Exploring New Frontiers in Marine Radioisotope Tracing – Adapting to New Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

Radioisotopes have been used in earth and environmental sciences for over 150 years and provide unique tools to study environmental processes in great detail from a cellular level through to an oceanic basin scale. These nuclear techniques have been employed to understand coastal and marine ecosystems via laboratory and field studies in terms of how aquatic organisms respond to environmental stressors, including temperature, pH, nutrients, metals, organic anthropogenic contaminants, and biological toxins. Global marine issues, such as ocean warming, deoxygenation, plastic pollution, ocean acidification, increased duration, and intensity of toxic harmful algal blooms (HABs), and coastal contamination are all impacting marine environments, thereby imposing various environmental and economic risks. Being able to reliably assess the condition of coastal and marine ecosystems, and how they may respond to future disturbances, can provide vital information for society in the sustainable management of their marine environments. This paper summarizes the historical use of radiotracers in these systems, describes how existing techniques of radioecological tracing can be developed for specific current environmental issues and provides information on emerging issues that would benefit from current and new radiotracer methods. Current challenges with using radioecological tracers and opportunities are highlighted, as well as opportunities to maximize the application of these methods to greatly increase the ability of environmental managers to conduct evidence-based management of coastal and marine ecosystems.

The Effect of Zinc Concentration on Bioaccumulation in Milkfish <i>(Chanos chanos)</i> Use of ⁶⁵Zn as a Radioactive Tracer

“…(2) measurement of the biokinetics of contaminants over the long term; and (3) distinction between foods from sources of contaminants that are difficult to investigate using standard analytical techniques [38]. Additionally, nuclear engineering facilitates experiments using concentrations of contaminants that are comparable to those found in natural waters [39].…”

Radiotracers for the study of Marine and Oceanic Ecosystems

“…A complete review of this kind of studies, with emphasis on the need for non-destructive studies can be found in Ref. [3]. In fact, we plan to use a nondestructive method, putting the individuals inside a set-up and measuring the amount of 45 Ca using ad-hoc nuclear instrumentation.…”

Ecotoxicological effects of decommissioning offshore petroleum infrastructure: A systematic review

“…Gamma-ray spectrometry is the ideal technique for quantifying the activity concentration of radionuclides (Cresswell et al, 2017(Cresswell et al, , 2020Joel et al, 2017). Care must be taken to interpret the reading of radioactivity relative to where the gamma measurement is positioned on the piece of infrastructure e.g.…”

“…Performing laboratory studies by exposing a variety of marine species to infrastructure-associated NORM contaminants will create refined estimates of contaminant bioavailability, radiation dose and subsequent assessments of effects from NORM and IR, combined with metals. Radiotracing techniques can provide new perspectives on the pathways and rates of uptake (e.g., bioaccumulation) and biomagnification processes of radioactive and non-radioactive contaminants (Cresswell et al, 2020;Lanctôt et al, 2017). Laboratory studies are needed to investigate the radiation-induced effects from NORM contaminants associated with petroleum scale.…”