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3D Maps Reveal a Lead-Laced Ocean
sciencehabit writes "About 1000 meters down in a remote part of the Atlantic Ocean sits an unusual legacy of humanity's love affair with the automobile. It's a huge mass of seawater infused with traces of the toxic metal lead, a pollutant once widely emitted by cars burning leaded gasoline. Decades ago, the United States and Europe banned leaded gas and many other uses of the metal, but the pollutant's fingerprint lingers on—as shown by remarkably detailed new 3-D maps released this week. The 3D maps and animations are the early results of an unprecedented $300 million international collaboration to document the presence of trace metals and other chemicals in the world's oceans. The substances, which often occur in minute quantities, can provide important clues to understanding the ocean's past—such as how seawater masses have moved around over centuries—and its future, such as how climate change might shift key biochemical processes."
Nearly the entire worldwide fleet of piston powered aircraft still burn leaded gas.
...is because of human activity.
Without some sort of baseline of ocean lead levels before the industrial age, it's difficult to assert that the levels observed are caused by humanity in any specific percentage.
Where's the proxy for historic ocean lead levels pre-1850?
Lead! The Romans used the stuff for pipes, and so did we in the fifties. We use graphite in pencils now, so we don't use it there. Where do we use lead these days? Nuclear containment and superman films? (And probably illegal Manhattan plumbing repairs, where legacy systems would be impractical to replace)
Do you really think the US and Europe account for the majority of vehicles? I'm pretty sure places like China and India wouldn't give a shit about using leaded gas and leaded metal still - their environmental standards aren't exactly great compared to Western standards (and despite our own flaws and corruption, we at least still have better environmental standards so no US bashing please).
Slusho - You Can't Drink Just Six!
What's the worst that could happen?
<_<
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I never understood why leaded gasoline was cheaper than unleaded back when both were for sale. They actually added the lead. I also don't understand why lead additives are still allowed.
just asking
Looking at TFA maps, the highest concentration appears to be in the outflow from the Mediterranean. That's probably a result of all the wars fought over there.
Have gnu, will travel.
Banning lead gasoline - Best environmental law ever passed. Lower blood lead levels in kids, higher test scores, less crime in cities.
Banning lead in solder - Worst environmental law ever passed. Lead in solder never escaped in the environment, was at worst destined for a lined landfill. Was replaced by dredging coral reef islands for TIN and SILVER (the alternatives to lead). Tin and Silver have very low recycled content, the lead was 85% recycled content.
I'm very pro environment, very pro scientific method. The unintentional consequences of the success of lead gasoline bans were stupid tin mining in coral islands to divert solid solder from rich nations lined landfills.
Gently reply
Pretty heat map means nothing without a scale. It shows some outflow of some amount of lead based chemicals (paint, tetra ethyl lead, metallic lead, whatever); but, without a scale there is no indication of the amounts. It might be parts per trillion, DAQ counts above measurable background derived from spectral analysis using a crappy camera, % change in mass relative to a neutron star, anything really.
Of course the oceans are big enough, if you could guarantee even mixing. You could dump a thousand years worth of uranium produced at curring mining rates, and only change the amount of uranium in the oceans by 1%. Lead might be a tad different even in the idealistic assumption of perfect mixing, considering we mine up hundred times as much a year as uranium, and the oceans normally have a factor of hundred less lead than uranium, and we're a lot less careful with lead.
What biased rubbish. No scientific proof of anything other than the obvious angry, mentally disturbed writer.
Long live Slashdot.
Unnecessary worldwide poisoning with lead through car gasoline (known to be neurotoxic for hundreths of years) still happens today in some parts of the world.
Read http://www.todayifoundout.com/... to see how we really don't deserve the name gaven to our species...
Nowadays, jet fuel, maybe even on purpose for solar management geo engineering (even unilateral as per CFR recomendations), is leaking all kinds of bizarre particulates all over the world.
There is a heated discussion on whether what we now see almost on a daily basis are contrails or chemtrails. Who cares! Just don't poison us!
What matters is that this is relatively new worldwide phenomenon ( less than a decade), and tests have proven that air quality is degrading everywhere.
Why not being more proactive, and make sure that whatever they add to the jet formulas is safe?
