Abstract: The current global intrusion of seawater into coastal aquifers causes salinization of groundwater and thus significant degradation of its quality. This study quantified the effect of seawater intrusion and freshening events in coastal aquifers on trace elements (Li, B, Mn and Ba) across the fresh-saline water interface (FSI) and their possible use as indicators for these events. This was done by combining field data and column experiments simulating these events. The experiments enabled quantification of the processes affecting the trace element composition and examination of whether salinization and freshening events are geochemically reversible, which has been seldom investigated. The dominant process affecting trace element composition during salinization and freshening is ion exchange. The results of the experiments show that the concentrations of major cations and Li+ were reversible during salinization and freshening, whereas B, Mn2+ and Ba2+ were not. During salinization, Li+ and B were depleted due to sorption by 10 and 100μmol·L−1, respectively, to about half of their expected conservative concentrations. The relative depletion of Li+ increased with distance from the shore, representing the propagation of salinization. Ba2+ and Mn2+ were desorbed from the sediment during salinization and enriched by tenfold in the aqueous phase compared to their concentration in seawater ( 0.1 μeq·L−1). During freshening both were depleted by almost tenfold compared to their concentration in fresh groundwater ( 0.7 μeq·L−1). The depletion of Mn2+ is a sensitive marker for freshening because Mn2+ has a strong affinity to the solid phase. Moreover, this study shows that both Mn2+ and Ba2+ can be used as sensitive hydrogeochemical tools to distinguish between salinization and freshening events in the FSI zone in coastal aquifers.

Abstract: The coastal regions of Pingtung Plain in southern Taiwan rely on groundwater as their main source of fresh water for aquaculture, agriculture, domestic, and industrial sectors. The availability of fresh groundwater is threatened by unsustainable groundwater extraction and the over-pumpage leads to the serious problem of seawater intrusion. It is desired to find appropriate management strategies to control groundwater salinity and mitigate seawater intrusion. In this study, a simulation–optimization model has been presented to solve the problem of seawater intrusion along the coastal aquifers in Pingtung Plain and the objective is using injection well barriers and minimizing the total injection rate based on the pre-determined locations of injection barriers. The SEAWAT code is used to simulate the process of seawater intrusion and the surrogate model of artificial neural networks (ANNs) is used to approximate the seawater intrusion (SWI) numerical model to increase the computational efficiency during the optimization process. The heuristic optimization scheme of differential evolution (DE) algorithm is selected to identify the global optimal management solution. Two different management scenarios, one is the injection barriers located along the coast and the other is the injection barrier located at the inland, are considered and the optimized results show that the deployment of injection barriers at the inland is more effective to reduce total dissolved solids (TDS) concentrations and mitigate seawater intrusion than that along the coast. The computational time can be reduced by more than 98% when using ANNs to replace the numerical model and the DE algorithm has been confirmed as a robust optimization scheme to solve groundwater management problems. The proposed framework can identify the most reliable management strategies and provide a reference tool for decision making with regard to seawater intrusion remediation.