As part of my post-doc at PSI Paul Scherrer Institut, I am very happy to share our latest paper we published in Science Advances.

Through the analysis of a Siberian ice core (Belukha glacier, Russian Federation), we present the first continuous nontarget screening ice-core record reconstructing how organic aerosol has changed from pre-industrial to industrial times in Central Asia.

While conventional analytical methods are typically designed to identify a limited set of organic compounds, our nontarget screening analysis unlocks the opportunity to explore a much broader chemical space, leading to the identification of nearly 400 different compounds. But more is not always synonymous with better, right? In this case, however, we demonstrate that detecting hundreds of compounds provides a deeper understanding of how atmospheric organic aerosol composition has evolved from pre-industrial to industrial times in the Former Soviet Union. First, we observed the emergence of novel, previously unknown compounds, directly or indirectly linked to human emissions. We also found an increase in nitrogen-containing molecules (e.g., nitrophenols), indicative of shifts in atmospheric chemistry driven by rising NOx emissions from anthropogenic sources.
Lastly, by reconstructing the oxidation state evolution of the detected compounds, we observed a significant increase in both their oxygen-to-carbon ratio and average carbon oxidation state, suggesting an increased oxidative capacity of the atmosphere over the last decades of the record. This may have interesting implications on the atmospheric lifetime of short-lived greenhouse gases, such as methane.

But what about Europe? That’s exactly what we are currently investigating, and the results so far are quite promising. Stay tuned!

This work was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF and carried out at the Laboratory of Environmental Chemistry (LUC) at PSI.

If you are interested to know more, you can read the manuscript here: