Detection of silica-mediated dissolution of magnetic grains in sediments using FORC diagrams

Recently silica-mediated dissolution has been recognized as a potentially important factor influencing magnetic studies of marine and lacustrine sediments. Although direct evidence for the dissolution of magnetic particles in silica-rich environments is lacking, the process is expected to produce changes in the magnetic grain-size distribution, a hypothesis that is tested in this study on sediments from Lake Tanganyika, East Africa, using First Order Reversal Curves (FORCs). Results from different magnetic intensity zones within the studied samples clearly show changes in the grain-size distribution of magnetic minerals. In particular, zones with high biogenic silica content (BSi) correlated with depletion in fine-grained magnetic material, whereas zones with lower BSi showed no depletion. These results are consistent with the idea that silica-mediated dissolution results in the preferential removal of fine-grained magnetic material, and indicate that FORC diagrams are effective in characterizing silica-mediated dissolution in sediments.