New research shows that concentrations of the toxic element mercury in rivers and fjords connected to the Greenland Ice Sheet are comparable to rivers in industrial China, an unexpected finding that is raising questions about the effects of glacial melting in an area that is a major exporter of seafood.
“There are surprisingly high levels of mercury in the glacier meltwaters we sampled in southwest Greenland,” said Jon Hawkings, a postdoctoral researcher at Florida State University and and the German Research Centre for Geosciences. “And that’s leading us to look now at a whole host of other questions such as how that mercury could potentially get into the food chain.”
The study was published today in Nature Geoscience. The international study began as a collaboration between Hawkings and glaciologist Jemma Wadham, a professor at the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute for the Environment.
Initially, researchers sampled waters from three different rivers and two fjords next to the ice sheet to gain a better understanding of meltwater water quality from the glacier and how nutrients in these meltwaters may sustain coastal ecosystems.
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