Costa Concordia disaster: environmental impact from phytochemical point of view

During the night of the 13 January 2012 at few hundred of meters from the Giglio island the giant yacht cruise Costa Concordia wrecked off the rocks of the coast. The disaster immediately propagated into Italy peninsula and later to the entire world. After impact the ship begin to inclined dangerously on the reefs. The evacuation of Costa Concordia took over six hours and not all passengers were evacuated, 32 people died, victim of confusion and negligence. Finally the inclination stopped, resting the ship on her starboard (right) side in shallow waters with most of her starboard side under water. After the indignation and desperation of the emergency period, people started to think. It was necessary to remove the ship. On 17 September 2013, Costa Concordia was winched upright to a vertical position through a parbuckling procedure. The cost for salvaging the ship was $799 million that makes it the most expensive salvage operation ever. The next stage was to understand the consequences and the entity of the damages, including the environmental impact. Scientists of the matter were called for measurements and considerations. For scientists it was an unique occasion. For 1 year, 9 months and 4 days, the enormous hull of the boat interrupted the normal flow of sun light, damaging in different ways all under the ship for a surface of more than 10 000 m2. A model of great proportion to measure an environmental impact impossible to obtain in other way. The seagrass Posidonia oceanica, that forms large underwater meadows, are an important part of the ecosystem. Owing to its well known relevance as environmental tool, the plant was chosen as ideal marker of the impact. We performed a study concerning the metabolic damage on P. oceanica populations on purpose collected near or under the Costa Concordia’s shadow in the period before savaging. Analytic method: HPTLC (High Performance Thin Layer Chromatography) fingerprint analysis was selected to detect the metabolic differences among the collected samples, in order to evidence the metabolic effects of the environmental changes. The comparison between samples is facilitated by the visual inspection and samples can be analysed side-by-side and exactly in the same conditions. Actually HPTLC is focused on the analysis of herbal and pharmaceutical marketed products, but its potentiality in biologic themes is high. This is the first time of application of fingerprint HPTLC in an environmental damage evaluation. To obtain a complete information HPTLC analysis must be detected, that means the use of selected markers to identify the most important constituents. For this reason the extracts were separated by column chromatography and the constituents identified by MS and NMR spectroscopy. In this way, the differences in fingerprints can be interpreted as metabolism changes. Previous phytochemical studies reported for P. oceanica the presence of simple aromatic acids, terpenes and phenols, beside carbohydrates, saturated and unsaturated fatty acids and other similar compounds, as confirmed also in this research.