Table 1.

Summary overview of main subject areas addressed in oil-related publications in the ScienceDirect database relating to the maritime Antarctic over the years 1970–2020.

Decade	Subject Areas	Example References
1970–1980	Distribution of hydrocarbons in the marine environment, pollution studies, toxicity assessments of Antarctic marine organisms (plankton, macrobenthos)	[20,28]
1981–1990	Chemical studies on alkane chains found in Antarctic marine sediments, chlorinated hydrocarbons	[21,29,30]
1991–2000	Toxicity studies on Antarctic fish, indigenous hydrocarbon-degrading bacteria, intertidal sediment studies, Bahia Paraiso, monitoring of hydrocarbon levels in seawater	[22,23,31]
2001–2010	Biodegradation studies by marine bacterial species, bioremediation, molecular and physiological studies of marine bacteria	[24,25,32,33]
2011–2020	Dynamic changes to microbial communities, genome sequencing, microcosm studies, biodegradation studies by bacterial consortia, hydrocarbon monitoring studies	[14,18,26,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42]