Variations in heavy metals concentrations in Antarctic snows from 1940 to 1980

Concentrations of Pb, Cd, Cu and Zn have been measured using improved ultraclean procedures in a succession of twenty six snow samples integrating a 40 yr time sequence from 1940 to 1980 which were collected from the walls of a 6 m deep pit at stake D 55 in Adelie Land, East Antarctica. Measured concentrations, which are among the lowest ones ever measured in Antarctic snows, are found not to have significantly increased during the investigated time period, with the possible exception of Pb for which there might have been a significant increase after the mid 1960's. For this last metal, measured concentrations in the 1940's are about 6-fold higher than in Antarctic Holocene ice several thousand years old, which indicates that a large fraction of the anthropogenic increase for Pb probably occurred before the 1940's.