Aquatic Sciences Meeting, Albuquerque 2001

PC03 Undergraduate Education

Date: Tuesday, February 13, 2001

Location: Southwest Hall

Alexander, M, R, LUMCON, Chauvin, USA, rpowell@lumcon.edu

Powell, R, T, LUMCON, Chauvin, USA, rpowell@lumcon.edu

HISTORY OF TRACE METAL CONTAMINATION IN BARATARIA BAY, LOUISIANA

Among the human activities that impact the coastal zone are levying of rivers, dredging, opening new canals, oil and gas drilling and shipping. The Barataria Bay system in Louisiana has been heavily impacted by all of these factors over the past 100 years. In order to evaluate these impacts, we collected three cores in the system during July 2000 representing a range of sediment accumulations (0.08 to 0.25 cm per year) and mixing or resuspension depths (3-7 cm). By normalizing the metal (Cr, Cu, Zn, Cd and Pb) concentrations to naturally occurring aluminum and iron concentrations we can remove a potential artifact due to decreased sediment load as a result of levy construction. Any excess metal (above the natural metal to aluminum ratio) must come from an anthropogenic process. By using existing sedimentation rates we can estimate a time frame for the occurrence of metal contamination and attempt to correlate it with natural or anthropogenic events.

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Aquatic Sciences Meeting, Albuquerque 2001

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