The Great Acceleration of fragrances and PAHs archived in an ice core from Elbrus, Caucasus

Abstract

the Great Acceleration of the anthropogenic impact on the earth system is marked by the ubiquitous distribution of anthropogenic materials throughout the global environment, including technofossils, radionuclides and the exponential increases of methane and carbon dioxide concentrations. However, personal care products as direct tracers of human domestic habits are often overlooked. Here, we present the first research combining fragrances, as novel personal care products, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (pAHs) as combustion and industrial markers, across the onset of the Great Acceleration in the Elbrus, Caucasus, ice core. This archive extends from the 1930s to 2005, spanning the profound changes in the relationship between humans and the environment during the twentieth century. concentrations of both fragrances and pAHs rose throughout the considered period, reflecting the development of the Anthropocene. However, within this rising trend, remarkable decreases of the tracers track the major socioeconomic crises that occurred in eastern europe during the second half of the twentieth century. The recent influence of human activity on the global environment is so profound that a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, was proposed. From the mid-twentieth century onwards the exponential growth in human population, economic activity and resource consumption created a global-scale change in the human signal, defined as the Great Acceleration 1,2. Geochemical signatures due to novel anthropogenic materials, including new minerals, plastics and organic contaminants, can be detected in nearly every terrestrial environment. The cryosphere is particularly good at archiving this human signal, by preserving the deposited aerosols and chemicals in the ice 3,4. A variety of indicators related to human population growth demonstrate a marked increasing trend since the 1950s 5 , but few studies consider the evolution of personal care products as socioeconomic development tracers during the Great Acceleration 6. The concentrations of these compounds in environmental matrices may be related to population size, changing industrial production and domestic behavior, as well as due to transport mechanisms 7. The knowledge regarding the distribution of personal care products in the cryosphere is limited 8-10 and no studies currently consider these contaminants in ice cores. Compared to personal care products, more information is available for the presence of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) in ice core archives. However, the related literature is restricted to a handful of studies, representing different Arctic 11,12 , Antarctic 13,14 and high altitude environments 15-17. PAHs are produced by the incomplete combustion of organic material and partially derive from natural sources, but mostly derive from anthropogenic emissions 18. While this human signal can be detected in remote environments 19 , the majority of the research in mountain environments is from other Eurasian mountain ranges such as the Himalaya or the Alps, w...

Levels and ecological risk of selected organic pollutants in the high-altitude alpine cryosphere - The Adamello-Brenta Natural Park (Italy) as a case study

“…By contrast, the Ant/(Ant + Phe) ratio suggests a petrogenic origin, as it was < 0.10 across all six samples from July and four samples from September 2019. Similar results were obtained by Vecchiato et al (2020), who explained this apparent contradiction in contamination origin with the different reactivities of the isomers during their atmospheric transport and aging processes.…”

“…High values were reported by Hu et al (2012), who recorded mean HHCB and AHTN concentrations of 11.0 and 33.3 ng/L, respectively, in snow samples from the Beijing urban area. Fragrances have also been detected in surface snow at Svalbard (Vecchiato et al, 2018), with concentrations up to 72 ng/L, and these compounds have been monitored for the first time in the Elbro ice core (Vecchiato et al, 2020), where an increase in concentration from 1930 to 2005 was reported.…”

“…In Europe, recent monitoring studies have highlighted the presence of CUPs in glacial meltwater of the Italian Alps (Ferrario et al, 2017a;Rizzi et al, 2019) and glacial lakes of the Pyrenees (Santolaria et al, 2015). Similarly, the volatility of synthetic musk fragrances predisposes them to medium-range atmospheric transport, such that they have been found in snow and glacial meltwater samples from the Italian Alps (Villa et al, 2014;Ferrario et al, 2017a), an ice core from the Caucasus (Vecchiato et al, 2020), and a sediment core from a glacier-fed lake in Switzerland (Bogdal et al, 2009).…”

Investigation of the Combined Effects of Rising Temperature and Pesticide Contamination on the Swimming Behaviour of Alpine Chironomids

“…Despite this, these results remain of interest because, according to their persistence observed for other POPs and banned pesticides, CPF will continue to be detected in the environment for several years, similar to endosulfan [63]. In addition, these findings may be valid for other lipophilic and semi-volatile toxicants that may be found in remote areas, such as the synthetic fragrances or the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons [7,64]. This study emphasises the importance of considering effects on behaviour (e.g., swimming speed) in early detection of the adverse effects of any stressor in toxicology evaluations and the incipient need to use wild alpine species for the evaluation of natural ecosystems to increase the ecological realism of ex situ experiments.…”

Hybrid Targeted/Untargeted Screening Method for the Determination of Wildfire and Water-Soluble Organic Tracers in Ice Cores and Snow

“…Last, considering that a fundamental step between sample collection and analysis is ensuring analyte preservation and preventing or minimizing any physical or chemical change (e.g., adsorption, diffusion, volatilization, oxidation, and microbial degradation), we assessed organic tracer preservation after melting of the ice/snow samples. We investigated two main sample storage strategies that involve the re-freezing of previously molten ice samples − and the physical adsorption on a solid phase . Previous studies performed on different chemicals (drugs) and matrices (wastewater) showed divergent results, , indicating that case-specific investigations are needed to assess analyte’s preservation during sample storage.…”