Metal adsorption onto and desorption from sediments. II. Artifact effects

Abstract

Several published adsorption and desorption (sorption) data sets have been recalculated and replotted in the course of developing and testing data-linearization techniques. Data sets that yielded results that appeared anomalous and two other data sets, one with adsorption time series for several metals and another with extensive particle size data, are examined in detail to better understand the factors that result in sorption data artifacts. Drying (and certain other pretreatments), uncontrolled (and frequently unmeasured) pH, unknown valence changes of redox-sensitive metals, unmonitored bacterial growth, and experimentally imposed differences in time-to-equilibrium were found to contribute to the large uncertainties in much of the published sorption data.