Flow and Transport Through Unsaturated Fractured Rock

Published by the American Geophysical Union as part of the Geophysical Monograph Series, Volume 42.

This monograph is an update and revision of the first edition, Geophysical Monograph 42, on ground-water flow and transport through unsaturated, fractured rock, published by AGU in 1987. The first edition evolved from a special symposium held during the American Geophysical Union fall meetings in San Francisco in December 1986. Invited and contributed papers at that AGU session, as well as panel presentations, focused on conceptualizing, measuring and modeling flow and transport through unsaturated fractured rock. As noted in the preface to the first edition, "the expanded interest in the topic (water flow and contaminant transport through unsaturated fractured rock) was initiated when the U.S. Geological Survey proposed that deep unsaturated zones in arid regions be considered in the site selection for the first high-level, commercially generated radioactive waste repository." Much of the research reported in that first edition was motivated by the U.S. Department of Energy's program to investigate Yucca Mountain at the Nevada Test Site as a possible geologic repository for commercially generated, high-level radioactive waste. As noted in the overview paper of the first edition, "characterization methods and modeling are in their developmental stage with the greatest lack of knowledge being the interaction between fracture and matrix flow and transport properties." Although the first edition of this monograph reflected the state-of-the science, laboratory and field experimental programs were novel and limited and, in general, followed from the principles and methods developed in the soil science community.