Investigation of 220Rn emanation and exhalation from soil samples of Larsemann Hills region, Antarctica

Abstract

In the present study, thoron exhalation flux density were measured in the soil samples collected around the Indian station namely Bharati (69° 24.41′ S, 76° 11.72′ E) and its nearby islands in the Larsemann hills region of Antarctica. Further, dependency of thoron mass emanation rate and emanation coefficient on the soil grain size was studied by segregating the soil samples into four different grain size groups: 50–100 μm, 100–200 μm, 200–500 μm and 500–1000 μm which showed that both of them follow a decreasing trend with increase in grain size. A comparison of measured mass emanation rate between different soil samples showed that it had a larger variation for the smaller grain size which eventually decreased as grain size increased while emanation coefficient was observed to be nearly constant for all the grain size groups. The variation in emanation coefficient with respect to mean grain size has been investigated and an empirical exponential model has been proposed for predicting emanation coefficient for different grain sizes.