While industries clean up, wildfires spew mercury

[depakid]

Most of the toxic mercury spewed into the air in Oregon does not come from smokestacks that face tightening pollution rules, but from smoky wildfires that are getting more frequent and more intense with global warming.

Oregon wildfires poured more mercury into the air from 2002 through 2006 than any other state except Alaska and California, according to findings released Wednesday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology by scientists at the National Center of Atmospheric Research in Colorado.

That period included the 500,000-acre Biscuit fire in 2002, the largest wildfire in modern Oregon history.

The scientists calculated that Oregon wildfires released an average of about 2.8 tons of mercury into the air annually, more than twice the amount emitted by industrial sources such as power plants and factories, according to an inventory by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Bruce Hope, an environmental toxicologist at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, said he noticed a few years ago that he could tell when wildfires were burning by looking at data from mercury monitors. The fires send mercury levels three or four times higher.

"When those fires roll through, it just spikes," he said.

More: http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/news/119267792896220.xml&coll=7

[murray hill farm]

1. I wonder...

how much carbon is spewed by the war in Iraq....how many poisons are produced every day in Iraq by the war.

[Sequoia]

2. How do the fires cause mercry?

[tabatha]

3. the answer is in the article

Industrial mercury is an issue in wildfires, too, because mercury released amid the smoke of wildfires came originally from industrial sources and some natural sources such as volcanoes, said Hans Friedli, a scientist with the atmospheric research center and co-author of the new study. The mercury settled in forests and remained until fires burned through and sent it into the sky again.

[phantom power]

4. Toxic metals. Their half-life is oo.

[Sequoia]

6. Who knows what evil lurks in your forest?

[depakid]

5. The mercury is already present in the forests

Forest fires simply "stir it up" and loft it back into the atmosphere, likely concentrating it in certain areas as well.

The article is also somewhat inaccurate (which is no surprise, considering that it's from The Oregonian).

Mercury travels far from power plants- much of ours comes from China's filthy coal plants and it's NOT benign in the forests. Had the reporter or the editor(s) done a simple google search, they could have confirmed that:

New research reveals the poison is more deadly to wildlife than previously thought, affecting forest songbirds and other species that do not eat fish.

In nature, it is also well known that mercury often ends up in fish and their predators, such as loons and eagles. Washed into rivers, lakes and streams, inorganic mercury transforms into its toxic form, methylmercury, then moves up the aquatic food chain, from microbes and aquatic insects to small fish to larger fish to waterbirds and fish-eating mammals such as mink and otter. Every step of the way, the poison concentrates, a process called biomagnification.

On dry land, however, mercury was believed to remain locked in its harmless inorganic state. When McFarland and Rimmer told colleagues their plan to sample forest songbirds for the toxin, they were told they’d most likely find nothing.

To test for the toxic form of mercury in the region’s wildlife, the researchers focused on Bicknell’s thrush because it breeds exclusively in the gnarled conifer forests of northeastern mountains.

The biologists found mercury in all four bird species, yet Bicknell’s thrush showed the highest concentrations. The scientists speculate the birds ingest mercury when feeding on insects, which pick up the toxin from eating even smaller bugs and vegetation. Precisely how the inorganic mercury transforms into toxic methylmercury in the mountains remains a mystery. Evers speculates that acid rain—a problem across the Northeast—helps create conditions that promote the transformation.

More: http://www.nwf.org/nationalwildlife/article.cfm?issueID=76&articleID=1099

[Squeech]

7. Trying to research phytoremediation

Which as you all know already is the process of using plants to clean up contaminated ground.

Turns out there are certain plants that are really effective at taking up heavy metals through their roots and incorporating them into their stems and/or foliage. Grow sunflowers in an urban brownfield for ten years and not only will you have ten years of pretty flowers, but at the end of that time, the site will be as safe to build on as anything in the neighborhood.

What I have not been able to find out yet is what to do with the sunflowers containing the mercury and cadmium and lead. Obviously you don't just want to plow them under and return them to the soil; the whole point is for them to take the metals out. Same applies to any landfill scheme. I suppose the best idea would be some sort of hi-tech distillation like the Changing World thermal depolymerization process, where the organic material could be salvaged and the metal atoms would precipitate out in the ash (maybe even in industrially significant quantities), but I dunno whether anybody has that process working...

Or maybe my Google-fu just isn't good enough. Certainly that's happened before...

Anyway, my point here is, you've got to harvest your plants before wildfire season!