Geochemical and statistical approach for evaluation of heavy metal pollution in core sediments in southeast coast of India

Abstract

Industrialization coupled with urbanizaton has led to stress in the Buckingham Canal which runs parallel to Bay of Bengal at a distance of around 1 km from the coastline. 4 sediment cores were collected along Ennore -Pulicat stretch to determine acid leachable trace metal concentration. Core samples were collected using gravity corer. The cores were sliced horizontally at 2.5 cm to determine the grain size, sediment composition, pH, organic matter, calcium carbonate, acid leachable trace metals; cadmium, chromium, copper, lead, zinc. The trace metals were extracted using acid mixture containing hydro fluoric acid, nitric acid and sulphuric acid and analysed by atomic emission spectrophotometer. In an attempt to infer anthropogenic input from geogenic input, several approaches including comparison with sediment quality guidelines -ecotoxicological sense of heavy metal contamination and classification by quantitative indexes such as geoaccumalation index, anthropogenic factor, enrichment factor, contamination factor and degree and pollution load index was attempted. Grain size analysis and sediment composition of core samples shows Ennore is sandy in nature having a neutral pH. Organic matter enrichment is observed to a higher extent in core 3. Core 2 at a depth of 5 cm shows organic matter of 9.4 %. calcium carbonate is totally absent at the surface sediments in core 2. Cores collected within the canal showed a higher heavy metal concentration than the cores collected from Pulicat lagoon and 2 km into the Ennore Sea. The trace metal concentration for cadmium, lead and zinc in Ennore does not pose a threat to the sediment dwelling fauna whereas chromium and copper are likely to pose a threat. Quantitative indexes place Ennore under moderately polluted. Ennore is likely to face a serious threat of metal pollution with the present deposition rates unless stringent pollution control norms are adopted.

Heavy metals contamination in water and sediments of an urban river in a developing country

“…Initially data were normalized using Fe to compensate for both granulometric and mineralogical variability of metal concentration in sediments (Daskalakis and O'Connor, 1995;Schiff and Weisberg, 1999;Seshan et al, 2010); and then PCA with varimax rotation was applied to the data matrix. The PCA leads to a reduction of the initial dimension of the dataset to three components which explain 94.54 % and 89.16 % of the data for Summer and Winter samples, respectively (Table 6).…”

Quantitative Changes in Soil Properties and Plant Uptake of Metals on Municipal Solid Waste Dumpsite in Nigeria

“…Fe was chosen as the normalizing element when determining EF-values, since in wetlands it is mainly supplied from sediments and is one of the widely used reference element [19]. Other widely used metal elements are Al, Mn [20] The EF is defined as follows:…”

Response of sediment-dwelling annelida community in relation to geochemical parameters in the Gorgan Bay, Caspian Sea

“…Stations 3 and 14 had the highest and the lowest of PLI, respectively (Table 3). An area with PLI value [1 is polluted, whereas PLI value \1 indicates no pollution (Chakravarty and Patgiri 2009;Seshan et al 2010). Similarly, PLI for a zone is calculated by the following equation:…”