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| Titel |
Fine Increment Soil Collector (FISC): A new device to support high resolution soil and sediment sampling for agri-environmental assessments |
| VerfasserIn |
Lionel Mabit, Katrin Meusburger, Andra-Rada Iurian, Philip N. Owens, Arsenio Toloza, Christine Alewell |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2014
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 16 (2014) |
| Datensatznummer |
250087934
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| Publikation (Nr.) |
 EGU/EGU2014-1992.pdf |
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| Zusammenfassung |
| Soil and sediment related research for terrestrial agri-environmental assessments
requires accurate depth incremental sampling of soil and exposed sediment profiles.
Existing coring equipment does not allow collecting soil/sediment increments at
millimetre resolution. Therefore, the authors have designed an economic, portable,
hand-operated surface soil/sediment sampler – the Fine Increment Soil Collector
(FISC) – which allows extensive control of soil/sediment sampling process and
easy recovery of the material collected by using a simple screw-thread extraction
system.
In comparison with existing sampling tools, the FISC has the following advantages and
benefits: (i) it permits sampling of soil/sediment samples at the top of the profile;
(ii) it is easy to adjust so as to collect soil/sediment at mm resolution; (iii) it is
simple to operate by one single person; (iv) incremental samples can be performed in
the field or at the laboratory; (v) it permits precise evaluation of bulk density at
millimetre vertical resolution; and (vi) sample size can be tailored to analytical
requirements.
To illustrate the usefulness of the FISC in sampling soil and sediments for 7Be – a
well-known cosmogenic soil tracer and fingerprinting tool – measurements, the sampler was
tested in a forested soil located 45 km southeast of Vienna in Austria. The fine resolution
increments of 7Be (i.e. 2.5 mm) affects directly the measurement of the 7Be total inventory
but above all impacts the shape of the 7Be exponential profile which is needed to assess soil
movement rates.
The FISC can improve the determination of the depth distributions of other
Fallout Radionuclides (FRN) – such as 137Cs, 210Pbexand239+240Pu – which are
frequently used for soil erosion and sediment transport studies and/or sediment
fingerprinting.
Such a device also offers great potential to investigate FRN depth distributions associated
with fallout events such as that associated with nuclear emergencies. Furthermore, prior to
remediation activities – such as topsoil removal – in contaminated soils and sediments (e.g.
by heavy metals, pesticides or nuclear power plant accident releases), basic environmental
assessment often requires the determination of the extent and the depth penetration
of the different contaminants, precision that can be provided by using the FISC. |
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