Persistent Organic Pollutants in Antarctica

Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) are carbon-based chemicals of anthropogenic origin that elicit toxic effects in organisms. For this reason, the United Nations Environment Programme implemented the Stockholm Convention on POPs in 2004 to protect human health and the environment. Due to their physical-chemical properties, POPs are readily transported over long distances to remote areas, including polar regions, where they are trapped because of the extreme cold climate. Once in the Antarctic region, they bioaccumulate in organism and food webs and can show their toxic effects. Antarctica and Southern Ocean ecosystems are fragile and have low resilience capacity, thus contamination can have unpredictable consequences. Moreover, global climate change stands to influence the abiotic drivers of chemical distribution and mobility in Antarctic ecosystems. Thus, a knowledge of concentrations and distributions of contaminants is necessary to understand the risk to Antarctica and for evaluating the overall environmental health and other possible consequences at a global scale.