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Persistent organic pollution in thawing permafrost (PermaPOP)
Call year: 2019
Status: active
IADC_id: 154
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Project description:
Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) are organic chemical substancesrnproduced as pesticides, industrial chemicals and industrial unintentionalrnby-products. POPs retain particular physical and chemical propertiesrnsuch that, once discharged into the environment, they remain intact forrnexceptionally long periods of time, with the possibility to accumulate inrnthe fatty tissue of living organisms, including humans, with toxic effects. Inrn2001, the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants aimedrnto preserve human and environmental health, requiring parties to eliminaternand/or diminish the production of POPs, which have a potential of causingrndevastating effects and have the ability to travel over great distancesrnand to be transported into environmental matrices. POPs that have beenrnaccumulated in Arctic regions during the past decades are now startingrnto be remobilized, specially because of permafrost thawing, one of thernmost problematic tipping points in climate change. In order to analysernPOPs in the frozen ground active layer, permafrost will be sampled in threerndifferent sites in the Kongsfjorden: I) the surroundings of the coal mine near Ny-Ålesund, to be considered as long-term polluted site; II) the surroundingsrnof the Ny-Ålesund airport, to be considered as human-in-use site; III)rnOssian Sarsfjellet (circa 12 km far from Ny-Ålesund), to be considered asrnclean-control site. The samples will be delivered to CNR-IDPA and UNISrnto be analysed, mainly with gas-chromatography mass-spectrometry. Thernresults may be indicating differences between the three sites, ascribable torndiverse environmental and anthropogenic conditions. However, if similaritiesrnbetween the sites would be discovered, these may be explained with regionalrnto global contamination. Finally, the new permafrost POPs dataset will berncompared with other literature studies about POPs contamination in thernArctic.
National/International Cooperation:
UNIS - Avdeling for arktisk teknologi
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