Pollution of Russian Northern Seas with Heavy Metals: Comparison of Atmospheric Flux and River Flow

Abstract

Fluxes of anthropogenic heavy metals (Pb, Cd, As, Zn, Ni, Cr, and Cu) to the surface of four seas (White, Pechora, Kara, and Laptev seas) in the Russian Arctic have been estimated in this work using previously calculated concentrations of these elements in the surface atmosphere in some island and continental points of the Arctic Ocean. The obtained values were compared with the published data on the fluxes of the same components carried by waters flowing into the seas. Based on EMEP reports, we made some corrections for the data on lead and cadmium fluxes from the atmosphere to White and Pechora sea waters, taking into account pollution sources from European countries and the contribution of processes of the raising of dust and soil particles by wind to the pollution of the European part of Russia. On the whole, the contribution of atmospheric fluxes of HMs to the formation of the environment composition of northern Russian seas is significantly lower than that of the runoff of rivers flowing into the seas. The White Sea is the exception; it is exposed to numerous anthropogenic sources of HM emissions into the atmosphere. It is also reasonable to expect the atmospheric transport of HMs to make a significant contribution to these waters. One can also expect a significant contribution of the atmospheric transport of HMs to waters of distant seas (the Kara and Laptev seas), namely, in the parts of these seas where the influence of largest Siberian rivers (Ob, Yenisei, and Lena) is insignificant.