Look up, next time you see a nice sun shiny day turn to a misty, smoggy, gray day from air traffic, remember it took almost a century to ban lean in car gasoline. Do you feel safe?
Z
I'm trying to get modded "Interesting Flamebait Informative and Insightful Redundant Troll" *-* Please Help *-*
Sorry, this started out interesting, but then the summary said something about climate change. Now I have a hard time believing lead even exists. And if you prove to me that it does, I will claim that volcanoes are spewing out a hundred times more of the stuff than all human activities. And if you tell me that is bullshit, well, then I'm already over in some other thread doubting lead's existence again.
"The solution to pollution is dilution" - man, that was one big lie, wasn't it? It started dying with this [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_Bay].
More than 15 years ago I was involved in such study and already at that time it was understood that the water might be safe for drinking but should you eat fish from it you are in trouble. The operative word here is "bio accumulation". I was working on a project commissioned by the [much smaller] EU at the time to readjust the safety levels of heavy metals in marine and river waters. We worked along the south-west coast of France and north-west cost of Spain. You know what's funny - because of the importance of our finds which would lead to legislation change we worked "under cover" .I am not kidding. A fishing boat was used with an analytical lab on board but we would always say on the radio we were fishermen. Even to the people that direct the traffic in harbors. We were told not to say to anyone what we research. I think the very fact that such measures were taken on a EU project no less, says something...something that is not nice.
However, your particular anger is not warranted in this case, IMO. The radioactive material form that disaster is truly insignificant compared to the heavy metal pollution from everything else. I am not saying that we should close our eyes and mouths of course...
First, we know nothing of the pre-industrial-age state of the oceans.
Second, lead occurs naturally in the Earth and water that filters through that Earth picks up lead (anybody here from LEADVILLE Colorado?)
Third, what are the levels that are demonstrated to be harmful (by having some human actually hurt, rather than by spooking a "soccer mom" and causing her to feel anxious) and what are the levels detected in the ocean? Once youve compare these two items, then ask the question that matters: What would it take to change things enough to matter, and would that be cost-effective?
Fourth, As our instruments get better and better, and as researchers seeking grants get more desperate to find ecological disasters that require the IMMEDIATE, EMERGENCY deployment of research grants, we can find traces of "harmful" things everywhere up to and including even NASA's best cleanrooms.
Fifth, there's no proof that our use of lead caused the levels seen in the ocean... it could simply be that our mining activities churned-up more lead-laden soils and rain waters washing through that made it to the sea (as most water does). We used to use lead solder to solder water-carrying pipes all over the world... that's an IMMENSE quantity of water that went through pipes at some point before going to the seas that might have picked up lead THAT way. I'm NOT insisting that either of these are what happened, just asserting that there might be any number of explanations for some portion, or all, of the lead detected that do not fit the narrative being pushed by these people.
Guess what, boys and girls... NEARLY EVERYTHING (including pure H2O) will kill you if you injest too much. More importantly: human beings DID NOT EVOLVE IN A SCIENCE LAB CLEAN ROOM WITH WATER PURIFIERS AND HEPA AIR FILTERS. In fact, it is entirely possible that if you raised a human in a perfectly clean pure environment with perfect clean air, perfect clean food and perfect clean water, that human would die a horrible death. We already KNOW that children raised with "dirty" pets are less vulnerable to allergies (for example) and AFAIK nobody has documented and proven just how much of the various substances we need, like various minerals, we absorb in various ways from our environment without even knowing it. Our modern society has spent BILLIONS of dollars scrubbing lead from electronics, without any evidence that anybody had ever been hurt by the lead in (for example) their computers (which, unlike leaded gas, involve no combustion) based primarily on [1] the harm poor children suffered from EATING leaded paint and [2] the harm it was asserted would occur when we put that lead back into the ground (where it originally CAME from) when those electronics get destroyed. Remember: lead is an element; it's NOT manmade, and (unlike some elements) it occurs in large deposits all over the planet. NOBODY considered that it might have been cheaper and more beneficial to spend fewer dollars simply lifting children out of poverty, or teaching people to feed their hungry kids so they would not peel paint off the walls and eat it. Nobody wanted to face the fact that lead-free solder is a poor replacement for leaded-solder, but this will probably get some notice when an airliner goes down someday with avionics that shorted-out from tin wiskers (those tiny crystallized structures that grow in lead-free electronics and form new random cat-whisker-like connections).
