Revolatilization of persistent organic pollutants in the Arctic induced by climate change

The oceanic biological pump modulates the atmospheric transport of persistent organic pollutants to the Arctic

“…The measured gas-phase concentrations of PCBs are comparable to those reported in Bear Island (North Atlantic-Sub Arctic Region) 6 for the low chlorinated congeners, and those reported by Gioia et al 11 for the eastern North Atlantic (3.5-22 pg m − 3 for Σ 7 PCBs). The higher concentrations found by the latter in the ice-margin zone, and the climate change modulation of atmospheric POP concentrations recently described 12 , is consistent with the higher variability reported here for some congeners in the ice-margin zone, and when air masses came from coastal and icecovered areas. The summer of 2007 holds the record for the melting of sea-ice around the North Pole 23 , which may have contributed to enhanced volatilization of POPs to the atmosphere as has been suggested recently for periods with minimum ice cover extention 12 .…”

“…The processes driving the transport of POPs to the AO and their occurrence have been the subject of several studies over the last two decades [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] , including the presence of POPs in the atmosphere, seawater and to a lesser extent plankton of the AO. Chemicals such as PCBs are highly hydrophobic, as measured by the octanol-water partition coefficients (K OW ) ranging between 10 4 and 10 8 , and are semivolatile.…”

“…These authors found decreasing concentrations at higher latitudes and evidence of fractionation processes with increasing concentrations of less chlorinated PCBs at high latitudes, which are less prone to cold trapping and being sequestered by settling particles rich in organic matter (biological pump). Gas-phase concentrations have also been reported to decrease from Northern Europe to the Arctic Atlantic sector 11 , with higher concentrations near the ice-margin zone, presumably due to enhanced volatilization induced by ice melting, which could be currently enhanced due to climate change 12 . However, the North-West Atlantic Ocean, a region with dominating south west air masses carrying pollutants from industrial/population influenced areas upwind, has not been studied before in terms of PCB occurrence and cycling, and none of the previous studies reported concentrations of POPs in air, water and plankton simultaneously.…”

Distribution and long-range transport of polyfluoroalkyl substances in the Arctic, Atlantic Ocean and Antarctic coast

“…Inasmuch as the climate has become warmer in the last 50 years, the influence on persistent organic pollutants (POPs) transport and fate has become a concern for scientists (Macdonald et al, 2005). Rapid ice melting in the Arctic area could have possibly accelerated the release of POPs stored in ice and snow (Macdonald et al, 2005;Ma et al, 2011).…”

Assessing and Forecasting Atmospheric Outflow of α-HCH from China on Intra-, Inter-, and Decadal Time Scales

“…This technique has been used to extract climate signals from the temporal trend of POPs in the atmosphere measured over the Great Lakes 24 and the Arctic. 11 Following these studies, we removed the both linear trend of the time series of standardized α-HCH outflow anomalies and the first autocorrelation from the α-HCH time series, in order to unveil potential climate signals from a "noise" background of the modeled time series of α-HCH outflow. A fugacity method developed by Harner et al 25 was used to calculate the response of α-HCH reemission from soil to air temperatures.…”