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VERSION:2.0
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SUMMARY:EESS talk on "Characterizing Past and Present Environmental Impact
 s with High-Resolution Sediment Analysis"
DTSTART:20191029T121500
DTEND:20191029T130000
DTSTAMP:20260509T114403Z
UID:562c3d36d1f11ad3dc0a3dbc4690179d68bab31dcdfc66f347c3b798
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Dr Aurea Chiaia-Hernandez\, is a researcher at the Institute o
 f Geography and Oeschger Center for Climate Change Research at the Univers
 ity of Bern. Graduate in Chemistry (Oregon State University) with a PhD in
  Environmental Sciences at ETH in 2013\, her research activities focus on 
 integrating two disciplines\, environmental chemistry and sedimentology. I
 n recent years\, she extended these to investigate the environmental impac
 t of plant protection products (organic pesticides) in agricultural soils 
 and microbial communities. At the University of Bern\, she investigates or
 ganic contaminants in lake sediments and soils on the Swiss Plateau (Inter
 faculty Cooperation Project “One Health”). She is a member of the Inst
 itute of Geography Cluster “Environmental pollution”.\nAbstract:\nIn r
 ecent decades\, the demand of synthetic chemicals has reached ~300 million
  tons per year due to the global use in the domestic\, agricultural\, and 
 industrial sectors. Chemicals released to the environment via direct sourc
 es or indirect input sources can enter natural waterways and ultimately be
  incorporated into aquatic sediments. Any of these chemicals that persist 
 over time would become excellent archives of past environmental contaminat
 ion\, and can be used to reconstruct environmental changes over time withi
 n a catchment. While many studies have analyzed the sedimentary record of 
 anthropogenic pollution\, gaining a comprehensive picture of many pollutan
 ts simultaneously in local palaeorecords remains challenging. Therefore\, 
 in this talk\, four different lakes across Switzerland will be presented t
 o provide a comprehensive overview of contamination patterns over time in 
 the last 100 years by means of liquid chromatography high resolution mass 
 spectrometry (LC-HRMS) non-target (unknown compounds) screening. HRMS comb
 ined with statistical analysis help to gain a comprehensive picture of the
  occurrence of organic contaminants and their trends over time in lake sed
 iments. Environmental changes recorded in the studied lakes give evidence 
 of past and present water quality\, as well as a record of management and 
 mitigation measures. Sediments from the four lakes show signatures that cl
 early define the beginning of large-scale human impact around the 1950s. T
 he results are also in agreement with other geological deposits (e.g. nutr
 ient pollution and radioisotope fallout signals) and clearly ratify a long
 -lived phenomenon as was shown for thousands of profiles with steady incre
 asing trends until today and not yet successfully targeted by environmenta
 l regulation and pollution reduction initiative. Furthermore\, in this tal
 k\, I will show how temporal and spatial analysis are being used as a comp
 lementary tool in soil monitoring to prioritize pesticides as well as to r
 econstruct past applications and provide future scenarios in agriculture.
LOCATION:GR C0 01 https://plan.epfl.ch/?room==GR%20C0%2001
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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