Abstract—
The natural soil-forming process is currently significantly impacted by human activities. Intense agricultural production intensifies the weathering and transformation processes of soil clay minerals, which were inherited from rocks and contain much potassium available to plants. A positive balance of vermiculite is a reliable diagnostic criterion of soil depletion in potassium, and therefore, monitoring of the content of this mineral is necessary to regulate soil fertility. A new method is proposed for quantitative determination of vermiculite in soils. The method is based on the ability of 2 : 1 clay minerals to selectively adsorb and fix Cs+. The procedure includes the saturation of soil exchange complex with Cs+ labeled with 137Сs. To do this, the sample is washed with CsCl solution with a trace level of 137Cs. After oven-drying at 110°C, which results in partial Cs+ fixation in the crystal lattice, the exchangeable Cs+ is replaced by \({\text{N}}{{{\text{H}}}_{4}}^{ + }\). The activity concentration of the fixed 137Сs is then determined by gamma spectrometry. Given a known ratio of Cs+ content to 137Cs activity concentration, the vermiculite quantity in soils is calculated from the ratio of the fixed Cs+ amount to the vermiculite interlayer exchange capacity, which is assumed to be 154 mg-equiv/100 g. Vermiculite content was determined in samples of arable soils, which have been collected in different climate zones of the European part of Russia. Among the soils, the lowest vermiculite content was found in soddy-podzolic soil (2.3 g/kg) and the highest one was detected in chernozems (26.9–28.6 g/kg). It is shown that vermiculite is also present in coarse fractions of soils (with particle size >1 µm). Among all soil samples, the highest content of vermiculite in coarse fractions was found in sandy soddy-podzolic soil (20.8% of the total content in soil), whereas this value in loamy and clay soils varied between 2.1 and 5.4%.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors thank Dr. N.I. Sanzharova for providing soil samples for this research and for fruitful discussions. Dr. T.A. Sokolova and the staff of the Department of Soil Chemistry at the Faculty of Soil Science of the Moscow State University are thanked for conducting mineralogical analysis of the samples.
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Translated by E. Kurdyukov
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Konopleva, I.V., Zabezhaylova, A.A. Using 137Cs in the Assessment of Vermiculite Content in Arable Soils in the European Part of Russia. Geochem. Int. 59, 516–521 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1134/S0016702921050037
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S0016702921050037