Top of page

Student/Staff Portal
Global Site Navigation

School of Science

Local Section Navigation
You are here: Main Content
  • Port Pirie

    Smelter at Port Pirie, South Australia

Related Contents

Seagrass archives reveal centennial-scale metal smelter contamination while acting as metal filters in a high-polluted coastal marine environment

In Port Pirie on the Upper Spencer Gulf (SA), one of the biggest ore smelters in the world has contaminated the region with metals since 1889, strongly affecting the marine coastal environment. Seagrass sedimentary deposits can provide an understanding of human-derived impacts on coastal ecosystems and on the role of seagrass meadows as filters and sinks of pollutants, including metals. Seagrass meadows may act as a significant sink for metal pollution in the area, preventing those metals from entering the marine food web, and emphasizing the need to preserve the seagrass meadows to avoid the potential release of those metals into coastal marine environment.

The Upper Spencer Gulf is blessed with one of the biggest temperate seagrass meadows in Australia covering an area of about 4000 km2. This offers a unique opportunity to assess the ecological service of seagrasses as environmental archives and pollutant sinks. During the first part of the project seagrass archives have been collected at a single site in Port Pirie to assess magnitude and source of contamination in the area. The chrono-stratigraphy revealed after 210Pb analyses by seagrass sediment cores will provide an understanding of changes in metals sources and contamination overtime, reconstructing the Port Pirie metal history of the last few centuries. The second part of the research aims to provide a fuller understanding of the filtering and sink capacity of seagrass meadows in a high-polluted environment such as Port Pirie, providing an estimation of the metals stocks accumulated in the seagrass sediments. This will be achieved by applying a multicoring and multiproxy approch that includes collecting a larger number of cores in the region, dating these (Lead-210 method) and analysing them for metals, Pb isotopes and explanatory sediment characteristics.

Funding agency

South Australia Water Corporation (SA Water)
Environmental Protection Authority of South Australia (EPA SA)
Equity Trustees Charitable Foundation

Project duration

2015-2018

Researchers

Ms Anna Lafratta (PhD student)
Professor Paul Lavery
Dr. Oscar Serrano
Professor Pere Masque
Sam Gaylard (EPA SA)
Dr. Milena Fernandes (SA Water)
Dr. Miguel A. Mateo (CEAB, Centro de Estudios Avanzados de Blanes)

Skip to top of page