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Arctic mercury flux increased through the Last Glacial Termination with a warming climate

Nature Geoscience volume 16, pages 439–445 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Mercury is a pollutant of global concern, especially in the Arctic, where high levels are found in biota despite its remote location. Mercury is transported to the Arctic via atmospheric, oceanic and riverine long-range pathways, where it accumulates in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. While present-day mercury deposition in the Arctic from natural and anthropogenic emissions is extensively studied, the control of past climate changes on natural mercury variability remains unknown. Here we present an Arctic mercury record covering the Last Glacial Termination to the early Holocene epoch (15.7–9.0 thousand years before 2000 ce), collected as part of the East Greenland Ice-Core Project. We find a threefold increase in mercury depositional fluxes from the Last Glacial Termination into the early Holocene, which coincided with abrupt regional climate warming. Atmospheric chemistry modelling, combined with available sea-ice proxies, indicates that oceanic mercury evaporation and atmospheric bromine drove the increase in mercury flux during this climatic transition. Our results suggest that environmental changes associated with climate warming may contribute to increasing mercury levels in Arctic ecosystems.

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Fig. 1: EGRIP Hg, Br, Na and Ca fluxes, Hg concentration, accumulation profile and NGRIP δ18O for the period 9.0–15.7 kyr b2k.
Fig. 2: EGRIP Hg and proxies of sea-ice variability.
Fig. 3: Schematic representation of the differences in mercury emission, transport, chemistry and deposition during the LGT and the early Holocene.

Data availability

EGRIP ice-core data are available in the Zenodo dataset (https://zenodo.org/record/7754371) and as Supplementary Data to this article.

Code availability

All files related to the box model are available at the following link: https://github.com/deliasegato1/box_model_EGRIP_Hg.git.

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Acknowledgements

EGRIP is directed and organized by the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen. It is supported by funding agencies and institutions in Denmark (A. P. Møller Foundation, University of Copenhagen), USA (US National Science Foundation, Office of Polar Programs), Germany (Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research), Japan (National Institute of Polar Research and Arctic Challenge for Sustainability), Norway (University of Bergen and Trond Mohn Foundation), Switzerland (Swiss National Science Foundation), France (French Polar Institute Paul-Emile Victor, Institute for Geosciences and Environmental research), Canada (University of Manitoba) and China (Chinese Academy of Sciences and Beijing Normal University). A.S. acknowledges the ‘Programma di Ricerca in Artico’ (PRA, project number PRA2019-0011, Sentinel) for supporting this work. A.S.-L. received funding from the European Research Council Executive Agency under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (project ERC-2016-COG 726349 CLIMAHAL). This work represents a contribution to CSIC Thematic Interdisciplinary Platform PTI POLARCSIC. A.S.M. acknowledges the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), funded by the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MOES), Government of India (GOI). F.W. received funding from the Canada Research Chairs Program. T.E., C.M.J. and C.Z. acknowledge the long-term support of ice-core research by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) under the project numbers 200020_172506, 200020B_200328 and 20FI21_164190 as well as the Oeschger Center for Climate Change Research. H.A.K. received funding from the DFF Inge Lehmann grant 1131-00007B ‘Holocene sea ice variability in the Arctic’. ELGA LabWater, High Wycombe, UK, supplied the pure-water system used in this study.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Polar Sciences, CNR-ISP, Campus Scientifico Via Torino, Venice-Mestre, Italy

    Delia Segato, Clara Turetta, Warren Raymond Lee Cairns, Carlo Barbante & Andrea Spolaor

  2. Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, University Ca’ Foscari of Venice, Venice-Mestre, Italy

    Delia Segato, Clara Turetta, Warren Raymond Lee Cairns, Carlo Barbante & Andrea Spolaor

  3. Department of Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate, Institute of Physical Chemistry Rocasolano, CSIC, Madrid, Spain

    Alfonso Saiz-Lopez, Juan Pablo Corella & Carlos Alberto Cuevas

  4. Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Pune, India

    Anoop Sharad Mahajan

  5. Centre for Earth Observation Science, and Department of Environment and Geography, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

    Feiyue Wang

  6. Department of the Environment (DMA), CIEMAT, Madrid, Spain

    Juan Pablo Corella

  7. Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany

    Tobias Erhardt

  8. Climate and Environmental Physics, Physics Institute and Oeschger Center for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Tobias Erhardt, Camilla Marie Jensen & Chantal Zeppenfeld

  9. Physics of Ice, Climate and Earth, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Helle Astrid Kjær

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  1. Delia Segato
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Contributions

A.S., D.S. and A.S.-L. designed the study. D.S., C.T. and W.R.L.C. performed the Hg, Br, Na and Ca analyses. A.S.M. and D.S. performed the box model simulations. C.Z., T.E. and C.M.J. provided the EGRIP dust profile. A.S.M., J.P.C. and F.W. contributed to the interpretation of the results. D.S., A.S.M., A.S.-L., A.S., F.W., J.P.C., W.R.L.C. and T.E. wrote the original manuscript. C.A.C., T.E., C.M.J., C.Z., W.R.L.C., H.A.K. and C.B. contributed to the review and editing of the manuscript. All authors provided input for the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Alfonso Saiz-Lopez or Andrea Spolaor.

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Nature Geoscience thanks Giovanni Baccolo and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Primary Handling Editor: James Super, in collaboration with the Nature Geoscience team.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–7, Tables 1–4 and Discussion.

Supplementary Data

Hg, Br, Na and Ca concentrations in the EGRIP ice core.

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Segato, D., Saiz-Lopez, A., Mahajan, A.S. et al. Arctic mercury flux increased through the Last Glacial Termination with a warming climate. Nat. Geosci. 16, 439–445 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01172-9

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