Laser Ablation ICP-MS Analysis of Faviidae Corals for Environmental Monitoring of a Tropical Estuary

Abstract

Environmental Context. The composition of calcium carbonate in annual skeletal growth bands reflects the environmental conditions in which coral grows, enabling their use as long-term bio-monitors and archives of environmental conditions. Such archives will provide a baseline against which recent and future pollutant levels can be compared.Abstract. An LA-ICP-MS linescan procedure has been developed for the determination of sub-millimetre scale elemental compositions of Al, Ba, Cu, La, Mg, Mn, Pb, Rb, Sr, U, and Zn in corallite walls of Faviidae corals, with the aim of establishing coral-based pollution monitoring in a tropical estuary. By selectively analyzing corallite walls, analytical signals from voids, organic, and detrital phases were minimized. Although the relative ablation yields of coral aragonite and NIST glass calibration standards differed and was dependent on pulse energy, accurate internal-standard normalized results could be verified for Ba, Cu, La, Mn, Pb, Sr, U, and Zn through the use of a secondary carbonate standard (MACS-1) and comparison with solution ICP-MS analysis. Signal smoothing and pre-acquisition surface cleaning procedures were applied. Corallite wall compositions varied by factors of up to five over distances of a few hundred micrometres. Significantly, the compositional variations along and perpendicular to the coral growth axis were of similar magnitude on a sub-millimetre scale. Consequently, compositional variations along the growth axis could not be interpreted chronologically on a sub-annual time scale. However, compositional records based on multi-annual integrated line scans should still reflect long-term environmental influences.

Climate and cave control on Pleistocene/Holocene calcite-to-aragonite transitions in speleothems from Morocco: Elemental and isotopic evidence

“…It has to be stated that detection limits may vary by a factor of three or four per sequence depending on the measurement conditions. In addition, the measured MACS1 elemental concentrations and uncertainties were very similar to earlier published MACS1 values (Munksgaard et al, 2004;Mertz-Kraus et al, 2009;Table S1 in supplementary material). A comparison between parallel tracks of ICP-OES and LA-ICP-MS trace element data across the Cc-Ar transition in stalagmite GP2 shows that potential sample heterogeneity does not play a role (see Fig.…”

Microstructure of common reef-building coral genera Acropora, Pocillopora, Goniastrea and Porites: constraints on spatial resolution in geochemical sampling

“…However, it and other faviid corals have only rarely been used for environmental analyses (Shen and Boyle 1988;Hanna and Muir 1990;Esslemont 1999;Munksgaard et al 2004). Goniastrea has the slowest extension rate of the corals investigated in this study along with a relatively deep calice.…”

Applications of LA-ICP-MS in the elemental analyses of geological samples

“…In general, the production of a homogeneous pressed pellet of a carbonate powder is difficult; a few elements in MACS-3 are even slightly heterogeneous [47]. The combination of external standard calibration and internal standard (generally Ca) normalization is often used to quantitatively analyze trace elements in carbonate materials using LA-ICP-MS [81,[143][144][145]. Chen et al [47] proposed a method that combines an external-standard (silicate glass) calibration with the total normalization technique to analyze the major and trace elements in carbonate minerals and biological crusts.…”