This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues. Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: http://www.elsevier.com/copyright Author's personal copy Mineralogical and chemical variability of fluvial sediments 2. Suspended-load silt (Ganga-Brahmaputra, Bangladesh

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This article proposes a new integrated methodology to determine the mineralogical composition of silt-sized sediments, reaching the same precision level required to perform quantitative provenance analysis as traditionally done on sand-sized sediments. We examine technical problems encountered in analysis of silt and illustrate how they can be solved for suspended load in a modern fluviodeltaic environment. All methods described here, and specifically the user-friendly Raman spectroscopy, can be routinely applied in mineralogical studies of ancient siltstones. Provenance information can thus be extracted from mudrocks, which represent a very conspicuous part of the stratigraphical record and are prone to preserve original detrital assemblages from diagenetic dissolution better than permeable interlayered sandstones. Quantitative mineralogical analysis of siltsized sediments by innovative techniques opens up new frontiers in sedimentary petrology. Such an effective approach is of crucial importance to make accurate provenance diagnoses and sediment budgets and to correctly unravel the innumerable pieces of geological information stored in sedimentary archives from the alluvial plain to the deep-sea.Keywords Raman spectroscopy Á Quantitative X-ray powder diffraction Á Heavy minerals Á Suspended-load Á Silt Á Siltstone ''The freshly laid silt that bordered the water glistened in the sun like dunes of chocolate. From time to time, bubbles of air rose from the depths and burst through to the top, leaving rings on the burnished surface. The sounds they made seemed almost to form articulate patterns, as if to suggest they were giving voice to the depths of the earth itself.'' Amitav Gosh, The hungry tide, p. 21.

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Crystal chemical study of ecdemite from Harstigen, a new natural member of the layered lead oxyhalides structural group Short Title:Crystal chemical study of ecdemite from Harstigen, Sweden.

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