Mired in the past — looking to the future: Geochemistry of peat and the analysis of past environmental changes

Abstract

Peat cores from ombrotrophic bogs have been used as a valuable archive to study environmental change for over a century. Much of this focus on the peat record has been on biological proxies of environmental change, such as pollen and peat-forming macrofossils, but there is growing interest in the geochemical record to study environmental changes. Several studies of long-term peat records in Europe have reconstructed past changes in atmospheric lead pollution, for example, and the general cohesiveness of the results and their agreement with known historical trends in metal production exemplify the best potential of peat geochemistry as an environmental archive. Based on the success with lead, a current emphasis in peat reconstructions is to assess the record of past mercury deposition and results thus far show generally consistent trends, e.g., a pre-anthropogenic mercury accumulation rate of about 0.5–1.5 μg Hg m − 2 year − 1 . Despite this general consistency there is increasing concern that there may be diagenetic effects on the quantitative record of some metals, which can be inferred based on a strong relationship between mercury and other organically bound elements and proxies for peat decomposition (C/N ratio). However, it is possible that changes in decomposition and the alteration of some metal records could provide climatic information. A few recent studies show that closer examination of the geochemical matrix, in some cases along with biological proxies, can provide valuable information on landscape changes and climate; for example, partitioning metals into different weight fractions and source regions can be applied to climate studies. The best interpretations of the peat geochemical record in the context of environmental and climate change will likely come when geochemical and biological records are considered simultaneously.