Abstract
Soil cover of the Earth is faced with intensive polychemical contamination. The pathways of the key pollutants are not investigated enough. Thus, the occasional transportation of soils to remote regions could serve as an informative tool for the elaboration of threshold levels of hazardous materials concentration. One of the most striking examples of such transboundary impact was the transfer of soils and grounds to the Antarctic stations Russkaya and Leningradskaya (before the implementation of the Madrid Protocol in 1991). Thus, the complex investigation of qualitative and quantitative composition of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in soils of various genesis (transported from Eurasia and pristine) of Antarctic have been conducted by the method of high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) in a gradient elution mode. The variability of PAHs content was evaluated across landscapes: pristine (the Hudson Mountains and the Haswell Archipelago), contaminated soils (stations Myrniy, Druzhnaya 4 and Bellinshausen) and unique samples of former agrosoils transported by fly in-fly of polar staff from St. Petersburg to Antarctic for local polar greenhouses in the Soviet times, when it was not strictly prohibited. The selected objects of study allow us to not only estimate the degree of contamination of Antarctic soils and grounds, but to also make it possible to assess the rate of PAH degradation in Antarctic conditions. Both high molecular and low molecular PAHs are accumulated following intense anthropogenic activity (fossil organic fuel combustion). The PAHs pool is dominated by low molecular weight representatives (naphthalene, phenanthrene, fluoranthene, pyrene). In most cases, the highest concentrations of benz(a)pyrene does not exceed the Russian Threshold Standard rate, which is the strictest one in the world. The statistical analysis of raw data allowed us to conclude that the contamination of pristine soils of Antarctica across variable landscapes is at the very initial stage. However, we recorded extremely high levels of PAHs in the transported former agrosoils. We can assume that our data could be used as background levels for the elaboration of threshold concentrations of the PAHs for such an internationally managed region as Antarctica.
Highlights
The data obtained indicate that Antarctica has a group of soils with a relatively low total polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) content and soils with a high content of PAHs
In the soils of conditional reference landscapes the content of benz(a)pyrene, which is a conditional marker of anthropogenic pollution, is very low or equals zero (Table 1)
Data on PAHs distribution in Antarctic soils showed that former agrosoils, transported from St
Summary
The Madrid Protocol prohibits the importation into the territory of Antarctica of various biological substrates and soils [2], but in Soviet times there were facts of transporting soils and grounds from St. Petersburg on the territory of the Leningradskaya and Russkaya Stations. No control was carried out on the level of contamination of these former agrosoils, which resulted in the transfer to the Antarctic continent of non-typical pollutants for this region. Our study is novel in many aspects because it is associated with the evaluation of current ecotoxicological states of the soils, located in the vicinities of the Antarctic stations and soils of mature ecosystems, and because we aimed to obtain information about the fact of agrosoils transportation and we have possibilities to estimate the degree of the PAHs stabilization rate in severe polar conditions with limited microbiological activity. The fact of soil and grounds transportation which had appeared more than 40 years ago and the existence of these grounds in conservated stations represents quite an interesting model for model ecotoxicological research
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