Chemical heterogeneity of humic substances and mobile soil colloids studied by X-ray microscopy and microspectroscopy

Humic substances are important sorbents for organic and inorganic contaminants such as heavy metals or radionuclides. They participate in many geochemical processes, affecting the quality of ground and surface waters, or the uptake of nutrients by plants. This property is due to their high surface area, the sorption of ions at charged hydrophilic functional groups and the sorption of non-polar organic compounds by hydrophobic surface sites [1,2].
The bulk chemical porperties of of humic substances can be investigated with a variety of methods like solid-state CP-MAS 13C-NMR spectroscopy, FT-IR spectroscopy, pyrolysis coupled with mass spectrometry or acid-base titrations. Although all of those methods have been applied widely to characterize colloids and their interaction with contaminants, methods which provide both in-situ imaging as well as spectroscopic characterization are rare. The Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscope (STXM) at beamline X1-A at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) is one of the few methods that may fill in this gap. Carbon X-ray absorption near-edge structure (C-1s XANES) as well as X-ray microscopy was employed to systematically monitor the chemical properties of humic substances. Furthermore, the colloidal fraction of different soil types was extracted and analyzed with C-1s XANES spectroscopy. The objectives of this study are (i) to characterize the spectroscopic features of humic substances and mobile soil colloids with C-XANES spectroscopy and X-ray microscopy and (ii) to evaluate a qualitative as well as quantitative comparison with other spectroscopic methods like solid-state CP-MAS 13C-NMR spectroscopy or FT-IR spectroscopy.

References
[1] Pignatello J.J., and Xing B. (1996) Environ. Sci. Technol. 30, 1-11.
[2] Grolimund, D., Elimelech, M., Borkovec, M., Barmettler, K., Kretzschmar, R., and Sticher, H. (1998) Environ. Sci. Technol. 32, 3562-3569.