Ecological Risk Assessment of Oil Spills in Ice-Covered Waters: A Surface Slick Model Coupled with a Food-Web Bioaccumulation Model

The limited knowledge on oil-ice interactions and on the ecological outcomes of oil spills in the Arctic represent sources of uncertainties for shipping and oil and gas activities in polar regions. The present work aims at the definition of the ecological risk posed by oil spills in the Arctic by the integration of an improved surface slick model to a fugacity-based food-web bioaccumulation model for icy waters. The model's outcomes are the representation of transport and weathering processes and the concentrations of a toxic component of oil, namely naphthalene, in the environmental media as a function of ice conditions. Given those concentrations, the associated ecological risk is defined in terms of the bioconcentration factor (BCF). Overall, the model predicted low bioaccumulation and biomagnification potential for naphthalene to a hypothetical Arctic food web, regardless of the ice concentration. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2020;00:1-16. (c) 2020 SETAC