Antarctic environmental specimen bank: A tool for chemical monitoring

The development of the first projects dealing with Environmental Specimen B anks (ESB) begun at the end of the sixties. The principal aim consisted in the longterm storage of representative environmental specimens in order to study the presence and the evolution of dangerous substances. The Antarctic Continent, thanks to its remarkable distance from thickly populated areas and its poor biological activity, is a privileged observatory for research on global changes recently caused by man in the environment: it can be cons idered as the largest environmental and climatological memory of the Earth. The project on an Antarctic Environmental Specimen Bank (Banca Campioni Am bientali Antartici - BCAA), which is an integral part of an Italian Project on the "Micropollutants Chemistry" (Sector "Chemical Contamination" of the Italian Antarctic Research Programme - PNRA)(1), begun in 1994 when the BC AA was installed in the Department of Chemistry and Industrial Chemistry (U niversity of Genoa Italy). In the international context there are already s pecimen banks serving biological, ecological, medical and other kinds of pr ojects(2-6); our objectives underline an emphasis on Environmental chemistr y and the establishment of baselines similar to the approaches followed by the other Environmental Specimen Banks (long-term storage of representative Environmental specimens for future analyses: retrospective control and new research using parameters which are not being studied at present), but foc us on the chemical characterisation of samples.