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THIRD-GENERATION (3G) SITE CHARACTERIZATION: CRYOGENIC CORE COLLECTION AND HIGH-THROUGHPUT CORE ANALYSIS, AN ADDENDUM TO BASIC RESEARCH ADDRESSING CONTAMINANTS IN LOW PERMEABILITY ZONES: A STATE OF THE SCIENCE REVIEW
Sale, T., S. Kiaalhosseini, M. Olson, R. Johnson, and R. Rogers.
SERDP Project ER-1740, 131 pp, 2016

Core samples frozen in situ before recovery can preserve pore fluids, volatile compounds, dissolved gases, redox conditions, mineralogy, microbial ecology, and pore structure. Furthermore, in situ freezing improves the quality of recovered core by preventing materials from dropping out of sample liners during recovery to ground surface. The steps followed for collecting frozen cores are referred to in this text as cryogenic core collection. Processing core in the lab simplifies field work and improves the resources (e.g., anaerobic chambers) that can be used when preparing samples for analysis, while allowing "production line" processing and analysis of large quantities of samples (i.e., high-throughput core analysis). In this project, the combination of cryogenic core collection and high-throughput sampling yielded high quality samples suitable for a wide range of chemical, physical, and biological analyses of chlorinated solvents and other persistent contaminants in groundwater in unconsolidated sediments. The protocols for sample collection and processing are sufficiently robust that they can now be used routinely at field sites. https://www.estcp.com/content/download/40835/390494/file/ER-1740%20Final%20Report.pdf



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