Environmental factors affecting reproducibility of bioremediation field assays in Antarctica

MARTINEZ ALVAREZ, LUCAS; MAC CORMACK W.P.; RUBERTO, LUCAS A. M.; GUREVICH, JUAN; MARTINEZ ALVAREZ, LUCAS; MAC CORMACK W.P.; RUBERTO, LUCAS A. M.; GUREVICH, JUAN

COLD REGIONS SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2020 vol. 169 p. 1 - 9

0165-232X

Soil hydrocarbon-contamination represents an environmental threat evenat remote locations such as Antarctica. In order to restore these soils,bioremediation, and biostimulation in particular, have proven to be aneffective approach. However, large scale bioremediation schemes under the extremeenvironmental conditions of this continent provide a big uncertainty upon therobustness and reproducibility of these treatments. In this work, we comparedthe efficiency of two consecutive year field assays using 0.5 ton biopiles atCarlini Station, in order to identify those factors that affect thereproducibility of the pre-optimized biostimulation. First year field assay(biopiles I) reached more than 75% of hydrocarbon removal, while second year(biopiles II) only removed 55% of the total hydrocarbons. Several biologicaland physicochemical variables were statistically analyzed for both years?biopiles in order to identify the source of these differences. Total sunlighthours resulted to be the key factor driving removal efficiency in thesetreatments by increasing soil temperature inside the biopiles, and therefore,total biological activity and degrading bacterial counts in soil. This workrepresents the first study on the reproducibility of field assays in extremeenvironments such as Antarctica, and it provides a novel input to the scarce knowledge on field hydrocarbon bioremediationpractices in cold regions.