4 week project report Study of Clay mineralogy and Rock magnetic properties of sediments from river Patala Ganga

and Arabian sea

Anvesh . M . Reddy EPSS423. INTRODUCTION: Rock magnetism is the study of the magnetic properties of rocks sediments and soils . The field arose out of the need in paleomagnetism to understand how rocks record the Earth's magnetic field. This remanence is carried by minerals, particularly certain strongly magnetic minerals like magnetite . An understanding of remanence helps paleomagnetists to develop methods for measuring the ancient magnetic field and correct for effects like sediment compaction and metamorphism. Rock magnetic methods are used to get a more detailed picture of the source of distinctive striped pattern in marine magnetic anomalies that provides important information on plate tectonics . Strongly magnetic minerals have properties that depend on the size, shape, defect structure and concentration of the minerals in a rock.Rock magnetism provides non-destructive methods for analyzing these minerals such as magnetic hyterisis measurements, temperature dependent remanence measurements, Mossabaeur spectroscopy, ferromagnetic resonance and so on. With such methods, rock magnetists can measure the effects of past climate change and human impacts on the mineralogy). In sediments, a lot of the magnetic remanence is carried by minerals that were created by magnetotactic bacteria, so rock magnetists have made significant contributions to biomagnetism.

PROCEDURE: Samples were collected and dried for 2 days in an oven to loose the water content . The dried samples were crushed and weighed .

 Samples were packed tight in vials and their magnetic susceptability was measured for all the samples using barington magnetic susceptibility meter. We used a molspin A F demagnetizer to demagnetize the samples and induce ARM(anhysteretic remanent magnetism) and the induced ARM was measured using a spino-magnetometer. Then using a molspin pulse magnetometer we induced fields at intervals of 20/50/200/300/ upto 1000mT and did the same by reversing the samples i.e back field . After a certain limit the sample no longer aquired any of the magnetization. The samples from river Patala Ganga have high magnetic suceptability, NRM ,ARM compared to the SEA samples. Now for the clay mineralogy part we firstly separated sand from silt and clay . The samples were put in beakers and crushed . Distilled water was filled in those beakers ,stirred well and left for settling for 3 days. Then the water was decanted using a thin pipe carefully making sure that no settled part was decanted. Then we added 10% sodium hexa meta phosphate to the samples for dissolution and stirred at regular intervals of 10 min for 2 hours. Then we used a sieve (<64 m) and removed the sand completely with the remaining collected to a 1000ml cylinder. Then the cylinder was filled upto 1000ml mark with distilled water and stirred rigorously for 1min each and left undisturbed for 6hr40min for the silt to be collected at bottom with clay on the top . From the above procedure we had separated silt and clay .

Work to be done:

Now the clay mineralogy is to be studied and the rock magnetic properties of silt collected is to be calculated .