SecuCoast – Security and Management of Coastal Groundwater Resources and Marine Ecosystem Services

Introduction

 

SecuCoast enhances securing coastal groundwater resources, marine ecosystem services and infrastructure.
We enhance the management of coastal aquifers and coastal marine ecosystem services by studying groundwater-seawater mixing from two perspectives:

• Sea Water Intrusion (SWI): Coastal aquifers are vulnerable to human activity (water pumping, construction) and climate change impacts (sea level rise, extreme weather such as storm surges, flooding, heavy rainfall and heat waves)
• Submarine Groundwater Discharge (SGD): Direct groundwater discharge from coastal aquifers contributes to the state of coastal sea ecosystems (ecosystem services, eutrophication, acidification)

SecuCoast supports the management of coastal aquifers and marine ecosystems under the human and climate change pressures by developing numerical groundwater modeling (incl. reactive transport processes). We create site-specific inventories of SGD-derived ecosystem services and assess the corrosion risk of underground infrastructure caused by SWI and the liquefaction risk to seabed infrastructure caused by SGD. We produce significant new understanding from diverse environments over wide spatial (Baltic Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Northern Atlantic) and temporal
(seasonal to glacial cycle) scales.

Partners: Stockholm University (SU), Institute of Oceanology Polish Academy of Science (IOPAN), Geological Survey of Estonia (EGT), Geological Survey of Norway (NGU), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Geological Survey of Israel (GSI)

The coordinator of the project: GTK

Funding authority: EU Water4All Partnership, Research Council of Finland

Contact person: Joonas Virtasalo

 

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