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A new way of thinking about groundwater age is changing the field of groundwater age dating. Following a rigorous definition of age, a groundwater sample is seen not as water that recharged the flow regime at a point in the past, but as a mixture of waters that have resided in the subsurface for varying lengths of time. This recognition resolves longstanding inconsistencies encountered in age dating and suggests new ways to carry out age dating studies. Tomorrow's studies will likely employ sets of marker isotopes and molecules spanning a broad spectrum of age and incorporate a wide range of chemical and physical data collected from differing stratigraphic levels. The observations will be inverted using reactive transport modeling, allowing flow to be characterized not in one direction along a single aquifer, but in two or three dimensions over an entire flow regime.
Bethke et al. (Tue,) studied this question.