The Arctic is Full of Toxic Mercury, and Climate Change is Going To Release it (washingtonpost.com) 195
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.
How many Library of Congresses, though? (Score:2, Insightful)
Wait - how many Library of Congresses does that convert into? Or is there a car analogy you could use?
Re:How many Library of Congresses, though? (Score:5, Funny)
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False [imgflip.com].
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I like thermometers. If you filled 67 billion thermometers with mercury and laid them end to end you would reach the sun.
No they wouldn't, they wouldn't have structural integrity to reach the sun. They would topple over with the slightest of winds. There is no way you would be able to lay thermometers on end to end from here to the sun; although I hear Elon Musk is attempting that next and is raising funds from investors.
Re: How many Library of Congresses, though? (Score:1)
Nobody said there isn't any external structure supporting them. Only that they're end to end.
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Given Soul is 8 billion km from Planet, I find yor Calculators amuzing.
I find your auto complete to be even more amusing.
Just what is a "Yor calculator"?
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Given Soul is 8 billion km from Planet, I find yor Calculators amuzing.
Aprox. 0.15 billion km buddy.
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>> There are 32 million gallons worth of mercury, or the equivalent of 50 Olympic swimming pools, trapped Wait - how many Library of Congresses does that convert into? Or is there a car analogy you could use?
Car analogy? Since this is evil, I'm assuming we should use Musk-mobiles as the metric. How many seals are beaten to death every time a new Tesla rolls off the line?
Idiot density reached critical levels. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:The Climate Change Alarmism on Slashdot (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Kindly have some consideration for the people who do give a fuck. There are more of them than you think. And they have existed for all of recorded history -- acting imperfectly and selfishly at times, but leaving a legacy that the next generation can use to help make things better.
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Why? It's your world. Fix the problems yourself.
Aye, there's the problem. If you want a next generation, then you fix the world. Not a concern of mine.
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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.
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You always have a choice. If someone points a gun at your head and wants to make you do his bidding, you always have the choice to say "shoot" instead of becoming his accomplice.
The choice may not be something you like. But there is ALWAYS an alternative.
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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 [archive.fo]. Give up your SUVs, free speech rights, guns and beef and you will enter the promised land just like Cat Lady Ascendancy [counter-currents.com] Hierophant Hillary Clinton did.
How? (Score:1)
For context, that's "twice as much mercury as the rest of all soils, the atmosphere, and ocean combined,"
Why is there twice the mercury in the arctic? Or, should I just RTFA?
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Easy, when it's cold, all the mercury goes to the bottom.
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Elsewhere: Mercury compounds bio-accumulate in plants, plants die, decay, release mercury into environment. Lather rinse repeat.
Arctic: Mercury compounds bio-accumulate in plants, plants die, do NOT decay because of cold. Overtime, mercury accumulates in the Arctic, is lessened elsewhere.
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Wasn't that aluminium?
We Can Do Better (Score:2, Funny)
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.
I for one (Score:1)
Good news. (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Today's News (Score:2)
This just in: Trump pledges $1B to innovative Clean Mercury plants
And how did it get there? (Score:2, Troll)
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 re
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The mercury in permafrost largely predates modern coal burning. It tends to concentrate in the arctic due to atmospheric characteristics.
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Thanks. I would have expected such a tiny detail in the summary.
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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?
Preparation is the key (Score:3)
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.
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Way ahead of you. I live on an elevated position. I have a gun. Anyone trying to escape the rising sea levels gets shot.
Amazing. Every word in that sentence was wrong.. (Score:1, Informative)
From the study : "The turnover time associated with the microbial decay of frozen organic matter is ~14,000 years (Figure S28), making the Hg locked in permafrost effectively stable on human time scales. However, projections indicate a 30–99% reduction in near surface permafrost by 2100, and, once thawed, the turnover time for microbial decay drops to ~70 years (Koven et al., 2013; Schaefer et al., 2011). This makes the reservoir of Hg in permafrost soils vulnerable to release over the next century, w
I just want to say two words to you (Score:1)
Clean coal
That's the ticket to solving this whole greenhouse, global warming thingy. We need to make coal great again.
Mercury? (Score:3)
Does it...
Want to Break Free?
When is this warming happening again? (Score:1)
Is this before or after the projected 10-year pause in global warming [wattsupwiththat.com] due to decreased solar activity? Google search is pulling back articles from 2012 to say global warming wasn't linked to solar activity, except that it has for the last 5 years, and could happen again for at least another decade or more.
