Environmental Contaminants: Using natural archives to track sources and long-term trends of pollution

514 Pages·2015·13.83 MB·English

by  Jules M. Blais

Developments in Paleoenvironmental Research
Volume 18
Series Editor
John P. Smol
Paleoecological Environmental Assessment & Research Lab. (PEARL), Queen’s
University Dept. Biology, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
Aims and Scope:
Paleoenvironmental research continues to enjoy tremendous interest and progress
in the scientific community. The overall aims and scope of the Developments in Pa-
leoenvironmental Research book series is to capture this excitement and document
these developments. Volumes related to any aspect of paleoenvironmental research,
encompassing any time period, are within the scope of the series. For example,
relevant topics include studies focused on terrestrial, peatland, lacustrine, riverine,
estuarine, and marine systems, ice cores, cave deposits, palynology, isotopes, geo-
chemistry, sedimentology, paleontology, etc. Methodological and taxonomic vol-
umes relevant to paleoenvironmental research are also encouraged. The series will
include edited volumes on a particular subject, geographic region, or time period,
conference and workshop proceedings, as well as monographs. Prospective authors
and/or editors should consult the Series Editor John P. Smol for more details. Any
comments or suggestions for future volumes are welcomed.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5869
Jules M. Blais • Michael R. Rosen • John P. Smol
Editors
Environmental Contaminants
Using Natural Archives to Track Sources
and Long-Term Trends of Pollution
Editors
Jules M. Blais John P. Smol
Department of Biology, Program for Paleoecological Environmental Assessment
Chemical and Environmental Toxicology & Research Lab. (PEARL)
University of Ottawa Queen’s University Dept. Biology
Ottawa Kingston
Ontario Ontario
Canada Canada
Michael R. Rosen
US Geological Survey
Carson City
Nevada
USA
ISSN 1571-5299 ISSN 2215-1672 (electronic)
Developments in Paleoenvironmental Research
ISBN 978-94-017-9540-1 ISBN 978-94-017-9541-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-9541-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014955353
Springer Dordrecht Heidelberg New York London
© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
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Printed on acid-free paper
Springer Netherlands is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com)
This book is dedicated to Professor
David W. Schindler, in recognition of his
tireless work dealing with environmental
issues. We wish him well in his “retirement”.
v
Preface
The Developments in Paleoenvironmental Research book series has thus far cov-
ered a wide spectrum of paleoenvironmental subjects, some of which have included
examples of studies using natural archives of contaminants. However, given the
growing interest and development of approaches used in this area, we believed it
was an opportune time to collate summaries of some of these sub-disciplines into a
single volume.
This book aims to provide a review of recent developments in the study of natu-
ral archives to resolve the timing and magnitude of environmental contaminants.
Natural archives have tremendous potential to resolve the human footprint on the
environment, but experience has shown that these archives must be examined with
an understanding of the processes that may shape and modify the historical record.
We have asked all contributing authors to bring these issues to bear, and we devote
several chapters to discuss how external and internal processes may modify the
historical record in sediments, specifically focusing on hydrology, geochemistry,
and physical turbulence.
Our intent with this book was to provide a review of sufficient breadth and depth
to serve both seasoned practitioners of the field, as well as newcomers. We strived
to make the writing accessible to a general audience that could serve as a text for
graduate courses as well as a reference for those actively participating in the field.
The vast literature that utilizes natural archives to determine the timing and magni-
tude of pollutants spans a broad spectrum, including cores collected from ice, peat,
lake and marine sediments, to sclerontological archives and museum specimens
spanning centuries. This book spans this full range of natural archives, and will
hopefully be useful to those who are curious about recent developments in these
related fields. Ultimately, a strong proof of concept for the use of natural archives is
to determine the concordance of separate lines of evidence as recorded in different
kinds of archives, and this book aims to provide a platform to facilitate those kinds
of comparisons.
Many people helped with the planning, development, and final production of
this book. We would like to acknowledge the hard work and professionalism of
our many reviewers, who provided constructive comments on earlier drafts of
the manuscripts. We would also like to acknowledge the assistance we received
vii
viii Preface
from our publishers, and especially the efforts and encouragement from our main
Springer colleagues—Judith Terpos and Sherestha Saini. Thanks are also due to our
host institutions and our funding sources, which helped facilitate our academic en-
deavours. We also gratefully acknowledge a variety of publishers and authors who
allowed us to reproduce previously published figures. Foremost, we would like to
thank the authors for their hard work.
Contents
Using Natural Archives to Track Sources and Long-Term
Trends of Pollution: An Introduction ............................................................. 1
Jules M. Blais, Michael R. Rosen and John P. Smol
The Influence of Hydrology on Lacustrine Sediment
Contaminant Records ...................................................................................... 5
Michael R. Rosen
The Stability of Metal Profiles in Freshwater and Marine Sediments ........ 35
P. M. Outridge and F. Wang
Calculating Rates and Dates and Interpreting Contaminant
Profiles in Biomixed Sediments ...................................................................... 61
Zou Zou A. Kuzyk, Robie W. Macdonald and Sophia C. Johannessen
Contaminants in Marine Sedimentary Deposits from Coal Fly
Ash During the Latest Permian Extinction ................................................... 89
Hamed Sanei, Stephen E. Grasby and Benoit Beauchamp
Lake Sediment Records of Preindustrial Metal Pollution ........................... 101
Colin A. Cooke and Richard Bindler
Lacustrine Archives of Metals from Mining and Other
Industrial Activities—A Geochemical Approach .......................................... 121
John Boyle, Richard Chiverrell and Dan Schillereff
Organic Pollutants in Sediment Core Archives ............................................. 161
Jennifer B. Korosi, Wenhan Cheng and Jules M. Blais
ix
x Contents
Environmental Archives of Contaminant Particles ...................................... 187
Neil L. Rose and Meri Ruppel
Tracking Long-range Atmospheric Transport of Contaminants
in Arctic Regions Using Lake Sediments ....................................................... 223
Jane Kirk and Amber Gleason
Tracking Long-Range Atmospheric Transport of Trace Metals,
Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons, and Organohalogen
Compounds Using Lake Sediments of Mountain Regions ........................... 263
Jordi Catalan
Using Peat Records as Natural Archives of Past Atmospheric
Metal Deposition .............................................................................................. 323
Sophia V. Hansson, Richard Bindler and François De Vleeschouwer
Historical Contaminant Records from Sclerochronological Archives ....... 355
Jessica Carilli, Branwen Williams, Bernd R. Schöne,
Richard A. Krause and Stewart J. Fallon
Contaminant Records in Ice Cores................................................................. 393
Paolo Gabrielli and Paul Vallelonga
Use of Catalogued Long-term Biological Collections and
Samples for Determining Changes in Contaminant Exposure to
Organisms ......................................................................................................... 431
Linda M. Campbell and Paul E. Drevnick
Tracking Contaminant Transport From Biovectors ..................................... 461
Roland Kallenborn and Jules M. Blais
Using Natural Archives to Track Sources and Long-Term
Trends of Pollution: Some Final Thoughts and Suggestions for
Future Directions ............................................................................................. 499
Jules M. Blais, Michael R. Rosen and John P. Smol
Index .................................................................................................................. 507