Recent researches suggest that the amount of toxic mercury element found in the rivers connected to Green land ice sheets are quite similar to that of the lakes connected with the Industrial areas of China.
This led to the rise of quite alarming questions of melting glaciers since they are connected with the major exports of seafood.
A researcher from Florida State University and the German Research Centre for Geosciences, said that the finding of high levels of mercury in the water sampled from southwest green land was quite surprising and alarming.
Now the further researches are going on if this mercury would get into the food system and how it will impact human lives.
A paper on this topic was later published in the journal of Nature Geosciences.
In the first step of this research, water samples were collected from three different lakes to analyze their quality, amount of nutrients present, and their impact on the water ecosystem. These three lakes were related to the green land glacial melt waters.
While analyzing these water samples, to their surprise they found high levels of this highly toxic element called mercury.
Generally in water bodies around 1—10 ng L-1 of mercury are a permissible amount but here the levels of mercury were as high as 150 ng L-1. Not only this but the amount of mercury found in the glacial floor was extremely high that is up to 2000 ng L-1.
Scientists are unclear whether this will affect the marine ecosystems and accumulation of Mercury will increase in the successive food chain or will it dissipate.
Also, Green land’s one of the main occupations is fishing and they are main exported of cold-water shrimps and cons. If the mercury levels keep increasing this could potentially affect the health of humans.
Over 10 % of Earth’s surface is covered with ice but the increasing temperature is making rapid melting of this ice.
Moreover, the researchers said that managing the mercury coming from industries is quite manageable but those coming from natural sources like these glacial waters are quite difficult to manage.
