Widespread presence of anthropogenic compounds in marine dissolved organic matter
Journal
Nature Geoscience
Journal Volume
19
Journal Issue
4
Start Page
478
End Page
487
ISSN
1752-0894
1752-0908
Date Issued
2026-03-16
Author(s)
Kalinski, Jarmo-Charles J.
Pakkir Mohamed Shah, Abzer K.
Ruiz Brandão da Costa, Bruno
Farrell, Shane P.
Schellenberg, Lisa
Graves, Lana G.
Schramm, Tilman
Stincone, Paolo
Koester, Irina
Torres, Ralph R.
Cancelada, Lucia
Utermann-Thüsing, Caroline
Quinlan, Zachary A.
Wegley Kelly, Linda
Carlson, Craig A.
Castillo-Ilabaca, Cristóbal
Pantoja-Gutiérrez, Silvio
Beman, J. Michael
Hartmann, Aaron
Aron, Allegra
Siwe Noundou, Xavier
Dorrington, Rosemary A.
Tasdemir, Deniz
Haas, Andreas F.
Dorrestein, Pieter C.
Nelson, Craig E.
Aluwihare, Lihini I.
Wang, Mingxun
Petras, Daniel
Abstract
Chemical pollution has profound impacts on marine ecosystem health and services. Most investigations of the distributions of anthropogenic organic chemicals (xenobiotics) have been regionally focused, which limits our understanding of the extent of chemical pollution in the world’s largest biome. To address this gap, we mapped the presence of xenobiotics across marine ecosystems. Here we present a meta-analysis of 21 public non-targeted tandem mass spectrometry datasets, which are not restricted to a predefined set of compounds but rather capture thousands of chemicals. These datasets comprise 2,315 seawater samples, spanning coastal to open ocean environments across three ocean basins. Our analysis revealed that common pollutants such as pesticides and pharmaceuticals were predominantly detected in estuaries and coastal areas but declined with distance from shore, whereas industrial chemicals and additives, including polyalkylene glycols, phthalates and organophosphates, were widely distributed across marine ecosystems. A total of 248 annotated xenobiotic features contributed a median of 2% to the total detected peak area per sample. We observed highest median levels of xenobiotic contribution in coastal datasets (up to 20%) and lowest levels (0.5%) in open ocean datasets, which indicates that anthropogenic organic substances contribute substantially to the dissolved organic matter pool in the surface ocean.
Subjects
anthropogenic source
data set
dissolved organic matter
marine ecosystem
marine pollution
meta-analysis
organophosphate
phthalate
xenobiotics
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Type
journal article