Yan Zheng

City University of New York - Queens College | QC CUNY · School of Earth and Environmental Sciences

Background and aims Rice accounts for around 20% of the calories consumed by humans. Essential nutrients like zinc (Zn) are crucial for rice growth and for populations relying on rice as a staple food. No well-established study method exists. As a result, we a lack a clear picture of the chemical forms of zinc in rice grain. Furthermore, we do not...

Microbially mediated inorganic-methylated arsenic (As) transformation in paddy soil is crucial to rice safety; however, the linkages between the microbial As methylation process and methylated As species remain elusive. Here, 62 paddy soils were collected from the Mekong River delta of Cambodia to profile As-related functional gene composition invo...

Viruses play a crucial role in microbial mortality, diversity and biogeochemical cycles. Groundwater is the largest global freshwater and one of the most oligotrophic aquatic systems on Earth, but how microbial and viral communities are shaped in this special habitat is largely unexplored. In this study, we collected groundwater samples from 23 to...

Background and Aims Severely low soil nutrient status and malnutrition or "hidden hunger" are two serious global problems. The consumption of rice constitutes approximately 20% of human caloric intake. Trace elements like zinc (Zn) is essential nutrient for rice growth, and to the populations depend on rice staples. This research examines the speci...

Abstract The distinct climatic and geographical conditions make high‐altitude permafrost on the Tibetan Plateau suffer more severe degradation than polar permafrost. However, the microbial responses associated with greenhouse gas production in thawing permafrost remain obscured. Here we applied nanopore‐based long‐read metagenomics and high‐through...

Arsenic (As) is one of the most harmful and widespread groundwater contaminants globally. Besides the occurrence of geogenic As pollution, there is also a large number of sites that have been polluted by anthropogenic activities, with many of those requiring active remediation to reduce their environmental impact. Cost-effective remedial strategies...

Understanding how natural nanoaggregates of iron (Fe) and organic matter (OM), currently identified in organic rich soil or peat, interact with metals and metalloids is environmentally significant. Coal is also organic-rich and exemplifies anoxic sedimentary environments with Fe usually as pyrite and not oxides. Here, we analyze the local structure...

Screen-printed carbon electrodes (SPCEs) were fabricated and compared with the commercial DS 110 (DropSens). In addition to the classic cyclic voltammetry (CV) of K3[Fe(CN)6], a method using widely available Bausch + Lomb and Tylenol was developed for comprehensive evaluation of the electrochemical performance of SPCEs. Scanning electron microscope...

Geogenic arsenic enrichment in soil and river sediments of Tibet compared to its upper crustal abundance has been observed, raising the question whether other trace elements are also enriched and thus may pose ecological risks. Because human activities are limited, the reservoir sediments after the recent construction of the Shiquan dam on the Sing...

Climate warming has accelerated thawing of northern permafrost, resulting in changes to the supply of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) to inland waters with uncertain fate. Extensive surface – groundwater interactions occur in alpine permafrost watersheds and likely influence DOC processing differently than systems with limited interactions. Here, we...

Sediment in fluvial-deltaic plains with high-As groundwater is heterogenous but its characterization of As and Fe oxidation states lacks resolution, and is rarely attempted for aqueous and solid phases simultaneously. Here, we pair high-resolution (> 1 sample/meter) Fe extended fine-structure spectroscopy (EXAFS, n = 40) and As X-ray absorption nea...

Construction of dams on the Singe Tsangpo (ST) and the Yarlung Tsangpo (YT) Rivers, the upper stretch of the Indus and the Brahmaputra Rivers, respectively, are expected to affect material transport. To evaluate the effects of dam construction on arsenic (As) mobility and transport in the ST River and the YT River in Tibet and the downstream river...

Research into precautionary action suggests outreach with personally-relevant risk information may help overcome optimistic biases, which have been shown to impede voluntary testing for arsenic by at-risk private well households. Since 2002, New Jersey's Private Well Testing Act (PWTA) has required testing for arsenic during real estate transaction...

Over 2 million mostly rural Americans are at risk of drinking water from private wells that contain arsenic (As) exceeding the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) of 10 μg/L. How well existing treatment technologies perform in real world situations, and to what extent they reduce health risks, are not well u...

