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. 2020 Oct 30;10:19088. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-75736-9

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© The Author(s) 2020

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Set of images showing the simulated seawater interfaces for a range of groundwater throughflow in a 30 m thick aquifer with hydraulic conductivity 200 m/day over an impermeable substrate (i.e., average values for the Quinns Rocks reference site). Charts A and B show the measured water levels (MWL) and equivalent freshwater head (EFH) in 1994 and 2014. The EFH is calculated assuming that the groundwater at the well screen occupies the entire well column. Images C, D, E and F show the solute concentration distribution corresponding to groundwater throughflow of 4, 3, 2, and 1 ML/year respectively. According to this homogeneous aquifer model, groundwater throughflow must remain above 2 ML/year at Quinns Rocks to maintain fresh groundwater at SIM 6; however, this results in significantly greater simulated hydraulic head than the field observations. We find that there is no combination of hydraulic conductivity and throughflow for a homogeneous aquifer that can reasonably explain both measured values of hydraulic head and solute concentration at the reference site. This points towards high contrast in hydraulic parameters within the aquifer as a strong influence on the landward extent of saline groundwater.