The missing piece: sediment records in remote Mountain lakes confirm glaciers being secondary sources of persistent organic pollutants.

After atmospheric deposition and storage in the ice, glaciers are temporary reservoirs of persistent organic pollutants (POPs). Recently, the hypothesis that melting glaciers represent secondary sources of these pollutants has been introduced by investigations of the historical trend of POPs in a dated sediment core from the proglacial Alpine Lake Oberaar. Here, the hypothesis is further confirmed by the comparison of sediment data gathered from two Alpine lakes with a glaciated and a nonglaciated hydrological catchment.