DOI: 10.1038/s41561-021-00793-2
论文题名: Rivers as the largest source of mercury to coastal oceans worldwide
作者: Liu M. ; Zhang Q. ; Maavara T. ; Liu S. ; Wang X. ; Raymond P.A.
刊名: Nature Geoscience
ISSN: 17520894
出版年: 2021
语种: 英语
英文摘要: Mercury is a potent neurotoxic substance and accounts for 250,000 intellectual disabilities annually. Worldwide, coastal fisheries contribute the majority of human exposure to mercury through fish consumption. Recent global mercury cycling and risk models attribute all the mercury loading to the ocean to atmospheric deposition. Nevertheless, new regional research has noted that the riverine mercury export to coastal oceans may also be significant to the oceanic burden of mercury. Here we construct an unprecedented high-spatial-resolution dataset estimating global river mercury and methylmercury exports. We find that rivers annually deliver 1,000 (minimum–maximum: 893–1,224) Mg mercury to coastal oceans, threefold greater than atmospheric deposition. Furthermore, high flow events, which are becoming more common with climate change, are responsible for a disproportionately large percentage of the export. Coastal oceans constitute 0.2% of the entire ocean volume but receive 27% of the external mercury input to the ocean. We estimate that the river mercury export could be responsible for a net annual export of 350 (interquartile range: 52–640) Mg mercury across the coastal–open-ocean boundary, although there is still high uncertainty around this estimate. Our results show that river export is the largest source of mercury to coastal oceans worldwide, and continued mercury risk modelling should incorporate the impact of rivers. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited. Citation statistics:
资源类型: 期刊论文
标识符: http://119.78.100.158/handle/2HF3EXSE/169784
Appears in Collections: 气候变化与战略
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作者单位: Ministry of Education Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China; School of the Environment, Yale University, New Haven, CT, United States; School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, United States; State Key Laboratory of Water Environment Simulation, School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
Recommended Citation:
Liu M.,Zhang Q.,Maavara T.,et al. Rivers as the largest source of mercury to coastal oceans worldwide[J]. Nature Geoscience,2021-01-01