Atmospheric Mercury Emissions Have Steeply Reduced in the Last Decade According to Mt. Everest Samples
Four decades of measuring atmospheric mercury on Mt. Everest show that concentration of mercury in the atmosphere peaked in 2002 and has declined around 70% between 2002 and 2020.
This indicates that overall human emissions of mercury have decreased steeply, which is extremely good news given the many damaging health effects of mercury exposure to both the environment and human health.
Information and image from this article in ACS ES&T Air
And why the shrinking lake might be key to meeting America's clean energy goals.
The State of California and to a lesser extent the federal government have been screwing around with the Salton Sea and its problems and potential solutions for years and years. I bet the stack of paper that contains all the studies done over the years would be ten feet high (or higher) and the amount of money that has been spent to pay consultants to produce that giant stack is approaching half a billion dollars. I used to go to Salton Sea a few times a year and photograph the birds (resident and migratory) and the gorgeous scenario. No more....the smell is awful, the poverty is depressing, the fish are dead and the birds are gone.
Excerpt from this story from Grist:
Cut off from the life source that created it — the Colorado River — and sustained mainly by limited agricultural runoff from nearby farms, the landlocked waterbody began to evaporate. The water that remained became increasingly salty and toxic. Tourism dried up. The scent of rotten eggs, from high levels of hydrogen sulfide in the sea, filled the air. Fish died in droves from lack of oxygen, their bones washing up on the beach like sand.
By the 1980s, the rich, white vacationers had fled. Today, the community is made up of predominantly Latino agricultural workers who labor in nearby fields in Imperial County, among the poorest counties in California, and Indigenous tribes that have called the region home for millennia. They suffer from a unique cocktail of health threats that stem from the Salton Sea.
The waterbody is fed by about 50 agricultural channels, carrying limited amounts of water infused with pesticides, nitrogen, fertilizers, and other agricultural byproducts. As a result, the briny lake’s sediment is laced with toxins like lead, chromium, and DDT. Climate change and the prolonged megadrought gripping the western United States are only compounding these problems. The Salton Sea is projected to lose three quarters of its volume by the end of this decade; declining water levels could expose an additional 100,000 acres of lake bottom. The sea’s surface has already shrunk roughly 38 square miles since 2003.
As the sea dries and more shoreline is exposed, the strong winds that plague this part of California kick up chemical-laced dust and blow it into nearby communities, where roughly 650,000 people live. Residents complain of headaches, nosebleeds, asthma, and other health problems.
But solutions are limited. The dust that gets kicked up can be suppressed, to some extent, with habitat restoration projects. The first-ever large-scale restoration project for the Salton Sea, a network of ponds on 30,000 acres of lake bed, is proposed to start this year. But the project is no substitute for the obvious: The sea is rapidly shrinking and it needs a fresh infusion of water to survive. “A perfect solution for the Salton Sea — in a world where we have an abundance of water and more reliable hydrological cycles — is we would just fill that thing back up,” Binstock, from the Sierra Club, said.
But there’s no water to be had. One proposal is to ship saltwater in from Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, 125 miles south, but Binstock isn’t so sure the positives of that plan outweigh the negatives. “The tremendous investments in hard infrastructure, the disturbance of playa, and the public health and environmental impacts, the costs are just … it’s pretty bananas to think about,” she said.
Meanwhile, the Salton Sea’s copious brine presents an unexpected opportunity: a bonanza of lithium, the highly sought-after metal.
Lithium is the key ingredient in electric vehicles batteries and clean energy storage, but it is also in short supply. Lithium prices shot up some 400 percent this year as the global appetite for EVs rose and companies became increasingly desperate to find new sources of the metal. The state of California estimates that the Salton Sea has enough lithium to supply America’s entire appetite, now and in the future, and 40 percent of the globe’s demand on top of that.
Loera and other local groups recognize the importance of the sea’s lithium stores, but they say communities affected by the region’s toxic dust and algae blooms need justice before extraction can begin. “A lot of residents have questions about potential impacts,” Loera said. Lithium mining requires copious amounts of water. Would that water come from the sea’s own limited supply? And what impacts would mining have on the state’s ongoing habitat restoration and dust suppression efforts? Those questions and others raised by the community haven’t been adequately answered yet. “There’s a lack of community engagement in the decision making process to date,” she said. “We need to have that conversation: How are we going to continue this green transition, but in an environmentally just way?”
TOXMAP, an interactive map that used various sources to track toxic pollution across the U.S., disappeared from the internet this month.
Excerpt from this EcoWatch story:
TOXMAP, an interactive online map that used various sources to track toxic pollution across the U.S., disappeared from the internet earlier this month, alarming environmental advocates, according to The Hill.
The 15-year-old interactive map was beneficial to researchers and environmentalists. The National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institute of Health, hosted it. Some of the information has moved to other sources, while some has just disappeared completely, as Newsweek reported.
TOXMAP offered detailed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data for clearly labeled toxic release sites and offered extensive health and demographic data, like mortality rates, that users could easily overlay on to the maps. The various capabilities and wealth of data earned TOXMAP a devoted following among researchers, students, activists and other people eager to pinpoint sources of pollution, according to Undark.
With little explanation, it was announced in September that the map would be taken down. Then it was removed last week and the former URL showed a message acknowledging its disappearance and ushered visitors to other potential sources of information, as Undark reported.
"Part of the decision was prompted by the increasing availability of the underlying data from their original sources," said NLM in a statement released to Undark. "Many sources such as the EPA, among others, offer several products that provide similar geographic information system functionality."
The NLM added in its statement that much of the removed information could be found scattered amongst nine other U.S. and Canadian government websites.
People who used the resource see the hiding of data and removal of information as part of the Trump administration's pattern of obfuscation and regulatory rollbacks of environmental policies, as Newsweek reported.
Furthermore, the alternative of combing through nine other websites takes away the consolidation of data and the user-friendly interface of TOXMAP.
After watching the NFL Conference Championship insanity on Sunday, my girlfriend and I started scrolling NetFlix and chose to watch a movie Called IO!
The movie deals with a dying Earth, the atmosphere on Earth has become so polluted and toxic, almost all life on Earth has either died or left the planet to inhabit another planet similar to Earth. Twenty…
Ranking the cities and states and release the most toxins into the environment.
Summary of findings:
As a state, Alaska produces the most toxins (834 million pounds)
Zinc and lead compounds (common products of the mining industry) are the most common toxins
Metal mining accounts for 1.5 billion pounds of toxins, while chemicals (515 million) ranks second
On a county level, the Northwest Arctic of Alaska leads the list, but multiple Nevada counties round out the top 5
Kotzebue, AK produces the most toxins as a city (756 million pounds), and Indianapolis, IN (10.9 million) produces the most out of the top 100 most populous cities
