CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Anthropogenic pressures on the Earth System have reached a scale where additional changes can trigger non-linear, abrupt environmental disasters even at planetary-scale. It was estimated that from nine planetary boundaries calculated, humanity has already transgressed three: climate change, rate of biodiversity lost, and changes in the global nitrogen cycle. Although there is a large number of data on both, the adverse effects of chemicals on living organisms and the huge amount of chemicals loaded in the environment, so far it was not possible to calculate boundaries in order to avoid or minimize negative externalities due to chemical pollution at a global scale. An evolutionary perspective can provide, from two complementary approaches, Paleoecotoxicology and Evoecotoxicology, an understanding of the role of chemical stress during the phylogenetic process, including mass extinction events. The chemical bomb hypothesis associated to abrupt biodiversity lost is based on the fact that iridium at the C-T boundary is up to 160 times the background crustal iridium abundance, in line with the dramatic increase in many other toxic chemicals from a total estimated in 6.8 × 1018 g pulverized rock distributed worldwide as a consequence of the impact of a 10Km asteroid with the Earth. The extinction/survival destiny within the mass extinction phenomena associated to this global pollution event seems to be directly related to bioaccumulation and biomagnification features, the resistance to chemical stress in different species, food preference, synergism-antagonism phenomena, refuges, etc. A different perspective on the role of chemical stress during the evolutionary process is based on the hypothesis that living organism at ontogenic stages can be considered as biomarkers of the environmental changes faced by their ancestors. For instance, based on the capacity of blastula stage embryo to survive in anoxic conditions, it was anticipated in 2006 that multicellular organisms flourished in the anoxic Earth, over 2.000 million years ago. They were discovered in 2010. By means of key example on the role of environmental conditions during the ontogenic process as well as the capacity of living forms to modify adverse environmental conditions, the complexity to establish a Safe Operating Space for Chemical Pollution will be considered from an ontogenic and evolutionary perspective.

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