Deposition of Organophosphate Ester Flame Retardants and Plasticizers to High Arctic Ice Fields
Abstract
Organophosphate esters (OPE) are used as flame retardants, plasticizers, and anti-foaming agents over the past several decades. Of particular interest is the long range transport potential of OPE given their ubiquitous detection in Arctic marine air. Here we report 19 OPE congeners in ice cores drilled in the High Arctic of Canada at considerable elevation and remote from human populations. A multi-decadal temporal profile was constructed in the sectioned ice-cores representing a time scale spanning the 1970s to 2015-17. In the Devon Ice Cap, the total OPE (ƩOPE) annual flux over the last decade was 61±18 µg m-2 per year, with a congener profile dominated by triphenylphosphate and tris(2-chloroisopropyl) phosphate (TCPP). Here, many of the OPE displayed an exponentially increasing depositional flux including TCPP which had a doubling time of 4.1 ± 0.44 years. At the more northern site in the Mt. Oxford icefield, the OPE depositional flux was lower with annual ƩOPE flux corresponding to 14±2.5 µg m-2 per year from 2010 to 2016, also predominated with TCPP. However, the temporal trends were less distinct. The temporal trend for halogenated OPE in Mt Oxford is bell-shaped, peaking in the mid-2000s. The observation of OPE in remote Arctic ice cores demonstrates the cryosphere as a repository for these substances. In this presentation we consider several transport processes that deliver OPE to these remote polar regions.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMH089.0014D
- Keywords:
-
- 0478 Pollution: urban;
- regional and global;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 0481 Restoration;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 1803 Anthropogenic effects;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1847 Modeling;
- HYDROLOGY