ИСТИНА

Samples of seewater organic pollutants have been collected in more than 20 sites throghout the Mediterranean Region during the expedition in March-April 1990 on a research ship "Moskovskii Universitet" in Mediterranean, Ionic, and Adriatic seas, and joint Russian-Italian ecological expedition on the same ship in March-April 1991 in Tyrrhenian sea. Normal alkanes and phtalate esters have been detrmined in the samples by means of capillary gas chromatography and GC-MS. The data on both the distributions of polutants, and their total content in the seawater of Mediterranean have been obtained. The uniform distribution of normal alkanes with Carbon Preference Index (CPI) close to unity in all the cases, and the broad hump on the chromatograms are both the evidence in favour of petroleum nature of paraffinic pollutants of the Mediterranean waters. Only in the region of Po River and to the west of Trapani (Sicily) the values of CPI were close to 1.2 which reveals a small contribution of biogenic paraffins into the seawater pollution of these places. Dibutylphtalate and di(2-ethylhexyl)phtalate were the major phtalate pollutants in the seawater of Mediterranean. Concentrations of these phtalate esters in seawater were much higher than of all other phtalate esters. The comparison of the concentrations of normal alkanes and phtalate esters in seawater of Western (0.62-1.76 and 0.29-9.96 ug/l) and Eastern (0.32-0.55 and 0.27-0.34 ug/l) regions of the Adreatic sea reveals that the seawater is much more heavily polluted near Italy. The heviest pollution by petroleum hydrocarbons (total content of normal alkanes 1.76 ug/l) and phtalate estrs (9.96 ug/l) was established near the Po River delta.