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Arsenic release from paddy soils during monsoon flooding

Nature Geoscience volume 3, pages 53–59 (2010)Cite this article

Abstract

Bangladesh relies heavily on groundwater for the irrigation of dry-season rice. However, the groundwater used for irrigation often contains high concentrations of arsenic, potentially jeopardizing the future of rice production in the country. In seasonally flooded fields, topsoil arsenic concentrations decrease during the monsoon season, suggesting that flooding attenuates arsenic accumulation in the soils. Here we examine the chemistry of soil porewater and floodwater during the monsoon season in rice paddies in Munshiganj, Bangladesh, to assess whether flooding releases significant quantities of arsenic from the soils. We estimate that between 51 and 250 mg m−2 of soil arsenic is released into floodwater during the monsoon season. This corresponds to a loss of 13–62% of the arsenic added to soils through irrigation each year. The arsenic was distributed throughout the entire floodwater column by vertical mixing and was laterally removed when the floodwater receded. We conclude that monsoon floodwater removes a large amount of the arsenic added to paddy soils through irrigation, and suggest that non-flooded soils are particularly at risk of arsenic accumulation.

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Figure 1: Map and schematic vertical cross-section of the field area.
Figure 2: Floodwater level, sampling times and As concentrations in bulk floodwater and channel water.
Figure 3: Arsenic profiles in floodwater on field I.
Figure 4: Geochemistry of arsenic release.
Figure 5: Arsenic flux estimates.

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Acknowledgements

We thank T. Ruettimann, J. Traber, K. Barmettler and D. Gaertner for analytical support, T. Rosenberg, C. Farnsworth, S. Chowdhury, M. S. Alam and A. Rahman for help with field work, R. Neumann for help with procuring meteorological data and C. Dinkel for providing the field spectrometer. We are indebted to the people of Bashailbhog village and to M. F. Ahmed from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology for their long-standing support of this project. Financial support of this research by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant 200021-15612/1 and 200020-113654/1) is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Eawag, Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology, Ueberlandstrasse 133, CH-8600 Dübendorf, Switzerland

    Linda C. Roberts, Stephan J. Hug, Andreas Voegelin & Bernhard Wehrli

  2. Department of Environmental Sciences, Institute of Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics, ETH Zurich, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland

    Linda C. Roberts, Jessica Dittmar, Andreas Voegelin, Ruben Kretzschmar & Bernhard Wehrli

  3. Center for Applied Geoscience, University of Tübingen, D-72076 Tübingen, Germany

    Olaf A. Cirpka

  4. Department of Civil Engineering, Dhaka University of Engineering and Technology, Gazipur-1700, Bangladesh

    Ganesh C. Saha

  5. Department of Civil Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka-1000, Bangladesh

    M. Ashraf Ali & A. Borhan M. Badruzzaman

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Contributions

L.C.R. planned and carried out the fieldwork and wrote the manuscript as part of her PhD thesis. L.C.R. and S.J.H. designed the sampling equipment and procedures. J.D., A.V. and R.K. carried out soil sampling and analyses. B.W. suggested the use of porewater samplers and O.A.C. provided support in modelling the floodwater data. G.C.S., M.A.A. and A.B.M.B. co-initiated the project and provided technical and logistic support during field work. A.V., S.J.H., R.K. and B.W. contributed to data interpretation and the writing of the manuscript. All authors contributed to the final version of the manuscript. This study was part of a larger research project initiated and supervised by S.J.H., A.V. and R.K.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Linda C. Roberts or Stephan J. Hug.

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Roberts, L., Hug, S., Dittmar, J. et al. Arsenic release from paddy soils during monsoon flooding. Nature Geosci 3, 53–59 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo723

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