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Heavy Mineral Assemblages and FT-IR Studies of Core Sediments from Arasalar River, Karaikkal, Pondichery Union Territory, India: A Tributary of Cauvery River

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Modern River Science for Watershed Management

Part of the book series: Water Science and Technology Library ((WSTL,volume 128))

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Abstract

The texture of sediments can reveal the source of evolution in river environments. This research was principally conducted to infer the source of the sedimentary process and the effect of the environmental factors on the river sediments in the Arasalar River. To extract the sediment transportation history and distribution of grain size, the research was attempted by analyzing textural properties, heavy mineral, and FT-IR studies of the river debris. The fundamentals of erosion, transportation, and deposition majorly depend on the dynamics of the statistical parameters such as an average or mean (Mz), skewness (Ski), standard deviation (σ1), and kurtosis (KG). The river's whole basin has extremely coarse to very fine sand that is very poorly sorted to moderately sorted. The sediment exhibited a range of grain sizes, ranging from coarse skewed to extremely fine skewed and had mesokurtic, platykurtic, and leptokurtic characteristics. The analysis of the linear discriminant function indicates that the sediments exhibit dominance in three main processes: fluvial, shallow marine, and turbidity. The beach environment and the presence of shallow, agitated water conditions are observed in the remaining sediment samples. Under CM diagram analysis, the majority of the sediment exhibits the bottom suspension and rolling category. The remaining samples were classified under rolling conditions. The region under consideration exhibits a variety of heavy mineral, including non-opaque and opaque minerals, which can be attributed to their origin in igneous and metamorphic rock formations. The current research focuses on the sediment originating from the Arasalar River, Pondicherry, southern Tamil Nadu, India.

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Acknowledgements

The Department of Earth Sciences at Annamalai University provided the laboratory space for the sediment study, for which the corresponding author is grateful. The Annamalai University Department of Physics provided infrared spectroscopy using the Fourier transform (FT-IR) for the authors to use in identifying the minerals in sediment samples. The corresponding author would like to acknowledge financial support from RUSA 2.0 (G11/39493/DRD/RUSA 2.0).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth Sciences, Annamalai University, Annamalai Nagar, Tamil Nadu, 608002, India

    Venkatesan Selvaraj, Singarasubramanian Ramachandran Saradhambal & Ajin Bejino Aloysius

  2. Department of Applied Geology, University of Madras, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, 600025, India

    Parthasarathy Pandu

  3. Centre for Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Sathyabama Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, 600119, India

    Krishnan Vijayaprabhakaran

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  1. Venkatesan Selvaraj
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  2. Singarasubramanian Ramachandran Saradhambal
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  3. Parthasarathy Pandu
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  4. Ajin Bejino Aloysius
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  5. Krishnan Vijayaprabhakaran
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Contributions

Venkatesan Selvaraj: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Data Curation and Original draught writing. Singarasubramanian Ramachandran Saradhambal: Original draught, review and editing. Parthasarathy Pandu: Methodology, Interpretation, Conceptualization, Visualization, Methodology and Original draught writing. Ajin Bejino Aloysius: Validation sampling, software and analysis. Krishnan Vijayaprabhakaran: Investigation, validation and data curation.

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Correspondence to Venkatesan Selvaraj .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geology, Government Arts College (Autonomous), Salem, Tamil Nadu, India

    S. Satheeshkumar

  2. Department of Geology, Govt. Arts College (Autonomous), Salem, Tamil Nadu, India

    V. Thirukumaran

  3. Department of Civil Engineering, Hindusthan College of engineering and Technology, Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India

    D. Karunanidhi

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Selvaraj, V., Saradhambal, S.R., Pandu, P., Aloysius, A.B., Vijayaprabhakaran, K. (2024). Heavy Mineral Assemblages and FT-IR Studies of Core Sediments from Arasalar River, Karaikkal, Pondichery Union Territory, India: A Tributary of Cauvery River. In: Satheeshkumar, S., Thirukumaran, V., Karunanidhi, D. (eds) Modern River Science for Watershed Management. Water Science and Technology Library, vol 128. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-54704-1_27

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