Multivariate statistical tool to analyse the environmental magnetic data in Ponnai River Sand, Tamil Nadu

In the recent years, an environmental pollution plays a major role in the developing countries. In this study, the magnetic susceptibility meter was used to measure the low and high frequency susceptibilities to assess the ferromagnetic behaviour of Ponnai River Sand, Tamil Nadu, India. In the present study, all samples show that low frequency magnetic susceptibilities (χlf) are slightly greater than the high frequency magnetic susceptibilities (χhf). The textural characteristics, such as sand, silt and clay percentage were determined by mechanical sieve analysis. The content of the sand is varied from 78 to 92.30% with mean values of 84.46 whereas silt content varied from 6.20 to 21.50% with mean value of 14.20. The results show that sand concentration was dominated in all the sampling locations. Moreover content of sand, silt and clay is not altered by anthropogenic activities in the study area. In order to study the relation between textural characteristics and magnetic susceptibility, all the data were treated using multivariate statistical techniques such as factor analysis (FA), Pearson correlation (PC) and cluster analysis (CA) were performed to evaluate the anthropogenic inputs. Based on the obtained results, most of the samples show that moderate distribution of ferromagnetic minerals in the study area due to anthropogenic activities.