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The Arctic is Full of Toxic Mercury, and Climate Change is Going To Release it (washingtonpost.com)
We already knew that thawing Arctic permafrost would release powerful greenhouse gases. On Monday, scientists revealed it could also release massive amounts of mercury -- a potent neurotoxin and serious threat to human health. From a report: Permafrost, the Arctic's frozen soil, acts as a massive ice trap that keeps carbon stuck in the ground and out of the atmosphere -- where, if released as carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas would drive global warming. But as humans warm the climate, they risk thawing that permafrost and releasing that carbon, with microbial organisms becoming more active and breaking down the ancient plant life that had previously been preserved in the frozen earth. That would further worsen global warming, further thawing the Arctic -- and so on. That cycle would be scary enough, but U.S. government scientists on Monday revealed that the permafrost also contains large volumes of mercury, a toxic element humans have already been pumping into the air by burning coal. There are 32 million gallons worth of mercury, or the equivalent of 50 Olympic swimming pools, trapped in the permafrost, the scientists wrote in a study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. For context, that's "twice as much mercury as the rest of all soils, the atmosphere, and ocean combined," they wrote.
That a popular article doesn't give a perfectly accurate description shouldn't be shocking but if you go to the actual research article http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GL075571/full?wol1URL=/doi/10.1002/2017GL075571/full there concern is pretty clear about airborne and water soluble organic mercury compounds which are far more dangerous than metallic mercury or most inorganic mercury compounds. Metallic mercury and inorganic mercury is pretty safe. You can hold a ball of mercury in your hand without any real consequences. But organic mercury compounds can be much more dangerous. It took just a drop of dimethyl mercury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylmercury on the outside of a glove to kill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn. Of course, no one is going to directly die from this, but an increase in atmospheric and oceanic mercury levels could have a real negative impact on both the ecosystems and general human health.
Since when does the "sniff test" trump a paper in a peer-reviewed journal, written by scientists from the US Geological Survey? The introduction to the paper suggests a mechanism (with citations) by which mercury is concentrated in the permafrost.