Extracciones quimicas secuenciales de metales pesados. Aplicacion en ciencias geologicas

Abstract

Sequential chemical extraction methodologies are applied in Geological Sciences with the objective of determining the solid speciation for trace metals present in soil, sediment and rock samples. Such information is not available from a conventional chemica1 analysis. At the present time a wide variety of sequential protocols exists, but none of them has been imposed as an international standard method as yet.
The fractions of solid material that these protocols usually allow to distinguish are the following: Exchangeable, carbonate, Fe-Mn oxide-hydroxide, organic, and residual. Different methods differ in the used reagents as well as in the experimental conditions, depending on the particular objectives.
Sequential extraction methods are used in different fields of geological sciences, mainly in environmental geochemistry of aquatic systems (rivers, lakes, estuaries), edaphology and also in groundwater hydrology.
In general, sequential extraction protocols involve important methodological problems which have been pointed out for severa1 authors. Among these problems are the following: Reagent selectivity, operative definition of methods, elemental redistribution (or readsorption), variable experimental conditions, scarcity of reference solid certificated materials, strong difficulty in order to validate the existing methods, and the evaluation of its precision. In spite of al1 methodological problems mentioned, at the present time sequential extraction protocols constitute the better approach in order to describe the geochemical association of trace elements with different fractions of solid materials.