Fate of Anthropogenic Lead in the Biosphere

One approach to quantify the extent of anthropogenic enrichment in soils is to use a conservative, hthogenic element such as Zr, to take into account the 

The bog at Bagno in Ukraine is west of the Carparthian Mountains, and directly exposed to the industrial regions of the former Eastern Europe, compared 

To help evaluate the fate of metals in soils, it can be helpful to separate total Pb into the compartments by which it is predominantly bound exchangeable, organically-complexed, adsorbed to Fe and Mn oxides, associated with sulfide minerals, and the residual fraction which is primarily the natural silicate fraction [118,119]. This approach is especially useful when it is combined with the determination of the isotopic composition of Pb in these fractions. In soils from the Middle East, isotope analyses of the labile fractions were used [120] to show that there had been substantial penetration of anthropogenic Pb into deeper soil layers. However, in a comparable study of soils from central Emope, no such mobilization was found [121]. 

To summarize, the fate of any metal in soil is a response to a complex set of parameters including soil texture, mineralogy, pH and redox potential, hydraulic conductivity, abundance of organic matter and oxyhydroxides of Al, Fe, and Mn, in addition to climate, situation, and nature of the parent material [122-124]. As a result, it is not possible to make any general conclusions regarding the final fate of anthropogenic Pb in soils. In fact, the fate of Pb in soils will probably have to be 

Because Pb has to be transferred from the solid phase to the aqueous phase before it can be taken up by plants and aquatic organisms, the concentration of Pb in natural waters can be a sensitive indicator of the potential for Pb to become biologically available . To estimate how much of this Pb might be transferred to the aqueous phase, solutions collected from ten Swiss forest soils were measured for concentrations of total dissolved Pb (Peter Blaser, unpublished data) and found to range from 1 to 60 p-g/L. Five of the profiles were acidic (pH 4-5) and these contained 20-60 pg/L Pb in the aqueous phase of the surface layers. These layers, however, are the most critical ecologically, as they represent the biologically active zone of acidic forest soils this is also the zone which has been most impacted by anthropogenic Pb. 

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