Distribution of Heavy Metal Concentrations in Surface Sediments in Dubai Creeks, United Arab Emirates

Abstract

Dubai is developing rapidly and many developmental activities are concentrated around its Creek. The present study reports the lateral distribution of heavy metals and compares it with local historical record of heavy metal concentrations. For this purpose surface sediment samples were collected and analyzed for metal contents, total organic carbon content (TOC), mineralogy and grain size. The percentages of the different grain size fraction of the collected sediments were as follow 65% for sand size, 15% for silt size fraction, and the rest accounted for clay size fraction. The microscopic analyses indicate that the sediment composed mainly from carbonate and quartz with traces of rock fragments. Such mineral composition is not believed to be a potential source of heavy metal. The study found that the average recorded heavy metal concentrations in the collected sediment samples were 87, 96, 127, 38.5, and 279 ppm for Cr, Cu, Ni, Pb, and Zn, respectively. Those values were slightly higher than metal concentrations recoded in 2001 with 1.22 (Cr), 2.5 (Cu), 2.87 (Ni), 0.69 (Pb), and 2.1 (Zn) folds. However, in 2001 and 2003 the measured metal contents, along the creek, were lower than those of the average earth crust. Along the Creek most metals recorded the highest concentrations in the upper reach of the Creek. The distribution of the measured heavy metals was not affected significantly with the TOC values. The present study also documented obvious related point sources of pollution.

Assessment of Metals Concentrations in Soils of Abu Dhabi Emirate Using Pollution Indices and Multivariate Statistics

“…This indicates the common origin of these pollutants, spread from the neighboring industrial sites or resulted from the traffic, as presented in Section 3.1 . This result is in concordance with the finding from [ 38 , 52 , 53 ].…”

“…Literature survey reveals different multivariate GIS approaches for determining the heavy metal contamination in agricultural soil [8,[43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50] in many parts of the world, but only a few articles are focusing on the analysis of the metals concentrations in soils [38], sediments [51][52][53] and water [54][55][56][57], in the United Arab Emirates. Apart from the mentioned articles [38,[51][52][53][54][55][56][57], only one study [58] presents the soil characteristics in the Eastern Arabian Desert Region using as investigation tools the ICP-OES with GIS Mapping.…”

Distribution of metals in coastal sediment from northwest sabah, Malaysia

“…Quartz is the primary mineral composition of onshore parent rocks that do not contribute to the natural source of heavy metals as it is resistant to weathering process and tend to exist in unactivated state [ 34 , 35 ]. However, the bicarbonate ions released during the weathering of carbonate minerals also increase the retention capacity of carbonate-buffer system which resist metal solubility and reduce their concentrations in the sediments [ 36 , 37 ].…”

Distribution of heavy metals in the coastal area of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates

“…Heavy metal contaminations have been examined in several Emirates in the UAE (Shriadah, 1999;El-Sammak, 2001;De Mora et al, 2004;Howari, 2005;Abd El-Gawad and El-Sammak, 2008;Campbell et al, 2015). The objective of this study is to investigate the current distributions and concentrations of heavy metal along the coastal area of Abu Dhabi.…”