Abstract
Abstract. Rare earth elements (REEs) and yttrium in seawater originate from atmospheric fallout, continental weathering, and transport from rivers, as well as hydrothermal activity. Previous studies have reported the use of REE and Y measurements in biogenic carbonates as a means to reconstruct these surface processes in ancient times. As coastal seawater REE and Y concentrations partially reflect those of nearby rivers, it may be possible to obtain a regional fingerprint of these concentrations from bivalve shells for seafood traceability and environmental monitoring studies. Here, we present a dataset of 297 measurements of REE and Y abundances by laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) from two species (Crassostrea gigas and Ostrea edulis). We measured a total of 49 oyster specimens from six locations in France (Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea). Our study reports that there is no significant difference in concentrations from shell parts corresponding to winter and summer periods for both species. Moreover, interspecific vital effects are reported from specimens from both species and from the same locality. REE and Y profiles as well as t-distributed stochastic neighbour embedding processing (t-SNE; a discriminant statistical method) indicate that REE and Y measurements from C. gigas shells can be discriminated from one locality to another, but this is not the case for O. edulis, which presents very similar concentrations in all studied localities. Therefore, provenance studies using bivalve shells based on REEs and Y have to first be tested for the species. Other methods have to be investigated to be able to find the provenance of some species, such as O. edulis.
Highlights
Rare earth elements (REEs) are a group of 15 elements (La to Lu) with a similar electronic configuration of atoms, similar properties, and similar chemical behaviour (Elderfield, 1988), with the exceptions of Ce and Eu, which present multiple oxidation states
Rare earth elements (REEs) and yttrium in seawater originate from atmospheric fallout, continental weathering, and transport from rivers, as well as hydrothermal activity
REE and Y profiles as well as t-distributed stochastic neighbour embedding processing (t-SNE; a discriminant statistical method) indicate that REE and Y measurements from C. gigas shells can be discriminated from one locality to another, but this is not the case for O. edulis, which presents very similar concentrations in all studied localities
Summary
Rare earth elements (REEs) are a group of 15 elements (La to Lu) with a similar electronic configuration of atoms, similar properties, and similar chemical behaviour (Elderfield, 1988), with the exceptions of Ce and Eu, which present multiple oxidation states. The main sources of REEs in seawater are atmospheric fallout (Elderfield and Greaves, 1982; De Baar et al, 1983) and riverine input through continental weathering (Goldstein et al, 1984; Frost et al, 1986), as well as hydrothermal activity (Olivarez and Owen, 1991). In addition to these various sources, the concentrations of REEs in seawater are impacted by adsorption processes of REEs to mineral surfaces and complexation with organic ligands, especially near the ocean surface (Sholkovitz et al, 1994; Schijf et al, 2015). The Y / Ho ratios in estuaries could exhibit different values according to the regional inputs related to the mineralogical variability in continental covers
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