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SSF-Svalbard Science Forum

Persistent organic pollution in thawing permafrost

Tildelt: kr 64 610

Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) are organic chemical substances produced as pesticides, industrial chemicals and industrial unintentional by-products. POPs retain particular physical and chemical properties such that, once discharged into the environment, they remain intact for exceptionally long periods of time, with the possibility to accumulate in the fatty tissue of living organisms, including humans, with toxic effects. In 2001, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants aimed to preserve human and environmental health, requiring parties to eliminate and/or diminish the production of POPs, which have a potential of causing devastating effects and have the ability to travel over great distances and to be transported into environmental matrices. POPs that have been accumulated in Arctic regions during the past decades are now starting to be remobilized, specially because of permafrost thawing, one of the most problematic tipping points in climate change. In order to analyse POPs in the frozen ground active layer, permafrost will be sampled in three different sites in the Kongsfjorden: I) the surroundings of the coal mine near Ny-Ålesund, to be considered as long-term polluted site; II) the surroundings of the Ny-Ålesund airport, to be considered as human-in-use site; III) Ossian Sarsfjellet (circa 12 km far from Ny-Ålesund), to be considered as clean-control site. The samples will be delivered to CNR-IDPA and UNIS to be analysed, mainly with gas-chromatography mass-spectrometry. The results may be indicating differences between the three sites, ascribable to diverse environmental and anthropogenic conditions. However, if similarities between the sites would be discovered, these may be explained with regional to global contamination. Finally, the new permafrost POPs dataset will be compared with other literature studies about POPs contamination in the Arctic.

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SSF-Svalbard Science Forum