Magnetic susceptibility and heavy metals contamination in soils of Southern Poland

Abstract

The anthropogenic character of the increase in magnetic susceptibility of Silesian soils is doubtless. The dependence between the magnetic susceptibility of industrial dust and the concentration of heavy metals was investigated. Correlation coefficients between those two parameters range for metallurgic dust from 0.911 to 0.998 for Ni and Zn, for fly ashes from 0.710 to 0.820, for Pb and Zn, for cement dust from 0.261 to 0.519 for Ni and Pb, respectively. The anthropogenic character of this dependence is also confirmed by the values of the correlation coefficients between magnetic susceptibility and dust emission, fly ash, metallurgic dust, cement dust, are 0.903, 0.867, 0.918 and 0.365, respectively. For immission the correlation coefficients are as follow: 0.817, 0.656, 0.440 for dustfall, suspended dust and iron fall, respectively. In magnetic particles selected from fly ashes high concentrations of Pb, Zn, Ni and Cu were found. Regarding dependence of magnetic susceptibility on concentration of heavy metals in soils Upper Silesian Industrial Region the correltion coefficients were: between 0.616 - 0.986 for Zn, 0.724 - 0.979 for Pb, and 0.175 - 0.581 for Cd. These values were lower for 90 soil profiles collected from an area of 22 000 km 2 (Katowice Forest State Directorate) resulting from varying conditions of emission and immission of industrial pollutants.