Iron cycling in the environment: new insights from the micro to the macro-scale

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Understanding the iron cycle in the environment is of prime importance because iron oxides are highly efficient at sorbing soluble contaminants, such as toxic metals. At first glance, iron cycling appears rather straight forward, i.e., microbial and/or chemical oxidation of ferrous iron and subsequent precipitation of iron oxides and abiotic and/or biotic reduction of ferric iron oxides and subsequent reductive dissolution of the oxides. Recent studies have however shown that the iron cycle is far more complex than we thought and that iron behavior in the environment is closely linked to the presence of other solutes, such as arsenic, aluminum, nitrogen, silicon, sulfur, phosphate, etc. The present proposal therefore aims at investigating iron cycling in natural and synthetic biogenic iron oxides (BIOS) in the presence of several solutes known to affect iron transformation and/or stability. The