Impact of microorganisms on unsaturated flow at fracture intersections

An experiment is described in which a groundwater bacterium, Sphingomonas sp., influenced the dynamics of unsaturated flow at a fracture intersection. A washed cell suspension increased by three‐fold the length of time that water pooled at the fracture intersection. On the other hand, the addition of growth substrates resulted in cell growth and the conversion from intermittent to continuous flow behavior at the fracture intersection. The results suggest that microbial properties and processes need to be included with other important variables for understanding unsaturated flow in fractured geomatrices.