Baseline
Occurrence, characterization, and ecological assessment of petroleum-related hydrocarbons in intertidal marine sediments of Burrard Inlet, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2020.111304Get rights and content

Highlights

  • All detected TPH did not exceed the criteria regulated by BC and CCME.

  • Main biogenic n-alkanes were presented in all the sampling sites.

  • Most sites had trace amounts of petroleum biomarkers.

  • Mixed pyrogenic and petrogenic inputs contributed to PAHs at most sampling sites.

  • Some PAHs had possible negative effects to benthic organisms at a few sites only.

Abstract

Total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH), n-alkanes, petroleum biomarkers, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) were analyzed in the intertidal sediments of Burrard Inlet, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Most of the sampling sites had low TPH (<40 μg/g). Only 10% of sampling sites, located nearby a harbour and densely populated areas, had relatively high TPH (<260 μg/g). Main biogenic n-alkanes were present in all the sites, except for the main petrogenic input in the sample from the upper intertidal zone (UIZ) of the Maplewood Mudflats. Most sites had trace amounts of petroleum biomarkers. Mixed pyrogenic and petrogenic inputs contributed to PAHs at most sites. PAHs did not show potential toxicity to benthic organisms at most sites; however, possible negative effects from some of the detected PAHs were found for the samples from the UIZs of the Maplewood Mudflats and Labour View Park, and from the lower intertidal zone (LIZ) of Gates Park.

Section snippets

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Zeyu Yang: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Keval Shah: Methodology, Investigation. Sonia Laforest: Resources, Visualization. Emile Cardinal: Visualization. Patrick Lambert: Project administration, Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing. Bruce P. Hollebone: Supervision, Project administration. Carl E. Brown: Project administration, Funding acquisition. Michael Goldthorp: Resources. Kevin Waston: Resources. Chun Yang:

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This work was funded and supported by the Government of Canada's World Class Tanker Safety System (WCTSS) and Ocean Protection Plan programs. We also greatly appreciate the anonymous reviewers' great help for improving the quality of this work.

References (16)

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (11)

  • Biogenic and anthropogenic sources of sedimentary organic matter in marine coastal areas: A multi-proxy approach based on bulk and molecular markers

    2022, Marine Chemistry
    Citation Excerpt :

    The thermodynamically stable αβ-hopanes and αββ-steranes in two homologue series with R- and S-configurations predominate in crude oils and mature source rock sediments. Therefore, the presence of these compounds in stable configurations in recent sediments indicates petroleum contamination (Yunker et al., 2002; Wang et al., 2011; Yang et al., 2020). The GC/MS hopane (191 m/z) and sterane (218 m/z) composition patterns for all studied sediments were clearly dominated by compounds with configurations typical of petrogenic origin (Fig. 5b, c), which implies prevalent anthropogenic input of these hydrocarbons in the investigated areas.

View all citing articles on Scopus
View full text