Geochemical traces of flood layers in the fluvial sedimentary archive; implications for contamination history analyses

We studied three cores from a well-dated sediment archive from an oxbow lake of the River Morava, Czech Republic, using a high-resolution (1 cm) multiproxy stratigraphic analysis and a concentration of selected heavy metals. The objective was to investigate how the vertical distribution of pollutants could be affected by episodic flood sedimentation in archives with high sedimentation rates. Stratigraphic proxies (magnetic susceptibility/MS/, X-ray densitometry and visible-light diffuse reflectance spectrometry), supported by grain-size analyses, enabled us to identify relatively coarse-grained flood layers and correlate them in the proximal-to-distal direction in the oxbow-lake delta. A correlation of the flood layers with the time series of the river discharge was used to improve the age model based primarily on 137Cs dating. The refined age model is nonlinear and shows periods of lower and higher sediment accumulation rates, which coincided with periods of lower and higher frequency of floods in the river, respectively. Concentrations of most heavy metals, normalized to lithogenic aluminium, revealed vigorous short-term variation related to floods, whose magnitude exceeds that of long-term trends. There is a substantial risk that temporal contamination trends, even if normalized to lithogenic elements, can be strongly influenced by facies, which may lead to potential misinterpretations. Element normalizing to MS, which proved to be a good proxy of grain size, provided smoother long-term trends whose interpretation was less affected by short-term variations. The long-term trends exhibit decreasing concentrations of most heavy metals for the last ~ 25 years, most notably between ~ 1987 and ~ 1992. These historical patterns correspond well to the significant improvement in environmental pollution reported elsewhere in Central Europe. In contrast, concentrations of Na have systematically increased up until the present, partly being driven by the widespread use of de-icing salt for winter road treatment.