During a significant flood event, reversible water exchanges may occur between a karst conduit and its adjacent porous rock (frequently designated as "matrix"): while the flood pulse rises, some conduit-derived water is forced into the matrix; then, as the flood recedes, the same water flows back into the stream passage. The present note addresses such a karst setting in the Carpathian Mountains (Romania), where in addition, a usually stable flux of chloride originating in a natural saline inflow, was being mixed with a variable flow of karst freshwater. For that particular case, with the above-mentioned process of matrix storage/release from storage assumedly taking place downstream of the mixing site, two distinct chemical signatures could be noticed during a flood event: an initial depletion in the spring flow chloride flux, subsequently followed by a comparable chloride flux enrichment (the depletion and the enrichment being outlined with respect to the essentially stable chloride flux value that had been noticed to persist at the spring over a long period of flow rate recession). Concomitantly with such flood-induced fluctuations in the spring chloride flux, the spring discharge displayed, for long periods, abnormally slow variations: the latter likely indicated that the spring supply rate actual oscillations were buffered by the reversible water exchanges which took place between the karst conduit and its adjacent matrix. On the whole, these results show that conduit-matrix water exchanges could be interpreted by simple mass balance calculations that involved fluxes of a conservative tracer (the chloride ion in that particular case).

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Methane occurrences displaying signatures of a possible abiotic origin had previously been reported in the South‐West Carpathians (Romania). Such an accumulation, at Tisoviţa, was intercepted by a well drilled in an ophiolitic rocks massif, whereas in two other localities—situated tens of kilometres faraway—the concerned methane is released via thermal groundwater outflows that are apparently not associated with any ultramafic products. By using groundwater ionic compositions, corroborated with previously published isotopic (13C‐CH4, 2H‐CH4, 3He/4He) and molecular gas analyses, we assessed in more detail the conjectured abiotic provenance of methane, and quantitatively investigated the hypothesis of a progressive mixing between two, abiotic and thermogenic, methane end‐members. The corresponding geofluids behaviour was modelled by hypothesizing a “concealed” ophiolite serpentinization setting (largely similar to that at Tisoviţa), whose abiotic methane production was “diverted” towards remote discharges at ground surface, via a ~20‐km‐long flowpath supposedly generated by recently operating extensional tectonics.