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Mercury in Vaccines (Score:2)
So wait - they are SOOO concerned about mercury in the artic being "released" but not concerned about the mercury in vaccines (or should I call an "adjuvent"). They tells us mercury is good for you that's why it's in the vaccines. So why should we give a raging rats ASS about mercury being released from the artic.... Make up your minds you stupid global warming conspiracy theorists.
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That doesn't mean that swallowing a couple of pounds of nails is.
Are you denialists intentionally stupid, or were you born that way?
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Wow look who is stupid. I think your confusing the PLANET mercury with the ELEMENT mercury.... Kind of hard to confuse, but I guess IQ challenged people can have that problem....
"Mercury poisoning can result from exposure to water-soluble forms of mercury (such as mercuric chloride or methylmercury), by inhalation of mercury vapor, or by ingesting any form of mercury."
Ref:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"Mercury's core has a higher iron content than that of any other major planet in the Solar System"
Ref:
ht [wikipedia.org]
The Talos Principle (Score:2)
Holy shit the Talos Principle is real! We have to get to work creating AIs that are humanlike to take over when we all die!
my experience with Mercury (Score:2)
My Grand Dad brought home a large Lipton instant Tea jar full of Mercury. He claimed it was used at work for cleaning.
I've swallowed Mercury, not on purpose - was going to shoot it like a empty Bic Pen spit wad when it fell down my throat.
Couldn't get rid of it, putting it down the drain was an experience. It would sit in the U-tube of the sink thwarting any attempt to remove and unclog (no one knew Mercury was poured down it). One day the U-tube shattered spilling Mercury all over, the Mercury had crystall
So? (Score:2)
Unless we're looking to farm the Arctic, I don't see a problem.
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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.
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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,
Thank you for that factoid. Time to draft another Slashdot narrative.. I mean "news article" that says IT'S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT because Global Warming has pushed the arctic above -38C for the FIRST TIME EVER IN RECORDED HISTORY THIS YEAR!
We'll just ignore the rest of your post about how mercury binds to other compounds. It's not science if it doesn't fit the narrative.
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That's an awful lot of words for "Whew, finally someone writes something that I understand and supports my preferred narrative!"
Re:Another day (Score:5, Informative)
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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 [wikipedia.org] on the outside of a glove to kill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn [wikipedia.org]. 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.
Wikipedia dry humor
Karen Wetterhahn
Known for Work on toxic metal exposure, dying of toxic metal exposure
Re:Another day (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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you should look up what "permafrost" means.
The name is a lie; There are bones under the ice from time before frost. My home town used to be under kilometers of ice just ten thousand years ago.
Re:Another day (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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you know what would make the world better? if you stopped whining and moving the goalposts like a little bitch, and started killing yourself.
Re:Another day (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Another day (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Another day (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Another day (Score:4, Insightful)
Another msmash abortion of an article about doom and gloom that probably won't happen.
And yet it melts... [metoffice.gov.uk]
Re:"Could" (Score:5, Insightful)
It says there is a bunch of mercury in a vulnerable system, not that it will be equitably distributed into your lunchables.
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The New American? Respectable scientists? What world are you in?
The World of Denial.
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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...
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Property.
What the city does potentially affects your property value, otherwise these people would ignore their cities, too.
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You're correct, however consider this also:
- Many people don't have insurance because the up front cost is too high or does not correlate with the risk mitigated.
- Many people choose not to live a healthy life because they prefer the comforts that come with an unhealthy life - even when they are aware of the negative consequences.
When it comes to mitigating "potential undesirable outcomes", people will often choose not to because the personal cost is too high - either in new costs or in reduction of day to
Should. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Use Billionaires $ Gates and the like (Score:1)
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Oh yes, and governments make such GOOD and PRODUCTIVE use of money.
Um, yeah.
literacy problem?
The tax would go directly to companies that actually clean up the messes being made.
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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.
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During the Bush era, I said that the only difference between liberal (or more like "progressive left") and conservative news people is that the latter don't try to hide the fact that they are assholes. Never been more true than today seems to me.
That said, I prefer if someone doesn't pretend.
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During the Bush era, I said that the only difference between liberal (or more like "progressive left") and conservative news people is that the latter don't try to hide the fact that they are assholes.
Really?
Which side purports to be "Fair and Balanced?"
Which side has the slogan "We report. You decide" that really means "We decide what to report. You believe you decided?"
Being biased is not being an asshole. Being biased and trying to claim you aren't? That's being an asshole.
