Boron isotope fractionation in groundwaters as an indicator of past permafrost conditions in the fractured crystalline bedrock of the fennoscandian shield.

The Fennoscandian Shield has been subjected to several glaciations over the past million years, the last of which (Weichselian Ice Age) ended only at about 10Ka. Here we used boron isotopes and B contents to (a) establish the degree of water-rock interaction (WRI) and (b) clarify freezing processes within groundwaters from the Aspo site in Sweden and from various sites in Finland. The high delta(11)B values recorded by all groundwaters (up to 51.9 per thousand) including diluted, boron-poor, inland groundwaters suggest selective uptake of (10)B into ice related to freezing processes under permafrost conditions. According to co-existing ice and residual brines in a Canadian frozen mine, this fractionation process, enhanced by Rayleigh fractionation, can generate a natural field of isotopic variation around 60 per thousand and provides a new application of B isotope that makes possible to easily characterise groundwaters that underwent past permafrost conditions.

Multi-bioindicators to assess soil microbial activity in the context of an artificial groundwater recharge with treated wastewater: a large-scale pilot experiment.

In the context of artificial groundwater recharge, a reactive soil column at pilot-scale (4.5 m depth and 3 m in diameter) fed by treated wastewater was designed to evaluate soil filtration ability. Here, as a part of this project, the impact of treated wastewater filtration on soil bacterial communities and the soil's biological ability for wastewater treatment as well as the relevance of the use of multi-bioindicators were studied as a function of depth and time. Biomass; bacterial 16S rRNA gene diversity fingerprints; potential nitrifying, denitrifying, and sulfate-reducing activities; and functional gene (amo, nir, nar, and dsr) detection were analyzed to highlight the real and potential microbial activity and diversity within the soil column. These bioindicators show that topsoil (0 to 20 cm depth) was the more active and the more impacted by treated wastewater filtration. Nitrification was the main activity in the pilot. No sulfate-reducing activity or dsr genes were detected during the first 6 months of wastewater application. Denitrification was also absent, but genes of denitrifying bacteria were detected, suggesting that the denitrifying process may occur rapidly if adequate chemical conditions are favored within the soil column. Results also underline that a dry period (20 days without any wastewater supply) significantly impacted soil bacterial diversity, leading to a decrease of enzyme activities and biomass. Finally, our work shows that treated wastewater filtration leads to a modification of the bacterial genetic and functional structures in topsoil.