Mineralogy, Environmental Geochemistry and Health Effects of the Khuzestan Dust, SW Iran

Recently the Khuzestan province in southwest of Iran is affected by duststorm phenomena and makes some problems in agriculture, Transportation, Communication and human health side effect in this province. Mineralogy, Geochemistry of particles and Geo- Environmental characteristics of trace elements is very important for detecting of major pollutant. The collected dust samples were analyzed for grain size, mineralogy, and chemical composition. The dust is predominantly Aluminosilicates (clay minerals and feldspars), quartz and carbonates with minor amounts of gypsum. The particles are mostly sub-rounded to sub-angular and generally between 5 to 02 μm in size. XRD studies show that calcite and quartz are the major constituents in most samples, and clay minerals such as Illite and Kaolinite are also present. The most important oxides are SiO6, Al6O3,Fe6O3, CaO and MgO. An eroded sedimentary environment presented for the source of these particles. Factor analysis has been done, and four factors extracted in this work, Enrichment Factor for all measured elements show that most of elements analyzed have a natural abundance. However, several elements such as Ba, Ni, Nb, Cr, Ca, Pb, Co and Mn have higher than natural abundances due to anthropogenic enrichment by various enrichment factors. Some ratios like Ti/Nb, Ga/Al, Rb/K show all of the dust samples have chemical homogeneity and indicating a similar provenance or source area. The dust aerosol samples have very similar rare earth element (REE) patterns, with relative enrichment of light REE, a slight depletion of heavy REE, and a strongly negative europium anomaly.