Post-World War II Uranium Changes in Dated Mont Blanc Ice and Snow

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• 作者：Carlo Barbante ; Katja Van De Velde ; Giulio Cozzi ; Gabriele Capodaglio ; Paolo Cescon ; Frederic Planchon ; Sungmin Hong ; Christophe Ferrari ; and Claude Boutron
• 刊名：Environmental Science & Technology
• 出版年：2001
• 出版时间：October 15, 2001
• 年：2001
• 卷：35
• 期：20
• 页码：4026 - 4030
• 全文大小：64K
• 年卷期：v.35,no.20(October 15, 2001)
• ISSN：1520-5851

文摘

Recent controversies concerning the possibility ofenvironmental contamination due to the use of uranium inclassical weaponry have led us to realize that there is alack of time series for this metal from environmental archives.We have therefore performed analysis of a dated 140m-long ice/snow core that was drilled in 1994 at a coldhigh altitude site (4250 m) near the summit of Mont Blancin the French-Italian Alps. Ultraclean analytical procedureswere employed in our analyses. Uranium concentrations weredetermined by inductively coupled plasma sector fieldmass spectrometry. In ice dating from before the 1940s,uranium concentrations are found to have remained fairlyconstant and can be explained simply by a crustalcontribution. For the post-World War II layers, on theother hand, the data show large excesses above crustalcontributions. These uranium excesses are attributedto tropospheric transport of dust emitted during extensivemining and milling operations which took place in theGDR and to a smaller extent in France at that time. Thereis no enhancement in uranium concentrations in the icelayer in which fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl accident waspreviously identified from a gross ars/beta2.gif" BORDER=0 ALIGN="middle"> activity vs depthprofile.