Lead was used in gasoline, in-part, as a lubricant in the parts of the engine where you did not want oil. It reduced the wear-and-tear on engines when the tech was older and there were not many good alternatives... and lots of Americans lost economic value they never recovered when they were railroaded into the 1st generation of cars that required "unleaded" gas. Those cars were often crappy machines (that cost as much or more than the older ones but did not last as long) that needed to be replaced early; cars are one of the biggest capital expenses families face after houses and that was money those families never got back (leaving them less for education, retirement, etc).
Also, many tests of kids have been dumbed-down over the past 40 or so years. They started by dumbing-down tests in the K-12 schools, then during the nineties they dumbed-down the SAT. They subsequently even re-scaled the SAT scores (1600 USED to be a perfect score). You simply cannot do a straight 1964-to-2014 comparison now for example. Yes, you MAY find lower lead levels in kids blood these days but you also probably find lower levels of radioactive substances (we tested lots of nukes above ground in the 1950's and into the 60's) and indeed MANY other things have changed (like moms all-over America stuffing their kids full of multi-vitamins) and you COULD even point out that [1] kids used to be under-nourished in poor neighborhoods but now tend to be over-nourished thanks to government food programs (food stamps, school lunches, etc) and [2] kids are drinking lots more fizzy drinks now than they used to ... so maybe fizzy drinks are having a positive effect.
I hate the way our modern societey has been replacing science with statistics; it's a dumbing-down of science that disregards the causation---corellation problem and can lead to LOTS of junk conclusions if not very carefully controlled for
Businessweek - A third of all tin comes from Bangka. http://www.businessweek.com/ar... Bangka tin mines were opened to supply deleaded solder. The point is that the environmental cost of extraction is nearly always more significant than the environmental cost of exposure. Environmental laws that consider only the "end of pipe" without considering lifecycle costs are to environmentalism what mercury laxative was to medicine (very effective if all you care about is an excellent crapping experience)
80% of lead supply is recycled content, the alternative (tin) must be mined. I thought the hype was that we'd be significantly safer with solid tin solder in lined capped landfills than we would be with leaded solder in lined capped landfills. What ROHS did was take a very minor, negligible risk from rich nations and displace the environmental costs to a hugely impactful practice (tin dredging) in developing nations, and label it "green" and give environmental awards with no study of the consequences upstream.
Want an organic, non-toxic raw material? Baby seal pelts. If all you care about is the final disposal effect, mercury made a great laxative. Primum non nocere
Gently reply
The Romans used lead to flavor food. But they ended up collapsing. We can understand that now. Lead in gasoline explains the crime wave of the seventies. http://www.motherjones.com/env...
And they know for sure it's because of the burning of leaded fuel and not a natural cause? This is just speculation that it's from polution, it might be true, but it also might not.. no real evidence to prove it..
I want to see some proof of their claim. Typical B.S. where somebody finds something and blames it on destructive humans. Yet these greenies aren't willing to 'off' themselves to make the planet better for everyone else. Al Gore is a good example.
"The solution to pollution is dilution" - man, that was one big lie, wasn't it?
The solution to pollution is dilution. The problem is knowing what amount of dilution is reasonable, and at some industrial levels there is going to be waste that will do damage because you can't achieve that dilution in any reasonable or safe way. It doesn't mean you can dump what you want where you want, but there are some cases where it won't matter. If you dump a pound of sodium chloride in the ocean, it won't be a big deal as long as you don't hit some animal on the head, and it is not something you're going to repeat thousands or millions of times. Dumping a pound of lead is a different story, since it could end up being a significant change for a kilometer away from where you dump it. This is important for making realistic environmental limits on what people and companies will do, increasing the likelihood that laws will be followed. A company can't go dumping millions of pounds of salt or fertilizer in a river, but there is some level where the amount added is insignificant with realistic mixing, whether that amount is parts per thousand or parts per billion. It is the difference between telling them to take reasonable efforts to clean up or filter out problematic stuff, versus spending insane amounts of money to make sure everything is at homeopathic levels.
