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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.