Alarm due to the accumulation of mercury in the Pacific Ocean

It is well known that there are many species of fish that over the years have ended up consuming large amounts of mercury that also pass to humans through the consumption of these fish and now, the alarm is sounding again through a study that has unprecedented accumulation of mercury in the Pacific Ocean unprecedented accumulation of mercury in the Pacific Ocean A recent scientific article published in Scientific Reports by Nature revealed that never before seen amounts of highly toxic mercury have been found in the most toxic pits. The international study, which involved countries such as Denmark, Canada, Germany and Japan in the effort, recorded the first direct measurements of mercury deposition in one of the most difficult-to-sample environments on the planet, and also the deepest, about 8-10 km in the depths of the sea. Lead author Professor Hamed Sanei, direct r from the Lithospheric Organic Carbon Laboratory (LOC) of the Department of Geosciences at Aarhus University, stated that the amounts of mercury discovered in this area exceed anything that has been recorded in remote marine sediments, and is even greater than many areas directly polluted by industrial emissions “The bad news is that these high levels of mercury may be representative of the collective increase in anthropogenic Hg emissions in our oceans,” he said. ‘But the good news is that ocean trenches act as a permanent landfill, so we can expect that the mercury that ends up there will be buried for many millions of years.Plate tectonics will carry these sediments deep into the earth’s upper mantle. “But, as Sanei explains, although mercury is removed from the biosphere through the aforementioned natural process, the large amount of it is still quite alarming. pollutant that has ended up in the ocean trenches, so it can be an indicator of the general health of our oceans, although none of them is spared from having their depths full of mercury. However, studies like the one just carried out require extensive additional sampling from the deep sea, and in particular from the ocean trenches, to support this preliminary work. Ultimately, this research will improve the accuracy of mercury environmental models and the management of global mercury pollution.