engleski

Nanoparticles and Marine Environment: An Overview

In natural waters, including seawater, which can be considered as extreme environment regarding high ionic strength conditions, NPs can transform, adopting strikingly different behavior. There they might be unstable, and subject to fast aggregation and sedimentation that eliminates them from the water column. Adversely, the interaction between metal bearing NPs and organic material (OM) could change their physico-chemical properties, distribution, and persistence in the water column. In general, understanding the behavior and fate of NPs in the aquatic environment is still limited due to lack of efficient methods for their characterization. Electroanalytical methods in combination with the state-of-the art technique (e.g. AFM) are recognized as a good choice for studying different biogeochemical processes in the marine environment, especially those related with OM, sulfur species and trace metals cycling, and the interaction and distribution between dissolved and colloidal phases. Long-term studies of surface-active particles in the northern Adriatic Sea provided evidence that biotic, as well as abiotic, transformation of OM at the micro and nanoscale are at the root of macroscopic phenomena in the sea. The advent of AFM opened a possibility to directly explore these processes at the scale that determines the fate of OM and its interaction with metal bearing NPs in the sewater.

organic colloids ; metal and sulfur bearing nanoparticles ; seawater ; AFM ; voltammetry ; amperometry

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