Determination of Mercury in Marine Sediments by Atomic Fluorescence

Marine sediments refer to the collective term for seabed sediments formed by various marine sedimentary processes. They are materials that settle on the seabed with seawater as the medium. Sedimentary processes can generally be divided into three different types: physical, chemical, and biological. Since these processes often do not occur in isolation, sediments can be considered geological bodies produced by combined processes. Traditionally, sediments are classified by depth as follows: nearshore sediments (0–20 meters), shallow-sea sediments (20–200 meters), mid-depth sea sediments (200–2000 meters), and deep-sea sediments (greater than 2000 meters).  

Marine sediments serve as indicators of the environmental conditions in their respective areas, primarily because they can amplify information about marine pollution. Not only can they spatially provide representative statistics on the impact range of marine pollution events, but they can also chronologically record the occurrence of such events. Compared with detecting other environmental factors, monitoring marine sediments can reliably reflect changes in the 'climate' of marine pollution over larger spatiotemporal scales with relatively small sampling sizes and lower sampling frequency, indicating the state and trend changes of regional marine environmental quality.