The health effects of drinking water exposure to inorganic arsenic are well known but are less well defined for dietary exposure. The rising concerns of arsenic risks from diet motivated this study of arsenic concentrations in highland barley, vegetables, meat, and dairy products to evaluate arsenic exposure source and to assess health risks among...

Exposure to naturally occurring arsenic in groundwater is a public health concern, particularly for households served by unregulated private wells. At present, one of the greatest barriers to exposure reduction is a lack of private well testing due to difficulties in motivating individual private well owners to take protective actions. Policy and r...

Background: The 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) regulates >170,000 public water systems to protect health, but not >13 million private wells. State and local government requirements for private well water testing are rare and inconsistent; the responsibility to ensure water safety remains with individual households. Over the last two decades,...

More than 100 million people globally are estimated to be exposed to arsenic in drinking water that exceeds the World Health Organization guideline of 10 µg/L. In an effort to develop and test a low-cost sustainable approach for water arsenic testing in Bangladesh, we conducted a randomized controlled trial which found arsenic educational intervent...

Regularly ingesting water with elevated arsenic increases adverse health risks. Since September 2002, the NJ Private Well Testing Act (PWTA) has required testing untreated well water for arsenic during real estate transactions in 12 counties. Its implementation provides an opportunity to investigate the effects of policy intervention on well testin...

Arsenic is a naturally occurring toxic element often concentrated in groundwater at levels unsafe for human consumption. Private well water in the United States is mostly unregulated by federal and state drinking water standards. It is the responsibility of the over 13 million U.S. households regularly depending on private wells for their water to...

Arsenic, a toxic element naturally found in groundwater, is a public health concern for households drinking from wells. Private well water is not regulated to meet the federal drinking water arsenic Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) of 10μg/L, or the more protective 5μg/L New Jersey (NJ) state MCL. In the absence of consistent private well regulation...

Riverbank sediment cores and pore waters, shallow well waters, seepage waters and river waters were collected along the Meghna Riverbank in Gazaria Upazila, Bangladesh in Jan. 2006 and Oct.-Nov. 2007 to investigate hydrogeochemical processes controlling the fate of groundwater As during discharge. Redox transition zones from suboxic (0-2m depth) to...

Fresh water resources are scarce in rural communities in the southern deltaic plains of Bangladesh where both shallow and deep groundwater is frequently brackish, and fresh water ponds have been increasingly salinized by inundation during storm surges and brackish-water aquaculture. Low-cost aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) schemes were construct...

Arsenicosis and fluorosis, two endemic diseases known to result from exposure to their elevated concentrations in groundwater of north China used by many rural households for drinking, have been major public health concerns for several decades. Over the last decade, a large number of investigations have been carried out to delineate the spatial dis...

Groundwater in sedimentary deposits in China, Southern, and Southeast Asia down gradient from the Tibetan plateau contain elevated As concentrations on a regional scale. To ascertain the possibility of source region As enrichment, samples of water (n=86), stream sediment (n=77) and soil (n=73) were collected from the Singe Tsangpo (upstream of the...

Household surveys in Bangladesh between 1994 and 2009 assessed sanitation access using questions that differed significantly over time, resulting in apparently inconsistent findings. Applying the WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme's 2008 definition for open defecation and improved sanitation facilities excluding shared facilities to the comp...

Arsenic (As) testing could help 22 million people, using drinking water sources that exceed the Bangladesh As standard, to identify safe sources. A cluster randomized controlled trial was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of household education and local media in the increasing demand for fee-based As testing. Randomly selected households (N...

Point-of-use water treatment, especially chlorination, is an effective intervention to reduce diarrhoea, a leading cause of death for children under five. Yet success in chlorination uptake has been limited. One obstacle is objection to treated water's taste/odour. Protective chlorine residuals that are not offensive to users require accurate dosin...

A national drinking water quality survey conducted in 2009 furnished data that were used to make an updated estimate of chronic arsenic exposure in Bangladesh. About 20 million and 45 million people were found to be exposed to concentrations above the national standard of 50 µg/L and the World Health Organization's guideline value of 10 µg/L, respe...

Exposure to arsenic in groundwater via drinking remains unabated for millions of villagers in Bangladesh. Since a blanket testing campaign using test kits almost a decade ago, millions of new wells have been installed but not tested; thus affordable testing is needed. The performance of the Arsenic Econo-Quick (EQ) kit was evaluated by blindly test...

