Assessment of Heavy Metal Contamination in Euphrates River Sediments from Al-Hindiya Barrage to Al-Nasiria City, South Iraq

Abstract

The degree of contamination in the sediments of the Euphrates River (Shatt Al-
Hindiya), for the metals As, Cd, Co, Cu, Cr, Mn, Ni, Pb, Sc Se, Sr, V and Zn has
been evaluated using the index of geo-accumulation (I-geo), Enrichment factor (EF),
Contamination factor (CF) and pollution load index (PLI), whereat the I-geo has
been widely utilized as a measure of pollution in freshwater sediment. Enrichment
factor (EF) is one widely used as approach to characterize the degree of
anthropogenic pollution to establish enrichment ratios, while the pollution load
index (PLI) represents the number of times by which the heavy metal concentrations
in the sediment exceeds the background concentration, and gives a summative
indication of the overall level of heavy metal toxicity in a particular sample. By
using these numerical sediments indexes we found that the Sediments of Euphrates
River in the study area are polluted by the metals of Nickel (maximum 194ppm) and
Strontium (maximum 543ppm), and moderately polluted by the metals of Copper
(maximum 47.9), Cobalt (maximum 22.8ppm), Chromium (maximum 111ppm) and
Selenium (maximum 1.1ppm), while the sediments of Euphrates River are not
polluted by the metals of Arsenic (maximum 10.2ppm), Cadmium (maximum
0.29ppm), Manganese (maximum 949ppm), Lead (maximum 14.8ppm), Scandium
(maximum 8.96ppm), Vanadium (maximum 81ppm) and Zinc (maximum 91ppm).