Historical changes in the aquatic environment and input of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons over 1000 years in Lake Kitaura, Japan

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We examined the vertical distributions of total organic carbon (TOC), total nitrogen (TN), total sulfur (TS), and 21 polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in a 100-cm-long sediment core collected from Lake Kitaura, a small and shallow eutrophic freshwater lake in central Japan, to elucidate changes in its aquatic environment and the input of PAHs with respect to human activity over the last 1000 years. Using a cross-plot of TOC and TS, the aquatic environment of this lake was well classified into four stages: a marine–brackish water period (≤1321 AD), a brackish–freshwater period (1394–1646 AD), a freshwater period (1726–1958 AD), and a eutrophication period (≥1971 AD). During the current eutrophication period, both TOC and TN have increased dramatically and TOC/TN (which is a useful indicator for distinguishing between aquatic and terrestrial plant sources) has decreased because algal production has markedly increased recently due to eutrophication. The vertical distributions of PAHs (which have derived primarily from combustion over the last 1000 years) showed increases in layers corresponding to periods of volcanic activity in the 18th century, as well as dramatic increases from 1971 to the present. Thus, both the aquatic environment and the input of PAHs in Lake Kitaura have been strongly affected by recent human activity. On the other hand, among all of the PAHs, only perylene—which is known to be of biological origin—was consistently formed via first-order kinetics over the period covered by the core. Its formation was barely influenced by fluctuations in the input of the precursor of perylene or how reductive the environment in the bottom water was.