Effect of Mineralogy on Dissolution and Speciation of Iron Containing Mineral Oxides in Atmospheric Aerosol Dust
Abstract
Iron is one of the important trace elements for the life. Though it is the fourth most abundant element in the terrestrial crust, given higher pH ( 8.5) in the ocean, the direct dissolution of iron from the Earth crust is limited. Despite this limitation, ocean contains about 2 nM of dissolved iron that is 20-fold greater. Therefore, it is hypothesized most iron comes to the ocean via atmosphere, and dissolution occurs in the acidic atmospheric environments. The current work focuses on the effect of minerology on atmospheric processing of Fe-containing mineral dust using four authentic dust samples, collected from different parts of the world, along with three model systems, hematite (α-Fe2O3), magnetite (Fe3O4) and ilmenite (FeTiO3). Here, spectroscopic methods are combined with batch reactor studies to investigate total iron dissolution and speciation, with a specific focus on source material i.e. particle size, mineralogy, and environmental conditions, i.e. pH, temperature and solar flux. Our data suggests that the presence of Ti metal enhances the dissolution of iron regardless the total %Fe in the mineral. The surface area normalized total iron dissolution in ilmenite, under the dark conditions, in the presence of nitric acid (HNO3) is 3-fold higher than that of hematite. In authentic samples, similar effects were observed for samples containing %Ti. Further, 74% of the dissolved iron in ilmenite remained as Fe(II), bioavailable iron, whereas it was only 60% for magnetite and 8% for hematite. In this study, these results were used to interpret similar trends observed for authentic dust samples with high magnetite content. Thus, the findings of the current study highlight important, yet unconsidered, factors in the atmospheric processing of iron-containing mineral dust aerosol.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFM.A23K..01H
- Keywords:
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- 0305 Aerosols and particles;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 0365 Troposphere: composition and chemistry;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 3311 Clouds and aerosols;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES;
- 1631 Land/atmosphere interactions;
- GLOBAL CHANGE