Hydrogeological Regimes and Their Subsurface Thermal Effects

Abstract

The symposium on which this monograph is based was organized for the purposes of bringing together two bodies of experts from the hydrological and geothermal communities to tackle the problem of the coupled thermalhydrological processes in the subsurface. For many years, workers interested in the measurement and interpretation of terrestrial heat flow have been well aware of more efficient modes of heat transport than conduction but assumed that if the temperature‐depth, or total thermal resistance‐depth (Bullard) plots obtained using borehole data were linear, then perturbing influences were insignificant. In other words, linearity of such plots was implicitly used as a test of reliability—so much so that in some cases where the data appeared to have systematic deviation, due to perturbing sources of unknown form and strength, the data were massaged until linear plots were obtained, thus allowing inferences to be made about the perturbing source and the conductive heat flow densities [ Allis and Garland , 1976; Francheteau et al ., 1984; Jaupart et al ., 1985].