Metallic elements and oxides and their relevance to Laurentian Great Lakes geochemistry

Meagan N Aliff; Euan D Reavie; Sara P Post; Lawrence M Zanko

doi:10.7717/peerj.9053

Metallic elements and oxides and their relevance to Laurentian Great Lakes geochemistry

PeerJ. 2020 May 6:8:e9053. doi: 10.7717/peerj.9053. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Meagan N Aliff¹, Euan D Reavie¹, Sara P Post¹, Lawrence M Zanko¹

Affiliation

¹ Natural Resources Research Institute, University of Minnesota Duluth, Duluth, MN, USA.

Abstract

The Laurentian Great Lakes are the most studied system in lake geochemistry and have well-preserved chronological profiles. Metals play numerous critical roles in natural and anthropogenic characteristics of lake ecosystems, so patterns in the historical records of metals from sedimentary cores provide important information about environmental baselines and human impacts. Relevant studies of Great Lakes geochemistry are listed, and we follow with encyclopedic descriptions of metals and their oxides in the lakes. These descriptions include likely natural and anthropogenic sources of elements, their known history from previous paleoecological studies, and their status as potential contaminants of concern. Despite the well-studied geology of the Great Lakes catchment, sourcing elements was sometimes difficult due to materials often being moved long distances by glaciation and the global prevalence of atmospheric pollutants. We summarized available information on metals and their roles as geochemical indicators in the Great Lakes.

Keywords: Geochemistry; Great Lakes; Metal pollution; Paleolimnology; Sediment cores.

Grants and funding

This research was supported by: (A) a grant to Euan Reavie from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under Cooperative Agreement GL-00E23101-2; and (B) State Special funding from Minnesota to the Natural Resources Research Institute. There was no additional external funding received for this study. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.