Certification of total mercury in a sea-water reference material, CRM 579†

Abstract

A wide range of certified reference materials is needed for the quality control of analyses performed in the frame of marine environmental programmes. As a response to this need, the Measurements and Testing Programme (formerly BCR) has conducted an interlaboratory project to certify the total mercury content of a sea-water reference material. This paper describes the preparation of the reference material, its homogeneity and stability studies and the analytical work performed for the certification of total mercury (1.85 ± 0.20 ng kg 21 ).

Mercury exports from a High-Arctic river basin in Northeast Greenland (74°N) largely controlled by glacial lake outburst floods

“…Detection limits using this procedure, calculated as 3 standard deviations on laboratory blank samples (milliQ water), were typically around 0.1 ng Hg L −1 . The method was checked using a certified quality control sample at 1.85 to 5.00 ng Hg L −1 (diluted NRCC ORMS-3 to 5 or direct JRC-IRMM BCR-579 (Kramer et al, 1998)). The certified quality control sample was analysed after calibration and after every approximately 10 samples.…”

Certified Reference Materials for Marine Monitoring

“…BCR-579 is only certified for total mercury and, indeed, is the only RM certified for mercury (Kramer et al ., 1998). CASS-5 (NRC Canada, S = 33.5) is a nearshore seawater sampled from Halifax Harbour, Nova Scotia, and is certified for 10 trace elements.…”

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“…23 Regarding the state-of-art in reference materials certification, as appeared in ISO Guide 35 2 and some BCR publications [15][16][17][18][19][20][21] concerning the homogeneity study, ANOVA and Ftest are normally used to determine the discrepancy between the variances of within-and between-bottle homogeneity. In the present work, all parameters concerned will be estimated by one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) using the data analysis tool in the Microsoft-Excel program at a significance level of α = 0.05 or otherwise indicated.…”

“…The coefficient variation (CV) and uncertainty of CV (U cv ) were evaluated following the BCR' s reports [15][16][17][18][19][20][21] using Equation 2…”