Release of toxic chemcials with climate change

Arctic Mercury Pollution To Increase as Permafrost Thaws

_{Warming soils will allow long-dormant bacteria to wake up and begin converting inert mercury to its more toxic form, say scientists}

_{By Emily Gertz}

Barents Observer,

13 October, 2015

Thawing Arctic permafrost may well unleash a new wave of toxic mercury pollution, say scientists,contributing to ongoing mercury poisoning issues in parts of the region.

Mercury poisoning harms wildlife and causes developmental and neurological damage in human fetuses and children.

These soils were frozen year round as recently as 10 to 20 years ago, but now thaw and re-freeze annually, said lead author Dwayne Elias, a microbiologist with the Oak Ridge National Laboratories, a federally-owned research center in the United States.

As the freeze-thaw cycle continues in coming years, he said, bacteria that contain the genes needed to convert inorganic mercury to its toxic form, called methyl mercury, will “wake up from being dormant for thousands and thousands of years.” 

Groundwater will transport this methyl mercury into rivers and streams that game animals such as moose and caribou drink from, he said. Those water flows will also carry the mercury into coastal habitats of marine mammals and fish.

Inert mercury is carried into the Arctic by global wind and water currents from sources in lower latitudes, largely coal-fired power plants and small-scale gold mining in Asia and Southeast Asia.

There have also been cases of mercury poisoning caused by pollution and illegal waste dumping from industrial operations sited in the Arctic, such as the “Ontario Minimata disease” crisis among First Nation communities in Ontario, Canada in the 1960s and 1970s.

Methyl mercury poisoning is a longstanding problem in the North American Arctic.

One recent study found that Inuit women and children in some remote northern Quebec communities consumed mercury at nearly twice the government’s recommended maximum daily dose. The children scored five points lower on IQ tests, on average, than Arctic children who ate less of traditional foods including beluga whale, seal, and walrus meats. The poisoned children also needed remedial education four times more often than children from less-remote villages.

Scientists in 2014 reported high levels of toxic mercury among residents of two coastal communities in Greenland.

In a 2004 study conducted in the sub-Arctic Faroe Islands of the North Atlantic, children born to mothers who ate pilot whale meat while pregnant had impaired cognitive abilities, hearing, and heart health throughout childhood and into their teen years.

For the latest research, which was published Friday in the journal Science, Elias and his colleagues tested over 3,500 “metagenomes” for the presence of methylating genes. Metagenomes are data sets that include the combined genetic codes of every organism present in an environmental or other biological sample.

Over 2,000 metagenomes in this study came from “a comprehensive sample of terrestrial and aquatic environments” around the world, said Elias, while around 1,200 were from human and animal sources.

“In permafrost, there was data existing from a couple of permafrost sites in Alaska,” he said. “We were able to find not only that the mercury methylation genes were present in those samples, but that they gave us some of the highest counts in all of the thousands of samples.”

Microplastics found in waters off Svalbard

Not biodegradable, once microplastics enter the marine environment, they are extremely hard to remove.(Photo: Unep.org)

Microplastics, the tiny plastic particles that are accumulating in marine waters and big lakes around the world, are now showing up in the Arctic waters south and southwest of Svalbard, Norway, a new study says.

Toxic chemicals released by melting Arctic ice

1st evidence of suspected link between climate change and pollution

Jul 25, 2011

Climate change is boosting levels of banned pollutants such as PCBs and DDT in the atmosphere, Canadian, Chinese and Norwegian scientists have found.

A "wide range" of persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, have been increasingly released into the Arctic atmosphere since the early 1990s, says the study led by Environment Canada scientist Jianmin Ma, "confirming that Arctic warming could undermine global efforts to reduce environmental and human exposure to these toxic chemicals."

Arctic ice melt to release 1 trillion pieces of plastic into sea

Increasing ice melt due to climate change will pose a major threat to marine life, report says

As the Arctic ice melt accelerates due to climate change it could release more than 1 trillion pieces of plastic into the ocean over the next decade, possibly posing a major threat to marine life, a new scientific report said.

The report, titled “Global Warming Releases Microplastic Legacy Frozen in Arctic Sea Ice,” said ice in some remote locations contains at least twice as much plastic as previously reported areas of surface water such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – an area of plastic waste estimated to be bigger than the state of Texas.