Spatial distribution and consequences of contaminants in harbour sediments: A case study from Richards Bay Harbour, South Africa

Bibliographical note

© 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Funder

This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research [grant numbers: 03F0798A, 03F0798B, 03F0798C] and is part of project TRACES (Tracing Human and Climate impact in South Africa) within the SPACES II Program (Science Partnerships for the Assessment of Complex Earth System Processes). The field work support by George Best is gratefully acknowledged. We acknowledge Anchor Energy (Pty) Ltd. for permission to use the multibeam data set. Doug Slogrove and Gaynor Deacon are acknowledged in this regard. We thank Transnet National Ports Authority for permission to use metal concentration data for the 2012 survey. The 2012 survey was funded by Transnet National Ports Authority and the CSIR through project Definition of baseline metal concentration models for assessing metal contamination of sediment from South African coastal waters (grant number: SIMS4401). We also thank Antonia Schell for semi-quantitative distribution data of plastic particles and Dirk Merten (both Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena) for ICP-MS and -OES analyses. Tammo Meyer (University of Greifswald) shared knowledge and equipment for aqua regia digestion. The cores were scanned with the ITRAX (CS-8) of GEOPOLAR at the University of Bremen. Klaus Jost kindly contributed the historical image of Richards Bay Harbour during the construction phase. Mike Steinich and Sebastian Lorenz (University of Greifswald) are acknowledged for their integral involvement in data collection.