Thermal flux, fugitive gas emission and geotechnical instability in a complex tailings legacy site.

Several years after decommissioning, a magnesium dross and mixed waste heap at a former industrial facility is still reactive, as evidenced by the emission of heat, Volatile Organic Carbon (VOCs), acetylene (CH), cyanide (HCN) and ammonia (NH) from deep, discordant, epigenetic fissures. To evaluate the longer-term stability of the waste heap material, four cores were collected to evaluate vertical variations in temperature, moisture, gas composition, geochemistry, and mineralogy. Temperature increased with depth and peaked at around 8 m, reaching in excess of 90 °C.

Toward enhanced subsurface intervention methods using chaotic advection.

Many intervention activities in the terrestrial subsurface involve the need to recover/emplace distributions of scalar quantities (e.g. dissolved phase concentrations or heat) from/in volumes of saturated porous media.

Effects of temperature on mineralisation of petroleum in contaminated Antarctic terrestrial sediments.

Although petroleum contamination has been identified at many Antarctic research stations, and is recognized as posing a significant threat to the Antarctic environment, full-scale in situ remediation has not yet been used in Antarctica. This is partly because it has been assumed that temperatures are too low for effective biodegradation. To test this, the effects of temperature on the hydrocarbon mineralisation rate in Antarctic terrestrial sediments were quantified.