Stable oxygen and hydrogen isotopes measurement by CF-IRMS with applications in hydrology studies

Isotopic fingerprint of the middle Olt River basin, Romania

“…Due to the lack of a Global Network of Isotopes in Precipitation station in the area at the time of this monitoring campaign initiation, individual precipitation events were sampled at Ramnicu Valcea location during September 2008-December 2009, October 2010-January 2011 and June 2011-August 2011, totalling 64 events [8,9,22,23].…”

“…All the water samples were analysed at the National R&D Institute for Cryogenics and Isotopic Technologies (ICIT) at Ramnicu Valcea (Romania), using a Delta V Plus (Thermo Downloaded by [Laurentian University] at 11:10 08 December 2014 Scientific) continuous flow-isotope ratio mass spectrometer (CF-IRMS) and a Gas Bench II isotopic equilibration module with repetitive loop injection of gases, the experimental conditions for determining the isotopic composition ( 18 O and 2 H) of the water samples being those presented in [8].…”

“…There are several studies published on isotopic investigations of Romanian rivers [8][9][10][11][12], some with emphasis on the use of tritium as a tracer in the environment [13,14], but only few regarding the Olt River [15]. In this paper we focused on the middle watershed of the Olt River (Romania), a Danube tributary, presenting the results of isotopic investigations conducted during seasonal campaigns between November 2010 and August 2011.…”

Using stable isotopes in tracing contaminant sources in an industrial area: A case study on the hydrological basin of the Olt River, Romania

“…A Gas Bench II isotopic equilibration module with repetitive loop injection of gases was used for the analyses of δ 18 O and δ 2 H, the experimental conditions being those presented in Costinel et al (2009). The determination of the total nitrogen isotope ratio of the dissolved inorganic nitrogen species was achieved in two steps: (i) extraction of the inorganic species from the water sample with a yield of minimum 90% (Bremmer and Keeney, 1965;ISO, 10048, 2001) and (ii) the determination of the nitrogen isotope ratio of the nitrogen species using a Flash EA 1112 Elemental Analyzer.…”

“…Current research focuses mainly on identifying pollution sources and determining the contributions of these sources (Peterson et al, 2001;Setzinger et al, 2002;Master et al, 2003;Segal-Rozenhaimer et al, 2004;Reinhardt et al, 2006;Nestler et al, 2011;Kanduc et al, 2012;Widory et al, 2013). As for isotopic investigations on the rivers in Romania, there are several published studies (Cuna et al, 2001;Costinel et al, 2009;Vremera et al, 2011;Butiuc-Keul et al, 2012), some with emphasis on the use of tritium as a tracer in the environment (Varlam et al, 2010;Faurescu et al, 2011), only few regarding the Olt River (Dinu et al, 2000;Popescu et al, 2014) and none on the subject of pollution source identification using the δ 15 N fingerprint. For this reason, the paper investigates the sources and transformations of inorganic nitrogen compounds (nitrate, nitrite and ammonium) in the middle Olt River basin, near the industrial area of Ramnicu Valcea, by applying a combination of physico-chemical and isotopic techniques, to determine if there are major industrial nitrogen releases in the environment.…”