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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.
Pencils never contained lead though. It's a misunderstanding from when graphite was discovered back in the 16th century and people thought it was a type of lead and called it "black lead" or "plumbago".
...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?
Exactly what I was thinking. Zero point in doing research on how the ocean has acted in the past naturally when we humans keep fucking it up with toxic sludge.
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<_<
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You essentially can't use leaded gas if you care more than the slightest bit about air quality. Lead deposits wreck catalytic converters, which are important for cleaning up exhausts. And there are adequate if not great replacements for lead's anti-knock qualities... And we're really good at making hardened valve seats these days, so you don't need that either.
If you read the article, you might see this paragraph: "Still, the maps show there are places where lead contamination is a continuing problem. Off the southern tip of Africa, surface waters with relatively high traces of lead are flowing into the South Atlantic from the Indian Ocean. That’s probably due to the continuing use of leaded gasoline in parts of Africa and Asia"
There appears to be a direct correlation... Guess it wasn't so difficult after all?
Pencils never contained lead though. It's a misunderstanding from when graphite was discovered back in the 16th century and people thought it was a type of lead and called it "black lead" or "plumbago".
Actually the paint that was used on pencils contained lead in the past. Considering how many kids chewed on pencils in grade school, this wasn't the best idea.
It's doubtful that the Romans introduced much lead into the water. from http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~...:
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Do you really think the US and Europe account for the majority of vehicles?
Yes I do. It's not extremely lop sided, but there are more vehicles in Europe and the US combined than there are in China and India combined. I'd also throw all the cars in Japan under the US/Europe column for not using leaded gas.
Thank goodness we have all these armchair experts to correct those worthless braindead scientists. My goodness, between the experts on hydrology, climatology, physics, biology and all those other disciplines who always seem so quick to poke holes in theories without RTFAing or the papers the articles are based on, why Slashdot is a regular renaissance man's hangout.
Clearly we have no need of academia at all. We can shut down the universities and the research facilities, because here on Slashdot we have geniuses of unfathomable brilliance.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
Specifically, Algeria, Iraq, Yemen and Myanmar are known to still sell gasoline containing TEL at the pump.
I was wondering why it only appears in the known Ocean Currents.
Is this a case of looking for your lost keys under the streetlamp because its easier to see there?
Do they not find any evidence in areas away from the currents?
Maybe they didn't take random bottom readings anywhere else. Or maybe it settled out everywhere else but
within the currents. Oh, that's it. Its Settled Science.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
It's OK, those kids studied law and became politicians.
Oh wait...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
In America almost every family can afford cars. Not true in most Asian societies. (Yes there are exceptions, such as Singapore, hence I said most.)
I don't know how many people in Singapore can actually afford a car but I can tell you that the certificate required to own a car costs $93k for 10 years and the cost of the car can be as much as triple that of a "Western" nation. A lot of people catch cabs.
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Boat keels are usually made of lead. In order to counter the weight above CG, massive amounts of weight are added to the keel as low as possible. Sailboats use more lead per foot than powerboats but powerboats and vessels such as barges are absolutely massive. Boats are basically massive Weeble Wobbles. http://www.ebay.com/bhp/weeble-wobbles/
Being at the lowest part of the vessel and constantly in the water, keels are prone to blistering, leaching, and sometimes they just fall off. All this is just left in the sea. The other amazing thing is the amount of copper these boats go through. Most bottom paints are 50-75% copper. All the copper is leached out in about 2 years in southern climes, 5 years in northern. Most 35' sailboats take 1.5 - 2 gallons per bottom. That's 30 lbs of copper per sailboat every two years. Gone. Wow. A typical boat also eats about 5 pounds of zinc a year in sacrificial anodes, but zinc is cheap, so who cares.
Uh, the article said "lead," not "tetraethyllead" [sic].
Guess what? That lead came from the earth - humans dug it up. It's not like alchemy is real.
Are sub-sea geothermal vents spewing lead in some form? Are there exposed veins of lead on the ocean floor? Is it from fishing weights or ballasts of sunken ships?
If you can't answer all those questions and other similar, your comment is less than worthless.
Well it's obvious you didn't read it, particularly the bit about a concentration diluting along known currents. Guess those were some big words and you might have had trouble with them.
Tetraethyllead was added to gasoline as a catalyst. Once the fuel was burned the catalyst exited into the atmosphere (are you keeping up?) where it could land anywhere or go into solution where rain fell, taking it through drains, watersheds, down rivers and into the ocean. Spotting it in the water column is pretty easy. Spotting it in your water and food, well, that's a less heterogeneous environment. But with all the fuel burned with that additive, it's somewhere, it doesn't go POOF and magically disapper (out of sight, out of mind.) Got that?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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Hello? Mr D? Are you there?
Ohh.. that's right.. it became a problem.
And you died. Oops.
Lead in food leads to neurological disorders, retarding intelligence, impairing motor functions, etc.
Now, I'm not saying there's evidence of that in any responses here ...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm not sure about the reassembling part. I don't think it is capable of that without maybe some extreme heat and pressure or something.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
And you could still buy 4 star leaded fuel in the UK in 2011. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
The US went lead free decades ago, Europe a few years ago.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
While I don't disagree with the notion that leaded gasoline is a major contributor to lead in the environment, I was a little curious how much naturally-occuring lead there is.
Uranium has a 4.5 billion year half-life, and the end-product of its decay chain is lead. Since the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, you should expect to find about equal amounts of uranium and lead in the environment overall (I'm not an expert on how minute quantities of these elements act in seawater). The trace uranium in seawater is about 3.33 parts per billion.
According to TFA (which didn't give exact numbers), "the lead concentrations are roughly equivalent to what youâ(TM)d get if you dissolved a small spoonful of frozen orange juice in 200 Olympic-sized swimming pools". An Olympic-sized swimming pool is about 2.5 million liters. According to Google, 1 teaspoon in 2.5 million liters is about 2 parts per billion.
So the amounts of lead they're detecting are about 0.01 parts per billion, or two orders of magnitude less than the amount of naturally-ocurring uranium in seawater. The charts linked in TFA bear this out. Clicking through random charts, lead concentrations are around 25 pmol/kg, while uranium concentrations are around 3 nmol/kg (3000 pmol/kg).
So (1) for whatever reason uranium dissolves in seawater much more readily than lead, and (2) the amounts of lead they're detecting are minuscule even by "trace elements" standards.
"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...
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 you could still buy 4 star leaded fuel in the UK in 2011. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new... The US went lead free decades ago, Europe a few years ago.
How did you come up with that when the article states it was banned in the UK in 1998?
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You look in the obvious places first. No point looking in the unusual places if you aren't even sure it should be there. If their hypothesis was right, they should find it in predictable places in the highest levels, so look there first.
The fact that they confirmed their hypothesis doesn't prove they had confirmation bias.
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Evolution has a necessary and sufficient falsifiable hypothesis statement.
Catastrophic global warming does not.
This is absurd. If we show that climate sensitivity is low, or that CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas, or that humans didn't put it there, that that there are negative feedbacks -- any of those lines of evidence will falsify AGW, and therefore CAGW as well.
What *precisely* is catastrophic is problematic because people have different value systems. Nonetheless, no warming would not be CAGW, and 10C warming would make many places unlivable -- as in animals would be slowly cooked. So it is more nuanced in pointing out possible or likely changes at certain levels of warming.
I'm sure you think you know more about this than me, but all I see is motivated reasoning clothed in "science"... I'm sure you'll weasel out some alternative claim so that you can keep preaching your religion.
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