We are very excited to announce that our new paper on the detection of deep groundwater circulation with environmental DNA (eDNA), noble gases and trace elements in one of the world’s most iconic mountains – Mt. Fuji in Japan – will be published in the launch edition of the new Nature research journal Nature Water:

Schilling, O. S., Nagaosa, K., Schilling, T. U., Brennwald, M. S., Sohrin, R., Tomonaga, Y., Kipfer, R., Brunner, P., & Kato, K. (2023). Revisiting Mt. Fuji’s groundwater origins with helium, vanadium and eDNA tracers. Nat. Water, 1. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-022-00001-4

20.10.22

media

On 20. October 21:05-21:50 SRF will air an episode of SRF Einstein titled ' Kann die Forschung unser Wasser retten?'. In this episode, Annette Affolter and Oliver Schilling present two Managed Aquifer Recharge systems used for drinking water production in the city and region of Basel and discuss its potential to tackle and mitigate climate change and water pollution related water issues.
https://www.srf.ch/sendungen/einstein

Meet us on 19th November 2022 at the 20th Swiss Geoscience Meeting in Lausanne. We will hold 2 oral and X poster presentations in the Hydrology and Hydrogeology session. https://geoscience-meeting.ch/sgm2022/program/session-program/

We are happy to welcome two new MSc students in our team:
Daniel Namendorf will investigate in his MSc thesis the impact of river restoration measures on microbial transport at the surface water-groundwater interface and develop a methodology to conduct continuous online flow cytometry directly in the field even under high sediment loading/turbidity.
Merhawi Solomon will investigate in his MSc thesis the sources of pumped groundwater at an urban riverbank filtration site with different environmental tracer techniques, and quantify the impact of ongoing river restoration measures on surface water-groundwater mixing dynamics.

Our new paper on the explicit transport simulation of reactive environmental gas tracers (Rn-222. Ar-37, He-4) with the integrated surface-subsurface hydrological model HydroGeoSphere has now been published as part of the 'Advances and emerging methods in tracer hydrogeology' special issue of Frontiers in Water:

Delottier, H., Schilling, O. S., Musy, S., Purtschert, R., & Brunner, P. (2022). Explicit simulation of environmental gas tracers with integrated surface and subsurface hydrological models. Front. Water, 4, 980030. https://doi.org/10.3389/frwa.2022.980030

28.9.22
news

Yama Tomonaga and Oliver Schilling presented research and participated in the Pallas Symposium at the Pallas atmosphere-ecosystem supersite on the northern edge of the Boreal forests in northern Finland. After the symposium, we conducted a two day field sampling campaign in Pallas with our good friend Pertti Ala-Aho of Oulu University and analysed dissolved gases directly on site with one of our miniRUEDIs, accompanied by some water and eDNA sampling for microbial analyses. Check out some photos: https://tomonaga.ch/yama/?p=906

08/2022
team

We say our farewells to Dr. Martin Binder, who has conducted research on the model- and tracer-based detection of leaky sewers in complex urban environment. Dr. Martin Binder stayed with us for half a year as part of his DAAD funded postdoc fellowship.

07/2022
team

We are excited to welcome our new PhD student Friederike Currle to our team. Friederike Currle will focus on the development of coupled solute and microbial transport algorithms in integrated surface-subsurface hydrological models (ISSHM) and on the application of data assimilation approaches for continuous tracer data.

06/2022
team

We published a new paper on buried paleo-channel detection with tracers, integrated modelling and a novel inverse method in Geophysical Research Letters: Schilling, O. S., Partington, D. J., Doherty, J., Kipfer, R., Hunkeler, D., & Brunner, P. (2022). Buried paleo-channel detection with a groundwater model, tracer-based observations, and spatially varying, preferred anisotropy pilot point calibration. Geophys. Res. Lett. 49(14), e2022GL098944. https://doi.org/10.1029/2022GL098944

06/2022
publication

See our recommendations for a systematic quantification of the uncertainty of groundwater models in Aqua&Gas: Moeck, C., Schilling, O. S., Künze, R., Brunner, P., & Schirmer, M. (2022). Grundwassermodellierung - Warum auch Modellunsicherheiten quantifiziert werden sollten. Aqua & Gas 7+8. https://www.aquaetgas.ch/wasser/trinkwasser-grundwasser/20220628_ag7_warum-modellunsicherheiten-quantifiziert-werden-sollten/

04/2022
team

We are excited to welcome Dr. Yama Tomonaga & Dr. Carl Love Råman Vinnå to our team. Dr. Råman Vinnå conducts research in the “Future River temperatures in Switzerland under climate change” project, for which he obtained funding for from the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN).

04/2022
publication

Read about the diverse research and applications that the Applied and Environmental Geology group is working on in the Regio Basiliensis special about the Geosciences at University of Basel. Affolter, A., Dresmann, H., Epting, & J. (2022) Undercover Investigations Forschung für eine nachhaltige Planung urbaner Infrastruktur im Raum Basel. Regio Basiliensis 63/1 2022 S. 75-86 www.gegbasel.ch=