SecuCoast

SecuCoast - Security and management of Coastal groundwater resources and marine ecosystem services

The SecuCoast project will develop and apply novel geophysical, optical and geochemical techniques to produce significant new understanding of groundwater and seawater interactions in coastal aquifers and the impacts of submarine groundwater discharge on the coastal sea. In addition, we will provide critical constraints for the human and climate change pressures on ecosystem services through well-constrained numerical modeling.

The work has three objectives:
1. Securing coastal aquifer water quality. Successful management of coastal aquifers involves finding a balance between groundwater pumping rate so that the sustainable levels are not exceeded and seawater intrusion (SWI) is not beyond control. We will incorporate hydrochemical reactions into the numerical groundwater flow models that are used for coastal aquifer management to better quantify sustainable pumping rates and mitigate climate change impacts.
2. Protecting coastal sea ecosystem services. Submarine groundwater discharge (SGD) can be a significant source of nutrients and carbon, causing coastal sea eutrophication and acidification. We will conduct novel geochemical analyses, including radioactive noble gasses, to quantify SGD and associated fluxes, and combine them with microbial and macrofaunal studies, to assess the impacts on coastal ecosystems and ecosystem services.
3. Securing coastal infrastructure. We will assess the risk of seafloor sediment types for SGD-induced liquefaction to inform the design of coastal infrastructure and the sustainable use of marine space. We will carry out geochemical and geophysical investigations to evaluate the factors affecting the transport of saline groundwater in fractured bedrock to inform the design of safe underground nuclear waste facilities.

Scientific and technological aims:
SecuCoast will apply a novel combination of recently-developed geophysical survey methods (FloaTEM, amphibious ERT) and sophisticated (isotope and radio)chemical analyses, microbiological and macrofaunal studies, and top-notch reactive transport modeling to better constrain and understand the SWI and SGD processes in coastal aquifers and sea areas.
The novel modeling capabilities allow the coupling to external physical forcings (e.g. sea-level rise and glacial dynamics), improving the prediction of groundwater systems for the foreseeable environmental changes over wide spatial and temporal scales.
We will develop a new optical method for characterizing the dissolved and particulate C organic and inorganic fractions to better understand the marine ecosystem effects of the groundwater C flux.

SecuCoast is funded by the EU Water4All partnership (2025-2028) and national funding agencies of the partner institutes.