COMPARISON OF MAJOR AND TRACE ELEMENTS BEFORE AND AFTER REMEDIATION, SILVER BOW CREEK, MONTANA

Silver Bow Creek, in western Montana is part of a much larger mining impacted river system. As the headwaters of the Clark Fork River, a large Superfund site contaminated by over 100 years of mining, it is an ideal site to study effects of remediation and metal transport. Samples were collected throughout the site and analyzed for various metals with Inductively Coupled Argon Plasma –Emission Spectroscopy (ICAPES). Undigested samples were analyzed by CO2 coulometry to determine dilution by precipitation of CaCO3. With this data and previous collected data we can see if levels have decreased, increased or perhaps just stayed the same by plotting element concentration in sediment against river kilometers to yield a first order glimpse at whether concentrations differ or not.