In late May, Norilsk in Northern Russia was hit by a massive diesel spill: more than 20 000 tonnes of fuel got into rivers and soil. Head of the state environmental watchdog Svetlana Rodionova said, the maximum concentration limit (MCL) on the ground was exceeded 10,000s times, while fuel was in almost all river inflows. Doctor of Biology Nataliya Shchegolkova claims that a complex approach with the help of microbiology is required to tackle this catastrophe.
There are two approaches to deal with any technogenic catastrophe resulting in toxic substance getting into ecosystems; and they are linked to different groups of specialists and methods.
1) Collecting and extraction of a toxin from the landscape;
2) Analysis of the remaining toxin’s transformation and addressing the consequences.
The former requires engineering methods: the specialists pick and use suitable technologies to collect the pollutants.
Traditionally, the latter is the issue of geochemists. Transit routes, places of accumulation, concentration in water and soil – these are basic terms of geochemistry, which has helped people forecast spread and risks of pollutants in landscapes for many decades.
However, in case the pollutant is of organic origin (for example, diesel), only microbiologists can forecast its transformation. They can assess the necessary and sufficient conditions for the toxin’s neutralization. It requires analyzing native microbiological cenosis, which influences decomposition of pollutants; other conditions, which would spur the neutralization or, in contrast, hinder the process (temperature, humidity, salinity, eutrophication etc.).
The most importantly, only microbiologists can recommend engineers where and how they can create special closed gaps (habitats, microcosms) that would be reactors with the highest neutralization rate. As the number of such technogenic events rises, this approach proves the most promising.
According to open data, by now engineers have collected only several hundreds of tonnes of the fuel in Norilsk. The spread of diesel has been partly stopped with containment booms. However, it is already clear that most diesel will stay in the landscape.
That is why it is vital to plan and organize the places, which will be the ‘landscape reactors’ for neutralization of the pollutants right now. In northern conditions, it is also important to artificially heat those reactors to enhance the pace of microbiological reactions. It could be done by burning part of this diesel. But burning all the spilled fuel is unacceptable because it would only aggravate the catastrophe.
Photo source: “РИА Новости”.