Northern US Forest Soils Contain Up To 16X Mercury Of Southern Counterparts - Chem/Eng News

[hatrack]

The carbon-rich soils in northern U.S. forests contain up to 16 times as much mercury as do soils in southern forests, according to a new study conducted in 10 states (Environ. Sci. Technol., DOI: 10.1021/es104384m).

Between 5,000 and 8,000 tons of mercury, a toxic metal, enter the atmosphere annually, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. While natural sources, such as volcanoes, emit some of the mercury, much of it originates from industrial sources, such as coal-burning power plants. Some of the mercury settles in forests, where trees, leaf litter, and soil absorb it.

Anthropogenic mercury has accumulated in forests since the Industrial Revolution. As a result, scientists suspect that globally, forests could store tens to hundreds of thousands of tons of the metal, says the study's lead author, Daniel Obrist, an associate research professor at the Desert Research Institute, the environmental research arm of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

But researchers know little about the geographical distribution of those mercury deposits, Obrist says. Nor do they have a clear understanding of whether a warming climate could cause that mercury to cycle more quickly into the atmosphere. Scientists want to understand mercury's fate because it can wash from the atmosphere or from forest floors to water bodies, where it can accumulate in the aquatic food chain.

EDIT

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/89/i17/8917scene.html

[PDJane]

1. Scary stuff,

But not unexpected.