Abundance sample contamination sources

Sampling and analysis for Pb have been difficult because of low concentrations and abundant contamination sources lead paint, lead weights, and gasoline exhausts. The latter source is now substantially reduced, so perhaps the current Pb contamination problem is less serious than it was in the 1980s. 

This value characterizes the upper level of relative scattering of estimated elements concentration in all the considered snow samples, which is associated both with estimation errors in groups 1-3 and natural variation of the elements abundance in samples. Thus, the results of successive testing of ypotheses Ht -H3 allow us to conclude that the basic hypothesis Hb is true and only global source of chemical contamination exists on the territory of Karabash. 

The above inference concerns all chemical pollutants except Fe, Cu, Si, and Ni. The abundance of these elements in melted-snow samples is beyond the limits predicted by the above model of vaporization and consequently can be attributed to non-molecular forms of mass-transfer of these elements. This discrepancy can be explained by some additional sources of contaminants within the considered technology. A comprehensive comparative analysis shows that the most probable form of transferring such elements as Fe, Cu, Si, Ni into the atmosphere and snow are the matte and dust, where they are major chemical elements. A rather strong correlation... 

An alternative to the terrestrial synthesis of the nucleobases is to invoke interstellar chemistry. Martins has shown, using an analysis of the isotopic abundance of 13C, that a sample of the 4.6 billion year old Murchison meteorite which fell in Australia in 1969 contains traces of uracil and a pyrimidine derivative, xanthine. Samples of soil that surrounded the meteor when it was retrieved were also analyzed. They gave completely different results for uracil, consistent with its expected terrestrial origin, and xanthine was undetectable [48], The isotopic distributions of carbon clearly ruled out terrestrial contamination as a source of the organic compounds present in the meteorite. At 0°C and neutral pH cytosine slowly decomposes to uracil and guanine decomposes to xanthine so both compounds could be the decomposition products of DNA or RNA nucleobases. They must have either travelled with the meteorite from its extraterrestrial origin or been formed from components present in the meteorite and others encountered on its journey to Earth. Either way, delivery of nucleobases to a prebiotic Earth could plausibly have been undertaken by meteors. The conditions that formed the bases need not have been those of an early Earth at all but of a far more hostile environment elsewhere in the Solar System. That environment may have been conducive to the production of individual bases but they may never have been able to form stable DNA or RNA polymers this development may have required the less extreme conditions prevalent on Earth. 

---