Pond Sediments Reveal the Increasing Importance of Road Runoff as a Source of Metal Contamination in Industrialized Urban Environments Downwind of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (USA).

ABSTRACT: Toxic levels of trace metals from human activities accumulate in natural environments, yet these metal mixtures are rarely characterized or quantified. Metal mixtures accumulate in historically industrial urban areas and change as economies shift. Previous research has often focused on the sources and fate of a specific element, which limits our understanding of metal contaminant interactions in our environment. Here, we reconstruct the history of metal contamination in a small pond downstream of an interstate highway and downwind of fossil fuel and metallurgical industries that have been active since the middle of the nineteenth century. Metal contamination histories were reconstructed from the sediment record using metal ratio mixing analysis to attribute the relative contributions of co

SUBMITTER: Hill MJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10034740 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature