View of Lake Melville from Rigolet, a Nunatsiavut community on the far eastern edge of the lake.
Credit: Prentiss H. Balcom
Colonial New Delhi had a cobra infestation. To get rid of it, the government offered bounties for dead cobras, inadvertently turning cobra breeding into a thriving business. When the government got wise and canceled the program, thousands of then worthless cobras were released into the city streets.
Today, the cobra effect means making a problem worse by attempting to solve it.
Arctic regions don’t have a poisonous snake problem; they have a poison problem.
The amount of methylmercury, a potent neurotoxin, is especially high in Arctic marine life but until recently, scientists haven’t been able to explain why. Now, research from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health suggests that high levels of methylmercury in Arctic life are a byproduct of global […]
It might be possible to use some form of magnetite or any other magnetization to trap the mercury and remove it from the system. I am no expert, but they may look into this as a solution, or just stop the lake building before it produces problems.