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I'll just let Dave Barry illustrate for me the bias in the press via his 2016 Year in Review, the month of November:
"Trump’s victory stuns the nation. Not since the darkest days of the Civil War have so many Americans unfriended each other on Facebook. Some even take the extreme step of writing “open letters.” Angry, traumatized protesters cry, march, shout, smash windows, set fires —and that’s just the New York Times editorial board."
Once I thought Fox was pretty bad, in the l
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kthxcovfefe
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Oh you absolutely do "show problem," but the mercury affected you in a way that prevents you from seeing it.
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Mercury distribution is driven by air mass movements, precipitiation patterns and the availability of oxidizing agents, most likely halogens, that are frequently found in higher amounts in the north polar region.
Re:sniff test (Score:5, Informative)
Re:sniff test (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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
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I've been to the US. Thanks, but no thanks.
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Nope. Sorry, but nope.
Remember Spain and their discovery of the "new world"? Spain brought home tons (literally) of silver to Europe, enough to trash the silver price. Before the influx of that Spanish Main silver, silver and gold had almost the same value in Europe. Afterwards, silver was valued at a fraction of the gold value.
Yes, gold does have applications, too. And if there is cheap(er) gold available, more gold will probably be used where cheaper materials are used now, but generally, the price of gol
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Re:sniff test (Score:5, Insightful)
The pollution dilution solution. (Score:2)
The article describes 32 Million gallons of mercury being released, 3.2E7 gallons
The US federal drinking water standard is 2 parts per billion or 1 part in 500 million, 1:5E8 gallons
Multiplying, that means this is safe if it is diluted in 1.6E16 Gallons of water.
The volume of the ocean is 3.52E20 gallons.
Is there a proposed mechanism that could cause the mercury to be concentrated in a specific region?
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After Fukushima there was concern that radiation in the water could reach certain coasts at high concentration, so letting the dogs out would mean that some places can have too high a concentration.
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There's this activity that humans engage in called "mining" in which giant kidneys are constructed to separate various useful elements from the entropic ooze.
No, wait, I was reading from the "40 billion years old" column.
Under the four billion column, everything we mine is found in deposits or clusters of high concentration, many of which were discovered long before
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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 cinnab
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First, mercury is NOT toxic neither in liquid nor in solid (cinnabar) forms. Full stop.
You're right. Here, catch this vial of dimethylmercury [wikipedia.org]!
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The point is that the GP claimed that mercury is not toxic as a liquid or solid, when practically all mercury compounds are toxic and all organic mercury compounds are highly toxic.
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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 ca
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We survived Mount St Helens just fine and it doubled atmospheric mercury exposure world wide by throwing it into the air. I'm thinking this stuff won't be all that airborne, being in the thawing ground and not thrown into the air.
Have any other possible routes here? As I see this, the issue will be it getting into the food chain, and given there isn't much from the Artic in the human food chain, I'm thinking we are going to be fine. In other words, this won't be an issue, at least not a serious one. So t
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Mount St. Helens absolutely did not double mercury exposure worldwide. And like I've said repeatedly on this slashdot story, mercury emissions from permafrost will be able to travel around the world. And you absolutely do eat fish from the Arctic; the Alaska pollack fishery is in the largest in the world.
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Volcanos are the largest natural source of mercury in the atmosphere and often create huge spikes. So take a look at this: https://toxics.usgs.gov/pubs/F... [usgs.gov]
St Helens is the large spike around 1989... This from some ice cores looked at by the USGS....
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You're misreading the chart. Even taking it as accurate, it simply means that about half the worldwide atmospheric deposition in that year came from Mt. St. Helens. The total exposure is a function of the mercury in the environment, not the mercury that popped up in one year.
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So you are wrong on St Helens... Care to go for double or nothing?
And you absolutely do eat fish from the Arctic; the Alaska pollack fishery is in the largest in the world.
So, please describe HOW these fish will consume mercury laced food from this possible source? Also, care to guess how little this is likely to affect Pollack? At this point the mercury content of this fish is exceedingly low, being 100X less than Tuna. So unless you can invent a way this affects their food chain, I'm guessing you are just guessing and don't really know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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First, the amount of mercury in pollock is far more than 100x that in tuna (https://www.fda.gov/food/foodborneillnesscontaminants/metals/ucm115644.htm).
Second, mercury evaporates and goes into the environment. I am continuously puzzled how you don't understand a fundamental geochemical process like that. You seem to think that since you, an uneducated layperson on the subject, can't think off the top of your head how this mercury can be a danger, then nobody else can figure it out either which is insane. Wh
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