A coastal acid mine drainage (AMD) of ~800m length, Chonam-ri Creek flows through a neutralizing pond mid-stream before discharging to the Kwangyang Bay of South Korea. The creek water displays a low dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentration of ~1mg/L, with a wide range of pH from ~3 to ~7 and Fe concentration from 0.005 to 106mg/L. Our previous...

Elevated arsenic concentration in fractured bedrock wells has emerged as an important and challenging health problem, especially in rural areas without public water supply and mandatory monitoring of private wells. This has posed risks of skin, bladder, prostate diseases and cancers to private well users. In central Maine, including the study site,...

A pilot dietary experiment was conducted over 10 days to evaluate whether a simple yet often underutilized approach of constructing mass balance of arsenic metabolites can be used to assess in vivo bioaccessibility of arsenic in cooked rice. Two volunteers were involved in this study. The quantity of drinking water, food and urine samples, together...

The 20th century witnessed exponential growth of the human population. A concurrent change was urbanization, with close to half of the world's population residing in urban centers at the beginning of the 21st century (McGranahan and Satterthwaite, 2003). Humans have domesticated nature with a net benefit to themselves such as enhancing food supplie...

Between 2001 and 2005, 21,155 of 445,638 wells in 20,517 villages in 292 counties in 16 provinces from China, or 5% of wells, were found to contain > 50 microg/L arsenic (As) by field testing with the Merck As kit. We achieved quality assurance of analysis of at least 10% of the wells containing > 50 microg/L As using hydride generation atomic fluo...

In June 2006, we surveyed the seafloor of western Long Island Sound with the R/V HUGH SHARP and collected multibeam bathymetry, chirp subbottom profiling, side-scan sonar imagery, and sediment samples (25 gravity cores, 11 multicores, and 10 grabs). In addition, 36 CTD hydrocast stations measured O, pH, alkalinity, trace metals, nutrients, Polonium...

This NSF-funded program developed an oceanographic field experience coupled to a strong curriculum and one-on-one mentoring of individual research projects, as a means to increase diversity in the geosciences. The working hypothesis is that New York City students will be attracted to geosciences through an integrated field and research experience t...

Techniques for making precise and accurate radiocarbon accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) measurements on samples containing less than a few hundred micrograms of carbon are being developed at the NOSAMS facility. A detailed examination of all aspects of the sample preparation and data analysis process shows encouraging results. Small quantities o...

This project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Opportunities to Enhance Diversity in the Geosciences Division, will develop a program based on multidisciplinary investigations of Long Island Sound, as a vehicle to enhance diversity in geosciences. The program includes a curriculum centered on geosciences with a substantial field and la...

During modern El Nino events, upwelled nutrients off of southern Baja California are sharply reduced due to a regionally deeper nutricline. We use two rapidly accumulating sediment cores from this region to reconstruct upwelling and productivity during the past 52 kyr. By doing so, we test hypotheses regarding ENSO system behavior on both orbital a...

A simple, fast and sensitive speciation method is described for inorganic arsenic in water at the μg/l level, applicable in the laboratory and in the field, based on differential pulse cathodic stripping voltammetry (DPCSV). Only As(III) is deposited on a Hg electrode in the presence of Cu and Se in HCl medium. Determination of total As is performe...

Particulate non-lithogenic uranium (PNU), excess U above detrital background levels found in marine particulate matter, is formed in surface waters throughout the ocean. Previous studies have shown that PNU is regenerated completely prior to burial of particles in sediments within well-oxygenated open-ocean regions. However, the fate of PNU has nev...

Uranium behaves as a nearly conservative element in oxygenated seawater, but it is precipitated under chemically reducing conditions that occur in sediments underlying low-oxygen bottom water or in sediments receiving high fluxes of particulate organic carbon. Sites characterized by a range of bottom-water oxygen (BWO) and organic carbon flux (OCF)...

Conventional batch mode analysis of dissolved sulfide by cathodic stripping voltammetry (CSV) is known to suffer from loss of sulfide in the cell to the waste mercury pool, compromising quantification of sulfide. Here we report a simple alternative approach to batch-mode differential pulse CSV (DPCSV). A fresh aliquot of sample is used for each vol...

