Reactive transport modeling: An essential tool and a new research approach for the Earth sciences

Reactive transport modeling is an essential tool for the analysis of coupled physical, chemical, and biological processes in Earth systems, and has additional potential to better integrate the results from focused fundamental research on Earth materials. Appropriately designed models can describe the interactions of competing processes at a range of spatial and time scales, and hence are critical for connecting the advancing capabilities for materials characterization at the atomic scale with the macroscopic behavior of complex Earth systems. Reactive transport modeling has had a significant impact on the treatment of contaminant retardation in the subsurface, the description of elemental and nutrient fluxes between major Earth reservoirs, and in the treatment of deep Earth processes such as metamorphism and magma transport. Active topics of research include the development of pore scale and hybrid, or multiple continua, models to capture the scale dependence of coupled reactive transport processes. Frontier research questions, that are only now being addressed, include the effects of chemical microenvironments, coupled thermal–mechanical–chemical processes, controls on mineral–fluid reaction rates in natural media, and scaling of reactive transport processes from the microscopic to pore to field scale.