Floodplains

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1.1 Background of the Study River floodplains are highly dynamic systems resulting from frequent flood inundations. Tinny layers of sediment are deposited in floodplains when flood water recedes. The deposited sediment layers consist of nutrients, soil particles and organic matter, but may also contain significant amounts of contaminants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, pesticides, metals etc (Klok et al., 2008). Floodplain sedimentation and erosion processes are mainly caused by floods which is one of the factor that can control the redistribution of anthropogenic contaminants in the floodplains (Malmon et al., 2002). Therefore, beside atmospheric inputs of pollutants, flooding events strongly influence the contamination of the soils of floodplains. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are a large group of more than 100 hundred organic compounds containing of two or more fused aromatic rings organized in linear, angular or cluster formation. PAHs are of environmental and health concern because a number of them have known mutagenic, genetoxic and carcinogenic properties as well as long range transportation capabilities. They tend to …show more content…

The sixteen PAHs have been further classified as follows; benzo(a)pyrene(BaP)as group 1A (carcinogenic to humans), dibenzo(a,h) anthracene(DahA) group 2A (probably carcinogenic to humans) and naphthalene (NaP), benzo(a)anthracene (BaA), benzo(b)fluoranthene (BbF), benzo(k)fluoranthene (BkF), chrysene (Chry) and indeno(1,2,3-cd)perylene (IndP) as group 2B (possibly carcinogenic to human), while acenaphthene (Ace), acenaphthylene (Acy), anthracene (Ant), benzo(ghi)perylene (BghiP), fluoranthene (Flt), fluorine (Flu), phenanthrene (Phen) and pyrene (Pyr) are not classified as to their carcinogenicity to humans (Banger et al.,

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