequence produced as the originally smectiterich clay mineral assemblage was kaolinized by percolating groundwater.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1998

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Footnotes

1

Present address: Envirocorp Services & Technology, Inc., of South Bend, Indiana, USA

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