Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

This proposal will determine how recent and dramatic climate changes in Arctic freshwaters are affecting the transport and fate of anthropogenic contaminants to aquatic systems. This research will advance Environmental Science and Technologies by developing new tools to examine how the fate of anthropogenic contaminants is affected in Arctic regions under different climate change conditions. Due to the paucity of direct environmental monitoring in Arctic regions, this proposal will investigate how contaminant cycles in Arctic freshwater ecosystems are affected by climate change as recorded in sediment archives. We will combine established, state-of-the-art technologies in reconstructing climate from preserved sedimentary paleolimnological proxies, and concurrent records of contaminant deposition histories. Specifically, this research will: (1) determine chronologies of pollutant deposition in Arctic lakes strategically selected to span a gradient in climate change, and assess temporal trends in relation to ecosystem productivity and structure and organic matter deposition; (2) determine how warming-related factors affect the delivery of dissolved organic carbon in Arctic lakes; and (3) determine how warming across the Arctic has affected the bioaccessibility of contaminants in Arctic waters through a combination of direct measurements in the field, and laboratory measurements using microbial bioreporters. Our proposed research will advance NSERC's Environmental Science and Technologies mandate by developing new tools to quantify the interactions between climatic-related factors and pollutant cycling in aquatic Arctic systems.