Abstract
Black carbon (BC) is one of the major drivers of climate change and a useful indicator of environmental pollution from industrialization, and thus it is essential to reconstruct the historical trend in BC flux to better understand its impact. The Yancheng coastal wetland reserve in Jiangsu province is an area sensitive to global sea level change and is also located in the most developed as well as most polluted region of China. We investigated the concentration and historical flux of BC over the past 150 years through geochemical analysis of two 210Pb-dated sediment cores from Yancheng coastal wetland. Measured BC contents ranged from 0.24 mg g-1 to 1.41 mg g-1 with average values of 0.51mg g-1-0.69 mg g-1, and BC fluxes ranged from 0.69 g m-2 yr-1 to 11.80 g m-2 yr-1 with averages of 2.94g m-2 yr-1-3.79 g m-2 yr-1. These values are consistent with other records worldwide. Both BC content and flux show a gradual and continuous increase over time and clearly reflect increased emissions from anthropogenic activities. The BC records have a significant peak in recent years (from 2000 to 2007), which is accompanied by the sharp increase of energy consumption and total carbon emission in the region. It is reasonable to conclude that changes in BC from increasing human activities have controlled BC fluxes during the last 150 years. Industrial contamination, especially BC emission, in the coastal region of eastern China should be taken into account when developing management strategies for protecting the natural environment.
Highlights
Black carbon (BC) is a molecularly diverse organic product of incomplete combustion of biomass and fossil fuels and is one of the major components of atmospheric aerosols [1]
The distributions were similar for the two cores and characterized by the highest value occurring at the subsurface sections, with a general decrease on moving to the deeper layers (Fig 3A)
Magnetic susceptibility is directly linked in this case to a concentration of anthropogenic ferromagnetic particles and is dominated by high values of magnetite that are produced during the combustion of fossil fuel [41]
Summary
Black carbon (BC) is a molecularly diverse organic product of incomplete combustion of biomass and fossil fuels and is one of the major components of atmospheric aerosols [1]. It plays a critical role in climate change because of its efficient light-absorbing character [2] and has been identified as the second largest contributor, after CO2, to anthropogenic radiative forcing [3]. As one of the major source regions of BC aerosol, BC emissions in China accounts for roughly 25% of the global anthropogenic production [6,7]. Owing to the above two reasons (being direct radiative forcing and potential C sink), there has been an escalation in interest in BC [11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]
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