More and more trace elements are present in the oceans as a result of industrial waste. In order to monitor their presence in the Mediterranean, Jonathan Richir is studying their presence in test species. Among these are the posidionae, whose state of health he is mapping along the French Mediterranean coast.

A young researcher in the second year of his doctoral studies, Jonathan Richir is studying the recent development of pollution in the North-Eastern Mediterranean by means of the trace elements. The term “trace element” refers to everything we find at a trace level in the sea: this includes the heavy metals of course, but also precious metals or other metalloids for example. The “classic” heavy metals such as lead or cadmium have long been detected and studied. The pollution they cause is well-known, and directives have been put in place to minimise their dumping into the sea. But industry is producing new items that are partly made up of rare metals, or rare metals are used and/or released during their manufacture. Let’s take for example antimony (Sb), it is a fireproof substance which is also found in industrial smoke, vanadium (V), a tracer of hydrocarbon pollution as it is released during oil-dumping into the sea, and also silver. Yet, technology that has been developed to measure heavy metals has been fine-tuned, so that today it is possible to measure many trace elements. However, this has curiously been neglected up to the present time. This is an oversight that Jonathan Richir wishes to make up for, by tracing the presence of no less than 23 trace elements, including the classic heavy metals which as earlier mentioned, are always measured.