Introduction

This volume represents an effort to bring together communities of land-based hydrogeology and marine hydrogeology. The issues of submarine groundwater discharge and its opposite phenomenon of seawater invasion are discussed in this book from the geophysical, geochemical, biological, and engineering perspectives. This is where land hydrogeology and marine hydrogeology overlap.

Submarine Groundwater Discharge

Submarine groundwater discharge is a rapidly developing research field. The SCOR and LOICZ of the IGBP have recently established a working group for this research. IASPO and IAHS under IUGG also recently formed a new joint committee "Seawater/Groundwater Interactions" to collaborate with oceanographers and hydrologists.

Research Topics

The other articles introduce frontier research topics in more typical land and marine environments, such as fluid flow in karst aquifers, the biological aspects of fluids in sedimentary basins and submarine sedimentary formations, respectively, and vigorous fluid flow in subsea formations and their significance in global tectonics.

Geochemical characteristics of hydrothermal activities at a number of active continental margins are also reviewed, and multidisciplinary geophysical constraints of the permeability of young igneous oceanic crust are summarized.

Mechanisms of Fluid Flow

A variety of driving mechanisms for fluid flow is discussed in land and subsea formations; terrestrial hydraulic gradient, buoyancy driven free convection, tidally induced flow, flow induced by tectonic strain, flow due to sediment compaction.