Anomalous Transport in Random Fracture Networks

We show that dominant aspects of contaminant (particle) transport in random fracture networks---non-Gaussian propagation---result from subtle features of the steady flow-field distribution through the network. This is an outcome of a new theory, based on a continuous time random walk formalism, structured to retain the key space-time correlations of contaminants as they are advected across each fracture segment. Particle tracking simulations on these networks exhibit the same non-Gaussian profiles, demonstrating quantitative agreement with the theory.