Abstract
A 9600 km2 area of southwestern Pennsylvania with widely varying amounts of historic industrial air pollution contains enough old cemeteries (135) to permit high-resolution mapping of Vermont marble tombstone weathering rates. Mean vertical-slab surface recession rates are as much as eight times greater for urban/industrial areas (maximum 3.0 mm [100 yr]-1) than for rural areas (minimum 0.4 mm [100 yr]-1). A damage function relates mean weathering rates to long-term numbers of employees in nearby polluting industries, and shows that even small industrial operations significantly augmented local rates of weathering within several kilometers. Marble stones near short-smokestack industries are significantly more weathered than are those near tall-smokestack, coal-fired electrical power plants. The comparatively high mean rate of marble weathering in small town cemeteries (1.1 mm [100 yr]-1) suggests that recent acidic precipitation may be dissolving the stones throughout the study region or that pollution from home coal and oil furnaces was high. [Key words: marble tombstone, weathering, industrial air pollution, Pennsylvania.]
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