Thursday, August 07, 2014

Discouraging pollution news...

Pollution triples mercury levels in ocean surface waters, study finds | Environment | theguardian.com

Particularly discouraging because it affects some of the tastier fish species.

Update:  The report in Nature reads even worse than the Guardian's:

But study co-author Carl Lamborg, a marine geochemist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, says that the deep water's ability to sequester mercury may soon be exhausted. Humans are on track to emit as much mercury in the next 50 years as they did in the last 150 years, he notes.

You're starting to overwhelm the ability of deep water formation to hide some of that mercury from us, with the net result that more and more of our emissions will be found in progressively shallower water,” Lamborg adds. That increases the odds that mercury levels in key food species will rise, increasing humans' exposure.

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