You're missing the point. I could have gone and gotten the journal article or gone to the Geotraces site myself as well. In fact, you'll notice one of my options was PPT. Science is doing a disservice by publishing graphs with no scale for reference and of all people, they should know better. You're not supposed to do that, ever. There was an article in a different publication not two days ago showing the trace cesium in the ocean currents that could be attributed to Fukushima. It was done in all scary dark reds and oranges, scaled for maximum impact, and the chart was widely circulated in the mass media. In reality, the trace amounts are barely detectable and insignificant all the way back to the Japanese coastline (except for right next to the accident site). I'm dealing with customers who are concerned about contamination levels around 3 PPB. Current technology allows us to see better than PPT. Maps like this amount to "Hey, we can see something" but don't put it into any context, scientific or otherwise.
They're talking about lab coats and extensive efforts to prevent contamination of the samples so they must be measuring in insanely low concentrations. I completely agree that we shouldn't be dumping anything into the ocean/air but these materials do exist naturally (lead, uranium, etc). It would be helpful to know what their occurrence is naturally and THEN know how much human activity has contributed to it.
Banning lead in solder - Worst environmental law ever passed. Lead in solder never escaped in the environment, was at worst destined for a lined landfill.
I didn't understand the seemingly poor cost-benefit trade-off either, until I realized it was the European Union that pushed for this. In Europe, they incinerate a much larger portion of their trash than we do -- thus, the lead in the garbage stream was actually a big problem for them.
Hi hs, it seems to me that some motivated reasoning is going on here. We both established that Pb has a short time-course, so paleolithic measurements of Pb aren't really relevant. If it only lasts upwards to 200 years, you only need to look back... 200 years. Also, there is no global Pb level, since the time-course is too short for global mixing. So any Pb measurement is necessarily local. Figure 2 shows the Pb measure growing by half to a full order of magnitude. The locality of the measurement is consistent with its distance for industrialized centres. The Saragossa Sea measurement shows a 15-fold increase over preindustrial levels. That Pb is coming from somewhere.
Also, it is important to realize that *everything* is a proxy. You think your thermometer isn't a proxy? It doesn't tell you the temperature in the room, there are all sorts of subtle local climates that aren't accounted for. A "skeptic" will point to unknowns about local climates to claim that the proxy isn't good enough. Good enough for *what* precisely is never discussed, because it is the underlying conclusion that is being avoided.
You will always be able to find some uncertainty, either directly in the measure, in the operationalization of the measure, or both. As such, it is an easy, and lazy game to point to uncertainties. Given the Pb measurements in corals, their locality, and what we know about gasoline usage, we can be fairly certain where the Pb came from. Sure there could be another source. Magic pixies could have created it. As such, we have no reason to believe that magic pixies didn't create the Pb.
You strike me as the type of person who is scientific only insofar as it jives with your politics, which is to say, you hate the thought that some forms of environmentalism is scientifically based, and therefore you are motivated to make hay out of uncertainties, even long after the balance of evidence has moved.
As such, you should apply for a job at Heartland, since that's what they do there.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Ignorance is not bliss, especially with heavy metals in the environment. Hg was used to almegmate fluvial Gold in California and large amounts of Hg are now trapped in sediments washed down from the gold bearing deposits. Hg is not that mobile in the environment unless it gets incorporated into organic systems and the amount of Hg detected downstream has been relatively low, but the point is, as in the OP, that we do the experiment after the fact. In ignorance we do things and turn around and try to find out the damage after the fact, after the profit taking, and hope that the damage isn't too fatal. The other shoe may drop on Hg contamination in California centuries from now, however.
This is always er... muddied, by the fact that nature does some of the injection of heavy metals into the environment, herself. Hg is a common element in the Franciscan Group of the California Coast Ranges, so is Cr, so when businesses put large excesses of these elements into the environment, both Hg and Cr, they point to the natural supply in order to get wiggle room. In the case of Cr, it was the overabundance of the more oxidized Cr+6 that got some businesses into trouble, when Cr+2 or Cr+3 are the natural species of the element ion.