Comparing levoglucosan and mannosan ratios in sediments and corresponding aerosols from recent Australian fires.

The monosaccharide anhydrides levoglucosan, mannosan, and galactosan are known as 'fire sugars' as they are powerful proxies used to trace fire events. Despite their increasing use, their application is not completely understood, especially in the context of tracing past fire events using sediment samples. There are many uncertainties about fire sugar formation, partitioning, transport, complexation, and stability along all stages of the source-to-sink pathway.

Accelerator mass spectrometry measurements of U in groundwater, soil and vegetation at a legacy radioactive waste site.

Low-level radioactive wastes were disposed at the Little Forest Legacy Site (LFLS) near Sydney, Australia between 1960 and 1968. According to the disposal records, U contributes a significant portion of the inventory of actinide activity buried in the LFLS trenches. Although the presence of U in environmental samples from LFLS has been previously inferred from alpha-spectrometry measurements, it has been difficult to quantify because the U and U α-peaks are superimposed.

A record of fallout Pu and Pu at World Heritage Bathurst Harbour, Tasmania, Australia.

This study presents the first measurements of anthropogenic plutonium (Pu and Pu) concentrations and atom ratios (Pu/Pu) for Tasmania, in sediment collected from Bathurst Harbour, in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, Australia. The weighted mean Pu/Pu atom ratio measured at this site was 0.172 ± 0.