Quantifying tidal contribution to submarine groundwater discharges: A review
Submarine groundwater discharges (SGD), consisting of groundwater flow from both terrestrial and marine origins, is an important source of nutrients, contaminants, and other chemicals to the coastal waters, and has significant impacts and implications on coastal environment and ecology. This paper reviews the recent advances in quantifying the tide-induced SGD in various beach aquifers around the world by means of mathematical modeling, laboratory experiments, and field observations or their combinations. Numerous studies have shown that (1) the order of magnitude of SGD around the world estimated by radium isotope tracers typically ranges from 102 to 103 m3 d-1 m-1 of the shoreline, (2) SGD is mainly of marine origin, i.e. the re-circulated seawater across the aquifer-sea interface, and (3) tide is one of the major forces driving seawater-groundwater circulation. The order of magnitude of the tidal contributions to SGD from beach aquifers reported in the literature is only 10 m3 d-1 m-1 length of shoreline, at least one order of magnitude smaller than the total SGD estimated by radium isotope tracers. This is obviously in contradiction with (3). The possible reasons for this contradiction may include (1) underestimation of the shoreline length due to neglecting many headlands, bays and banks of tidal rivers, and (2) negligence of the seawater-groundwater exchange from the seabed ranging from the nearshore areas to the continental shelf. Further research is needed to understand more about the contra-diction.