Heavy Mineral Distribution and Provenance Studies of Coastal Sediments of Visakhapatnam Coast – Statistical Approach

The present work aims to address the heavy mineral studies of coastal sediments.  There are three different environments that are studied in the present investigation.  They include beach sediments from VUDA Park to Bheemili, coastal red sediments at INS Kalinga area and sediments from Gosthani estuary sub-environments.  The interpretation of heavy mineral data sets indicates that the nature and presence of similar heavy mineral assemblage in a beach sub-environments, coastal red sediments, and Gosthani estuary sub-environments suggests that the study area heavy minerals have been derived from the same source of lithologies.  The heavy mineral assemblages and their concentrations of heavy minerals in different sub-environments of coastal sediments are derived mainly from metamorphic suite of rocks i.e., Eastern Ghats group of rocks of khondalites and charnockites etc.  The results of the cluster analysis have clearly brought about the importance of variations in the heavy mineral percentages in forming clusters. Application of cluster analysis on the heavy minerals variations resulted in two main clusters.  Cluster-1 consists of nine sub-clusters and cluster-2 consists of eight sub-clusters.  Beach environment and Gosthani estuary sediments fall under the cluster-1 category. The predominance of coastal red sediments is fall under the cluster-2 category.  The clusters and sub-clusters have certain distinct characteristics which make them different from others and hence they have formed separate groups.