Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2012. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of American Chemical Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Environmental Science & Technology 46 (2012): 8601–8609, doi:10.1021/es301261x.
Description:
The extent to which humans are modifying Earth’s surface chemistry can be quantified by
comparing total anthropogenic element fluxes with their natural counterparts (Klee & Graedel,
2004). We quantify anthropogenic mass transfer of 77 elements from mining, fossil fuel
burning, biomass burning, construction activities, and human apportionment of terrestrial net
primary productivity, and compare it to natural mass transfer from terrestrial and marine net
primary productivity, riverine dissolved and suspended matter fluxes to the ocean, soil erosion,
eolian dust, sea-salt spray, cosmic dust, volcanic emissions and – for helium – hydrodynamic
escape from the Earth’s atmosphere. We introduce an approach to correct for losses during
industrial processing of elements belonging to geochemically coherent groups, and explicitly
incorporate uncertainties of element mass fluxes through Monte Carlo simulations. We find that
at the Earth’s surface anthropogenic fluxes of iridium, osmium, helium, gold, ruthenium,
antimony, platinum, palladium, rhenium, rhodium and chromium currently exceed natural fluxes.
For these elements mining is the major factor of anthropogenic influence, whereas petroleum
burning strongly influences the surficial cycle of rhenium. Our assessment indicates that if
anthropogenic contributions to soil erosion and eolian dust are considered, anthropogenic fluxes
of up to 62 elements surpass their corresponding natural fluxes.
Description:
I.S. is thankful for a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Postdoctoral Scholarship that
supported this work. B.P.-E. acknowledges financial support from a Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution Coastal Ocean Institute Fellowship
Keywords:
Anthropocene
;
Biogeochemical cycles
;
Natural cycling
;
Anthropogenic cycling
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Preprint
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