Abstract
Even when an estuary is at steady state, it shows the typical features of a sink for contaminants, although input from rivers into the estuary may result in equal output from the estuary to the sea, thus in such estuaries accumulation of material is practically insignificant. The essential properties which determine the processes and transfer of contaminants to particulate matter are the chemical properties of the contaminant, the specific surface of particulate matter, its composition and its specific surface exchange capacities. A correlation exists between these factors. It is very essential to understand the complete picture of how compounds are sorbed to particulate matter, and not only part of it. For estuaries with a long freshwater-seawater mixing section and a turbidity maximum, the question can be posed whether the distribution of the dissolved and particulate contaminants along the estuary is conservative, meaning that the total inflow of contaminants (particulate and dissolved) from the river equals the discharge from the estuary into the sea, while there is no loss to or gain from the bottom. Model calculations have been made to solve this problem for different adsorption and complexing processes. Whether tropical estuaries are sinks or sources has to be answered in a time context. A tropical estuary newly contaminated will be a sink for a very long period, although equilibrium between input and output may be sooner obtained than in temperate climates. It may afterwards become a source, where the bottom sediments act as a buffer with very long turnover times, up to 1000 years.
Also published in Tecnologia Ambiental, CETEM No. 6, 1995, 36 pp.
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Duursma, E.K. (1998). Are tropical estuaries environmental sinks or sources?. In: Wasserman, J.C., Silva-Filho, E.V., Villas-Boas, R. (eds) Environmental Geochemistry in the Tropics. Lecture Notes in Earth Sciences, vol 72. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0010919
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0010919
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