Global Warming and Mercury Contamination - It has been discovered that a vigorous mixing process, which takes place in the air just above the large cracks in the Arctic ice masses that expose the cold polar air, sea water pumped atmospheric mercury to the surface.
This process can cause that one larger amount of this toxic element, well known for the damage they caused as a pollutant, enters the food chain, where it can adversely affect the health of fish and the animals that eat them, including being human.
Almost all of the atmospheric mercury that is located in the Arctic is transported there in gas form from sources that are much more remote South.
During a NASA expedition, the team of scientists who did the detailed analysis of data and the discovery, measured concentrations of mercury near the level of the surface and showed such concentrations increased when in masses of sea ice off the coast of Barrow in Alaska opened fissures that resulted in open channels of seawater.
The reaction of mercury pumping occurs because water exposed in one of those channels formed by cracking on plates of ice is much warmer than the air that is over. Due to this difference in temperatures, the air on the channel waves similarly to as does the air over a pot of boiling water.
The process of mixing of air masses is so strong; it triggers a sequence of effects which, among other things, pushes the mercury from a higher layer of the atmosphere to the lower layer, which is in contact with the water.
The mixing process, sometimes clearly visible to the naked eye by the dense white smoke of steam which rises from those channels, extends upward in the atmosphere up to a height of 400 metres (about a quarter of a mile). It is believed that this height is where the phenomenon of the pumping of the mercury.
Global Warming Sea
The discovery that, at average depths, the Pacific Ocean has warmed over the last 60 years 15 times faster than in natural cycles of heating of the last 10,000 years, underlines the fact that global warming of the atmosphere could have been even worse if a part of the heat had not been absorbed by the sea.
On the other hand, the finding also shows that slow warming is not guarantee that global warming is weakening, since absent in the atmosphere heat can simply be “hidden” in the sea.
Climatologists Braddock Linsley of the Observatory terrestrial Lamont-Doherty, affiliated with Columbia University, in New York City, Yair Rosenthal, of Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Delia Oppo, of the Oceanographic Institute in Woods Hole (WHOI) in Massachusetts, all entities in the United States, carried out a reconstruction of temperatures of the Pacific Ocean in the last 10,000 years reaching 15 times faster than the aforementioned discovery of warming of the Pacific at medium depths in the last 60 years than in the previous 10,000 years.
The scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on climate change (IPCC) are agreed that much of the heat that humans have put into the atmosphere since 1970′s through emissions of greenhouse gases probably has been absorbed by the sea.
However, the discovery of fast warming in the Pacific highlights the grand scale that can reach the phenomenon, and suggests that the oceans can be receiving part of the consequences of the assumed more extensive anthropogenic global warming so far.
“You can that we have underestimated the effectiveness of the sea as a reservoir for heat and power,” Rosenthal rises. If this is true, it is partly good, because he has delivered us from the worst effects of global warming, but in part it is bad because it means that the global warming of the Earth is greater than it believed.
Not to add that, even as we take steps to reduce greenhouse gases, climate much more takes to plunge since then will begin to release all this heat stored in the ocean.