Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon Contamination in Marine Sediments near Kitimat, British Columbia

Abstract

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), like many other hydrophobic organic contaminants, are rapidly sorbed to particles and incorporated within sediments in aquatic systems. The PAH composition within the sediments reflects the source(s) from which the PAHs were derived. However the "source signature" may be altered by postdepositional weathering or biodegradation. In the present study, variation in PAH composition was investigated in size-fractionated sediments and depth-fractionated sediments collected from a Canadian fjord contaminated with aluminum smelter derived PAHs. Multivariate analyses of PAH compositional data consistently showed that different sampling sites could be discriminated on the basis of their PAH composition, but smaller versus larger size fractions within a site could not. The composition of unsubstituted and alkyl-substituted PAHs in a sediment core primarily showed changes with depth that were attributable to enhancement of anthropogenic inputs in the upper core segments. No trends with sediment depth, associated with compound-specific weathering or biotransformation, were noted in the composition of anthropogenically generated PAHs. This may indicate a limited chemical and biological availability of the aluminum smelter derived PAHs.

Characteristics of PAHs adsorbed on street dust and the correlation with specific surface area and TOC

“…Concentration, structure, and the type of organic matter influence pollutant distribution in soil and sediments. Higher concentrations of pollutants usually exist in sediments with higher concentration of organic matter (Simpson et al 1998;Kleineidam et al 1999;Rockne et al 2002) but statistically significant relationship was not found in these studies. A weak relationship was observed between PAHs and total organic carbon (TOC) with correlation coefficient of R ranging from 0.46 to 0.82 in background soils from Norway (Nam et al 2008).…”

Seasonal Deposition Fluxes of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) in Lake Biwa, Japan

“…On the other hand, volatile PAHs (3 rings) tend to distribute not only in the (fine) aerosol particles, but also in (coarse) runoff particles (Hoffman et al, 1984;Lee et al, 2005;Takada et al, 1990;Venkataraman et al, 1999). Consistently, Simpson et al (1998) and Oen et al, (2006) pointed out that less volatile PAHs tend to be enriched in fine particles while volatile PAHs tend to distribute in coarse particles in coastal sediment.…”

Distribution and sources of the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the sediments of the Pearl River estuary, China

“…Besides, black carbon (BC) also benefited PAHs deposition within the sediments (Bucheli et al 2004;Oen et al 2006;Agarwal and Bucheli 2011). The grain size was also considered as an important factor influencing PAHs deposition and adsorption/desorption within the sediments (Simpson et al 1998;Wang et al 2001;Thorsen et al 2004). PAHs were easier to be absorbed on particles with small size rather than large ones (Kukkonen and Landrum 1996;Wu et al 2006;Zhao et al 2012).…”