Mineral transformation regulates arsenic mobility in groundwater: insights gained from reactive transport modelling of laboratory and field experiments

Millions of individuals worldwide are chronically exposed to hazardous concentrations of arsenic from contaminated drinking water. Despite significant efforts toward understanding the underlying geochemical processes, little effort has been made to merge the findings into frameworks that allow for a process-based quantitative analysis of observed arsenic behaviour and for predictions of its long-term fate. Guided by data from laboratory- and field scale experiments, this thesis developed a set of new numerical modelling approaches. The model applications illustrate and quantify the complex interdependencies that affect arsenic mobility during the reductive dissolution of Fe-oxides, such as pH variations and Fe mineral transformations.