A U.S. study has found that centuries of coal burning, primarily in Europe and North America, has contaminated the Arctic with pollutants injuring human health and damaging polar habitat.
Img: Jin Hua Gong Mine, Datong, Shanxi, China. Credit: Peter Van den Bossche
The research by the Desert Research Institute (DRI), Reno, Nev. is titled "Coal Burning Leaves Toxic Heavy Metal Legacy in the Arctic," and was partially funded by the National Science Foundation.
Measurements taken from an ice core drilled in Greenland show higher than expected levels of toxic heavy metals cadmium, thallium and lead, all of which result from burning coal.
But the data presented some interesting variations said the team in findings published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Conventional wisdom held that toxic heavy metals were higher in the 1960s and ‘70s, the peak of industrial activity in Europe and North America and certainly before implementation of Clean Air Act controls in the early 1970s," said Joe McConnell, lead researcher and director of DRI's Ultra-Trace Chemistry Laboratory.
"But it turns out pollution in southern Greenland was higher 100 years ago when North American and European economies ran on coal, before the advent of cleaner, more efficient coal burning technologies and the switch to oil and gas-based economies," McConnell said in the statement.
Though the data showed heavy-metal pollution in the North Atlantic sector of the Arctic is substantially lower today than a century ago, McConnell and his research partner, Ross Edwards, an associate research professor at DRI, said increased levels of world consumption of coal meant there was still cause for concern.
"Contamination of other sectors may be increasing because of the rapid coal-driven growth of Asian economies," they wrote in the report.
The pair suggest clean coal technology or switching to alternative sources of fuel may be the only way to avoid further contamination.
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