Narrow Results

Fossil fragments of bone and teeth that are exposed to a humid environment take up fluorine from the surrounding soil and accumulate it in their mineral phase. In cortical parts of long bone diaphysis a fluorine concentration profile can be observed, which carries information on the exposure duration of the buried object in its shape. The distribution of fluorine in a sample however is strongly influenced by environmentally induced processes of bone diagenesis, i.e. alteration in the structure and composition of bone mineral and degradation of the organic components that may make the time information indistinct.

PIGE (Proton Induced Gamma-ray Emission) is a precise and fast analytical technique to determine the quantitative fluorine content and its distribution in cross sections of bone and tooth specimen non-destructively. The simultaneous detection of Ca by PIXE (Proton Induced X-ray Emission) provides additional information on the sample topography. Cracks, alteration haloes and the porosity, which is typical for human bone samples, are parameters which have direct influence on the fluorine uptake and transport during burial. This contribution outlines the combined approach of using PIGE and PIXE measurement to understand some aspects of the complex environmental impact that impedes exposure age dating by fluorine diffusion profiling.

We report on ion beam investigations of 40 bone samples from the archaeological site Edesheim/Rheinland–Pfalz, Germany, a burial site of a Merowingian population (6–8th century AD).

The samples were prepared as pellets from the so–called WARD'S triangle. This region is an inner part of the femoral neck and one of the areas of high fracture risk in the case of osteoporosis. The experiments were carried out with an 1.5 MeV H⁺ beam at the 2 MV VAN DE GRAAFF accelerator of the University of Leipzig. Simultaneously to the PIXE measurements, PBS and PIGE spectra were recorded.

We will present a correlation matrix for 11 selected elements detected by PIXE, which exhibits trends and dependences from which preliminary information on various diagenetic processes can be derived.

The restructuring process of diagenesis in the sedimentary rocks is studied using a percolation type model. The cementation and dissolution processes are modeled by the culling of occupied sites in rarefied and growth of vacant sites in dense environments. Starting from sub-critical states of ordinary percolation the system evolves under the diagenetic rules to critical percolation configurations. Our numerical simulation results in two dimensions indicate that the stable configuration has the same critical behavior as the ordinary percolation.

Mercury in the aquatic environment is a neurotoxin with several known adverse effects on the natural ecosystem and the human health. Mathematical modeling is a cost-effective way for assessing the risk associated with mercury to aquatic organisms and for developing management plans for the reduction of mercury exposure in such systems. However, the analysis of mercury fate and transport in the aquatic environment requires multiple disciplines of science ranging from sediment transport and hydraulics, to geochemistry and microbiology. Also, it involves the knowledge of some less understood processes such as the microbial and diagenetic processes affecting the chemical speciation of mercury and various mechanisms involved in the mass-exchange of mercury species between the benthic sediments and the overlying water. Due to these complexities, there are many challenges involved in developing an integrated mercury fate and transport model in aquatic systems. This paper identifies the various processes that are potentially important in mercury fate and transport as well as the knowns and unknowns about these processes. Also, an integrated multi-component reactive transport modeling approach is suggested to capture several of those processes. This integrated modeling framework includes the coupled advective-dispersive transport of mercury species in the water body, both in dissolved phase and as associated to mobile suspended sediments. The flux of mercury in the benthic sediments as a result of diffusive mass exchange, bio-dispersion, and hyporheic flow, and the flow generated due to consolidation of newly deposited sediments is also addressed. The model considers in addition the deposition and resuspension of sediments and their effect on the mass exchange of mercury species between the top water and the benthic sediments. As for the biogeochemical processes, the effect of redox stratification and activities of sulfate and iron-reducing bacteria on the methylation of mercury is discussed, and the modeling approach is described. Some results for the application of the model to the Colusa Basin Drain in California are presented. At the end of the paper, the shortcomings of our current knowledge in predicting the fate of mercury in water-sediment systems, the potential improvements, and additional complexities required to make the model more realistic, are discussed.