Abstract
Spheroidal carbonaceous particles (SCPs) are one of the types of fly ash particles produced by industrial fossil-fuel combustion. These SCPs are mainly composed of carbon, which enables them to be preserved in sediments for a long time; this preservation means that sedimentary SCPs have been used to study the distribution and history of environmental pollution. SCPs are used as a proxy for temporal and spatial atmospheric pollution, as a marker for sediment core dating, and as a proxy for the evaluation of transboundary pollution (i.e., the identification of the source of pollutants originating in one country but deposited in another country). The concentrations of sedimentary SCPs and their characteristics, such as morphology, size and chemical composition, provide useful information on past and present atmospheric pollution. This review provides a summary of the technique and its application, principally in Japan during the past decade.
