Galveston Bay is an anthropogenic-influenced estuary where industrial runoff, wastewater, and shipping vessel discharges enter the bay alongside natural freshwaters. Here, heavy metal concentrations in Galveston Bay surface sediment (2-year quarterly time-series) and a single sediment core are presented to explore the anthropogenic and geochemical controls on the spatiotemporal distributions, fluxes, sources, and potential toxicity of metals within this estuary. Samples were leached to distinguish authigenic sediment coatings from geogenic crystalline material.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe oldest rocks-3.85 billion years old-from southwest Greenland have coupled neodymium-142 excesses (from decay of now-extinct samarium-146; half-life, 103 million years) and neodymium-143 excesses (from decay of samarium-147; half-life, 106 billion years), relative to chondritic meteorites, that directly date the formation of chemically distinct silicate reservoirs in the first 30 million to 75 million years of Earth history. The differences in 142Nd signatures of coeval rocks from the two most extensive crustal relicts more than 3.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF