Posted: April 2nd, 2015

Soil Samples produce a research paper using forms of statistical analysis done in the pre test

Soil Samples produce a research paper using forms of statistical analysis done in the pre test

Exercise 05 – Wessenden Moor, Fe, Pb, Br and Ca levels

Peat extracted from Wessenden Moor in West Yorkshire in November 2002. Samples of 2cm diameter were analysed taken from a 50cm deep core. Different depths of the peat core were analysed using X-Ray Fluorescence (XRF) analysis to measure the concentration of Iron, Lead, Bromine and Calcium. The results obtained after performing XRF analysis are shown in table 1

Table 1.  Results of XRF analysis of a peat core extracted from Wessenden Moor, November 2002
Elements
Fe    Pb    Br    Ca
midpoint cm    cm depth    (mg kg-1)    (mg kg-1)    (mg kg-1)    (mg kg-1)
1    00-02    18630    451.7    95.2    1828
5    04-06    25350    816.0    72.0    1465
11    10-12    5244    299.0    65.3    1631
15    14-16    5258    116.3    58.0    1597
21    20-22    4692    29.8    68.3    1954
25    24-26    3324    22.5    57.1    1986
31    30-32    2039    19.2    69.5    1467
41    40-42    2707    21.8    61.5    965.5
49    48-50    2163    25.0    77.4    1471

The peat core was obtained from Wessenden Moor, 4 meters west of Holmfirth, 500 meters north of A635 Holmfirth Road.

Samples 2cm x 2cm from the core which was 50 cm long from the surface (zero cm) were taken.  (Full depth of the peat is about 225cm)

The peat was dried at 80oC for 3 days, ground and 4g analysed quantitatively in the XRF spectrometer against internal standards.