Abstract :

Thirteen sites allocated on grid bases covering the urban soil of Mutah – Al-Mazar municipal area (south of Al-Karak province) were collected. The collection was designed to cover inhibited or open areas and all occupational activities. The sites were investigated for their heavy-metal content to delineate the polluted areas and determine the potential pollution sources. The results show no or limited downward mobility of the heavy metals as there is no big difference in average heavy-metal contents between lower and upper soils. This might be due to high soil alkalinity and low rainfall quantities. Besides, it shows that traffic is the main source for pollution which was approved using the correlation coefficient and index of pollution (IP) techniques. Furthermore, the ratio of index of pollution for most of the sites are <1; few are >1 but not reaching 2, which indicates that a low extent of pollution prevails in the study area, because of the absence of heavy industrial firms and high density highways. The correlation coefficient results show that the upper soil differs from lower soil; in upper soils Cu correlated positively with Fe, Cr, Co, Mn, Zn, Ni, and Pb, whereas in the lower soil, it correlated with Fe, Cr, Co and Ni, which indicates a different source of contamination or an anthropogenic source that contains Zn, Mn, and Pb.