ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Toxicology, Pollution and the Environment
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvanced Geochemical Mapping and Geochemical Background/Baseline: An Environmental PerspectiveView all 8 articles
Geochemical baseline and multivariate analysis of potentially toxic elements in stream sediments of the Vazante zinc district, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Provisionally accepted
Rafael Tarantino Amarante1*
Eduardo Duarte Marques2
Úrsula Ruchkys de Azevedo3
Emmanoel Vieira Silva-Filho4Gabriel Soares Almeida5Isadora Mello4
Gabriel Negreiros Salomão5- 1Instituto Tecnologico Vale Desenvolvimento Sustentavel, Belém, Brazil
- 2Superintendência de Belo Horizonte, Serviço Geológico do Brasil, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
- 3Programa de Pós-Graduação em Análise e Modelagem de Sistemas Ambientais, Instituto de Geociências, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
- 4Programa de Pós-Graduação em Geociências (Geoquímica), Universidade Federal Fluminense Instituto de Quimica, Niterói, Brazil
- 5Geologia Ambiental e Recursos Hídricos, Instituto Tecnologico Vale Desenvolvimento Sustentavel, Belém, Brazil
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Intense land use, driven by mining and agriculture, promotes the dispersal of elements, including potentially toxic ones (PTEs). This dispersal significantly enhances element concentrations in soils, sediments, and water bodies, thereby altering the natural background values of the environment. The objective of this paper is to employ geochemical mapping alongside multivariate statistical methods to establish the baseline values for the Mining Zinc District situated at the boundary of the São Francisco Craton and Brasília Belt. This will facilitate the assessment of spatial variability and determination of reference values for element concentrations in sediment samples, enabling the differentiation between natural and anthropogenic sources of potentially toxic elements. A geochemical database of 1853 sediment samples were assembled from the São Francisco and Paranaíba watersheds for subsequent ICP-OES and ICP-MS analysis. The baseline values were assessed through 3 distinct methods, while the Factor Analysis was employed as a multivariate statistical technique. The findings reveal that the baseline concentrations of Ni (415 mg.kg-1), Cr (137 mg.kg-1), and Co (106 mg.kg-1) were higher than the Investigation Values of CONAMA Resolution nº454/2012. The factor analysis found 6 main factors that explain 75.1% of the total system variance. It also found 8 major geochemical links between these factors: (1) Al, Cs, Ga, Sn, and V; (2) Co, Mg, Ni, and Zn; (3) Cr, Ni, and V; (4) Cs, K, and Rb; (5) As, and Fe; (6) Cd, Pb, and Zn; (7) LREE, Th, and U; and (8) Ba, P, and Sr.
Keywords: Geochemical mapping, baseline, sediments, multivariate analysis, São FranciscoCraton
Received: 12 Aug 2025; Accepted: 10 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Tarantino Amarante, Marques, de Azevedo, Silva-Filho, Almeida, Mello and Salomão. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Rafael Tarantino Amarante, rafaeltageo@gmail.com
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