Abstract

The use of lake sediments to infer current fluxes and depositional histories of heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants (POPs) is well established and well documented for many temperate environments including the Great Lakes (Goldberg et al. 1981; Czuczwa and Hites 1984; Swackhamer and Armstrong 1986; Eisenreich et al. 1989) and lakes in Scandinavia (Johansson 1985; Verta et al. 1989; Rognerud and Fjeld 1993) as well as in European alpine and arctic lakes (Fernandez et al. 2000; Grimalt et al. 2001). The use of carbonaceous anthropogenic particles, to examine pollution impacts in temperate lakes is also well established (Rose 2001; Cameron et al. 2002). Since the early 1980s, studies of cores from temperate lakes have demonstrated that sediments preserve historical records for a wide range of organic chemical pollutants, heavy metals and anthropogenic particles. Sediment cores have become valuable tools for the assessment of large scale spatial trends of pollutant deposition, as well as for development of retrospective information on emissions and use of various chemicals, and for estimating current fluxes from specific source regions. Use of dated sediment cores from arctic environments is more recent, with most studies conducted from the early 1990s onwards. This work has been driven to a large extent by the need to understand the spatial and temporal trends of contaminants in the Arctic and the path-

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call

Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.