Milestone Reached in Airborne Mercury Measurement

New analysis from the University of Nevada, Reno, is anticipated to play an vital function within the world battle in opposition to airborne mercury air pollution, a critical well being risk to folks and wildlife alike.

The researchers have verified that new applied sciences, together with some developed on the College, measure airborne mercury air pollution way more precisely than the older methods which have been in widespread use for many years. The truth is, the researchers discovered the older know-how undermeasures mercury concentrations by as a lot as 80%.

The work was led by two researchers within the College’s College of Agriculture, Biotechnology & Natural Resources, Sarrah Dunham-Cheatham and Mae Gustin. Dunham-Cheatham is a analysis assistant professor and director of the Core Analytical Laboratory, a analysis facility on the College collectively operated by the Faculty’s Experiment Station unit and the USDA Agricultural Analysis Service. Gustin is a professor of environmental geochemistry within the Faculty’s Department of Natural Resources & Environmental Science. Each conduct analysis as a part of the Faculty’s Experiment Station unit.

Seth Lyman, a researcher and affiliate professor at Utah State College who accomplished his doctoral research in environmental sciences on the College of Nevada, Reno, is the third writer of the research published this month within the peer-reviewed journal Science of the Whole Setting.

The specter of mercury air pollution is so nice that 139 nations have signed the Minamata Conference on Mercury, a decade-long initiative by the United Nations to cut back mercury emissions. Mercury could cause critical neurological injury and different well being results. Infants and unborn kids are particularly in danger.

“Each time anybody takes a breath, they’re inhaling mercury,” says Dunham-Cheatham, as she explains how mercury that enters the environment from small-scale gold mining, coal-burning energy crops, cement producers and different industrial operations is carried worldwide.

As mercury is carried via the air, it’s deposited into soil and water, the place it enters the meals chain. Mercury-contaminated fish pose a well being threat to people. So does mercury-contaminated rice. Excessive ranges of mercury focus have an effect on the replica of birds and different wildlife and take a silent dying toll.

Regardless of well-documented information of the environmental dangers, lack of correct know-how to measure airborne mercury air pollution has hampered efforts to set world requirements to cut back the risk.

Gustin says she started elevating questions greater than 15 years in the past within the scientific group concerning the accuracy of measurements of airborne mercury produced by the then-existing know-how. Her questions met sturdy resistance from scientists who had made vital investments — each monetary {and professional} — within the older measurement methods that had been in use because the mid-Nineteen Nineties.

However as proof pointing to the shortcomings of earlier methods has gathered, Gustin says a rising consensus of researchers got here to imagine a extra correct measurement know-how is required.

In 2013, Gustin and Jiaoyan Huang — on the time, a post-doctoral scholar on the College and now a member of the air high quality group with Sonoma Expertise — started a decade of labor to develop an alternate new know-how.

“It takes a variety of work to vary dogma and type a brand new paradigm,” Gustin says.

The researchers examined 4 air-sampling methods that use newer measurement know-how, together with one of many older units, for a full yr on the College’s Valley Highway Greenhouse Complicated, a part of the Experiment Station. Within the paper revealed this month, researchers report that the newer methods, which depend on nylon or polyethersulfone membranes to seize airborne mercury, are far more correct than older methods. One model of the know-how utilized in two of the brand new methods that have been examined was developed by the workforce led by Gustin on the College of Nevada, Reno; the know-how used within the two different new methods was developed at Utah State College.

The analysis was funded by a Nationwide Science Basis grant.

Now, Gustin says researchers are fine-tuning the supplies used to create the membranes used within the new measurement methods.

“Membranes are simple to gather and analyze and are simply deployed,” she says. “This may be a viable technique for a lot of researchers.

“The brand new membrane samplers have been deployed for testing at greater than a dozen areas the world over — from Peavine Peak exterior Reno to Svalbard in far-northern Norway, and from Amsterdam Island within the Indian Ocean to the shores of the Nice Salt Lake in Utah — to assemble additional info in collaboration with worldwide scientists.

“That is how science evolves,” says Gustin. “You develop one thing and, if it’s good, others strive it and get on board.”

Dunham-Cheatham and Gustin have obtained $30,000 from the NSF to carry a workshop on campus this October the place about 30 worldwide scientists who’re engaged on the measurement of airborne mercury will collect to debate their findings and chart a course ahead.

Reference: Dunham-Cheatham SM, Lyman S, Gustin MS. Comparability and calibration of strategies for ambient reactive mercury quantification. Sci. Whole Environ. 2023;856:159219. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.159219

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