Credit: Jim Urquhart/Reuters
Rainfall samples show increased levels of mercury are showing up in the Rocky Mountains to the Midwest but continuing to drop along the East Coast, according to a new study. The culprit is consistent with emissions from coal-burning power plants in Asia. (emphasis added)
Scientists from University of California Santa Cruz and University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign analyzed data from a network of monitoring sites in the US and Canada that collected rainwater samples to test them for mercury, sulfate, nitrate and others pollutants going back to 1997. When researchers looked at 71 sites in the Midwest, Rocky Mountain and West Coast regions over the period of 2007 and 2013, they found many sites showed increased mercury concentrations, as much as 2 percent rise per year.
“It’s a surprising result,” David Gay from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, who is a co-author on the new study, told Scientific American. “Everybody expected [mercury levels] to continue going down. But our analysis shows that may not […]