Authigenic metals (uranium, cadmium, and molybdenum), organic carbon (OC) and total C37 alkenone (totC37) concentrations were measured for the last 350 kyr in core MD900963, located in the eastern equatorial Arabian Sea. Authigenic metal concentrations on a carbonate-free basis range between 1 and 17 ppm, 0.5 and 6 ppm, and 0.5 and 4 ppm for U, Cd,...

We explored the reliability of radiocarbon ages obtained on organic carbon phases in opal-rich Southern Ocean sediments. Paired biogenic carbonate and total organic carbon (TOC) 14 C analyses for three Southern Ocean cores showed that the TOC ages were systematically younger than the carbonate ages. Carbonate ages were consistent with oxygen isotop...

The conventional view that the warm climate of the Holocene epoch (the last 11.7 kyr BP) has been stable is increasingly challenged by a number of studies demonstrating millennial-scale variability. For examples, a 1500 year periodicity in the Holocene has been observed in the high latitude of North Atlantic and at ~ 20° N off the coast of Africa i...

Pore water and sediment Mo concentrations were measured in a suite of multicores collected at four sites along the northeastern flank of the Santa Barbara Basin to examine the connection between authigenic Mo formation and pore water sulfide concentration. Only at the deepest site (580 m), where pore water sulfide concentrations rise to >0.1 μM rig...

Although climate records from several locations around the world show nearly synchronous and abrupt changes, the nature of the inferred teleconnection is still poorly understood. On the basis of preserved laminations and molybdenum enrichments in open margin sediments we demonstrate that the oxygen content of northeast Pacific waters at 800 m depth...

Although climate records from several locations around the world show nearly synchronous and abrupt changes, the nature of the inferred teleconnection is still poorly understood. On the basis of preserved laminations and molybdenum enrichments in open margin sediments we demonstrate that the oxygen content of northeast Pacific waters at 800 m depth...

We explored the reliability of radiocarbon ages obtained on organic carbon phases in opal-rich Southern Ocean sediments. Paired biogenic carbonate and total organic carbon (TOC) 14 C analyses for three Southern Ocean cores showed that the TOC ages were systematically younger than the carbonate ages. Carbonate ages were consistent with oxygen isotop...

The chemical and isotopic data reported here were carried out in our shore-based laboratories to complement the shipboard pore-fluid chemical data from the northern Barbados Ridge. The data include (1) pore-fluid bromide, iodide, and strontium concentrations and strontium and oxygen isotope ratios at both sites drilled, and (2) strontium, oxygen, a...

In situ bulk permeability was measured in a borehole that intersected the decollement zone (a low-angle detachment fault) between the North American and Caribbean plates. Permeability measurements were made at a variety of fluid-pressure conditions, defining a quantitative relation between bulk permeability and effective stress for this plate-bound...

The interrelation between deformation styles and behavior of fluids in accretionary prisms is under debate, particularly the possibility that overpressuring within the basal decollement may enable mechanical decoupling of the prism from the subducting material. Anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility (AMS) data from sediments spanning the basal decol...

The subduction of the oceanic spreading center at the Chile Triple Junction is marked by a substantial thermal perturbation and marked changes in the hydrogeologic and aqueous geochemical regimes in the overthrust plate. Ridge subduction substantially changes the fluid chemistry in the wedge through variably hydrating the oceanic basement, accretio...

Logs collected while drilling measured density in situ, through the accretionary prism and decollement zone of the northern Barbados Ridge. Consolidation tests relate void ratio (derived from density) to effective stress and predict a fluid pressure profile, assuming that the upper 100 m of the prism is at a hydrostatic pressure gradient. The calcu...

Methodology for trace sulfide determinations, developed within the San Francisco Bay-Estuary Toxics Study, was applied in an investigation of redox gradients in the suboxic Santa Barbara Basin. Water-column distributions of dissolved oxygen, sulfide and nitrate, and pore-water distributions for dissolved sulfide and iron indicate very different red...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1999. Includes bibliographical references. Department: Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Oxygen and strontium isotopic composition of sedimentary pore fluids obtained by drilling at the Chile Triple Junction have been used to obtain information on the diagenesis and transport mechanisms of fluids. Samples were collected from three sites located on an east-west transect of the pre-collision zone (Sites 859, 860, and 861) and from Site 8...