| Summary: | Metal pollution from mining activities is a well-known environmental concern, and detailed environmental monitoring before, during, and after mining is essential to evaluate the pollution status of a mining area. Natural archives, i.e., cores from soils, lakes, and peatlands, provide us with a powerful means to reconstruct pollution history over longer timescales (decades to millenia), yet studies of short-term and high-resolution records, on seasonal to annual-scale, is still scarse. As impact from e.g. heavy metal pollution derived from mining often have both a direct, and long-term effect on the surrounding environment and biota, information from long- and short-term records should be combined to ensure a comprehensive view of the pollution history. Metal concentrations in liver and muscle tissue from fish have been used as a proxy for metal exposure and recent metal pollution, but these analysis provide no temporal or historical information on metal exposure, uptake and accumulation. Otoliths (ear bones) are paired calcified structures, which are considered metabolically stable and can potentially contain a complete high-resolution record of the fish’s metal exposure history. A preliminary study1 indicates that LA-ICP-MS analyses of sculpin otoliths, collected at five sites near the Pb-Zn Black Angel-mine site in West Greenland, have the potential to become a valuable method for assessing time-resolved metal loading near mine sites. Here we carry on this work of mapping local pollution history, by continue the analysis of geochemical composition of fish otoliths collected near the Black Angel-mine, but also extending it further by compare and contrast the otolith record to that of locally collected peat cores and moss samples.
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