Quantifying excess heavy metal concentrations in drainage basins using conservative mixing models
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Eschenfelder, Jonas
Lipp, Alex G
Roberts, Gareth G
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
High concentrations of heavy metals and other pollutants in river sediments can have detrimental effects on the ecosystem and humans. The composition of river sediments throughout drainage basins therefore provides important information for environmental monitoring. An obvious first step for using river sediment compositions for monitoring is to quantify natural baseline concentrations. Once baselines have been quantified, it is straightforward to compare them to observations to identify excesses generated by, for example, anthropogenic inputs. In this study a new strategy for mapping element concentrations along rivers from discrete geochemical observations upstream is presented. We demonstrate our approach in a case study of the Clyde drainage basin in western Scotland, UK. First, continuous baselines are generated using simple forward models that conservatively mix source region concentrations along drainage networks. 1185 measurements of elemental concentrations from first-order streams are used to parameterise the source region. The calculated baselines are then compared to concentrations measured at 60 localities along the main channel of the Clyde river. For a range of major and trace elements (e.g., Mg, Sr, K, Mn), the downstream observations are in close agreement with baseline concentrations predicted by conservative mixing models. However, some heavy metal concentrations (Pb, Cu, Zn) tend to exceed predicted baseline concentrations. Therefore, the second part of our approach calculates element concentrations in source areas required to match the observed Pb, Cu and Zn concentrations measured along the river. An inverse approach is used to ‘unmix’ the observed concentrations utilising, again, a conservative mixing model. Model resolution is determined by the spatial distribution of the data. Resultant calculated natural baselines and heavy metal concentrations along the river can easily be compared to estimate excesses. We tentatively suggest that anthropogenic input to sediment composition along the river is equivalent to annual fluxes of 9.7, 1.5 and 5.7 t (106 g) of Pb, Cu and Zn, respectively.
Date Issued
2023-05-01
Date Acceptance
2023-02-06
Citation
Journal of Geochemical Exploration, 2023, 248
ISSN
0375-6742
Publisher
Elsevier
Journal / Book Title
Journal of Geochemical Exploration
Volume
248
Copyright Statement
© 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
License URL
Subjects
Clyde
Geochemical modelling
Geochemistry & Geophysics
GLASGOW
Heavy metal
Mixing
Physical Sciences
Provenance
River pollution
Science & Technology
Scotland
SEDIMENTS
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
107178
Date Publish Online
2023-02-10