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Mercury Pollution

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We’re Winning The Fight Against Mercury Pollution

Friday, April 24th, 2020
Photo of a river with a power plant in the background, white smokestacks billowing above it.

Chalk Point Generating Station on the Patuxent River, near Aquasco, Maryland. The gas billowing out of this power plant has already passed through some emissions-cleaning technology, thanks to healthier air regulations. (Credit: Cindy Gilmour/SERC)

by Kristen Minogue

Marylanders can celebrate at least one environmental win this year. Since 2005, toxic mercury pollution in the state’s rain has dropped over a third.

The preliminary figure comes from three state monitoring stations: Beltsville, Frostburg and a weather tower in Edgewater, at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC). All three stations belong to the Mercury Deposition Network, a collection of roughly 100 sites tracking mercury across the U.S.

Maryland’s success partially stems from early regulations—most notably the 2006 Healthy Air Act. The act mandated reductions for some of the most dangerous pollutants in the atmosphere: nitrogen dioxides that create smog; the sulfur dioxide behind both smog and acid rain; and, of course, mercury.

“We’ve had a long time to see those changes happen,” said senior scientist Cindy Gilmour, who runs the mercury station at SERC. “Other U.S. states have not had those rules in place as long.” The federal government issued its first rule on mercury emissions in 2011, with the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for Power Plants.

View from the forest floor, looking up at silver open-air tower stretching above trees

SERC’s 120-foot meteorological tower has collected data on mercury levels in rain since 2007, one of three Maryland stations in the Mercury Deposition Network. (Credit: Kristen Minogue/SERC)

Gilmour launched SERC’s mercury monitoring program in 2007. At the time, SERC’s 120-foot meteorological tower was already collecting data on weather and other chemicals in rain.

“I thought it would be great to put mercury on top of that,” she said. She approached the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and suggested adding SERC as a third Mercury Deposition Network site in Maryland. “We said, guys, you’re just about to put mercury controls on power plants. This would be a great time to start looking at this.” The state has funded SERC’s mercury station ever since, as well SERC’s projects monitoring mercury and the neurotoxin methylmercury in streams.

For Gilmour, the falling mercury in rain marks a major milestone. But it’s only the beginning of a long journey. Slashing mercury concentrations in rain is one step; tracking it in streams and food webs is another. Her lab will continue watching mercury, to help ensure Maryland continues moving forward.

And while the improvements didn’t come cheap—Gilmour estimates pollution control systems cost roughly $1 billion for each large power plant—for taxpayers, more breathable air cost just a few extra cents per month.

“For a few cents on our electric bills over the last 10 years, we got this,” Gilmour said. “We also got reductions in asthma. We got increases in how clear our air is. The air’s less yellow and it’s more transparent.”

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Cracking Down on Mercury

Monday, December 9th, 2013

by Kristen Minogue

Ally Bullock, a technician in SERC's mercury lab, draws pore water samples from Berry's Creek. (SERC)

Ally Bullock, a technician in SERC’s mercury lab, draws pore water samples from a mid-Atlantic Superfund site. (SERC)

There are places in the U.S. so polluted, eating fish or crabs from their waters isn’t just unhealthy—it can be illegal. The Environmental Protection Agency calls sites like that “Superfund sites,” a label for abandoned or neglected sites that became dumping grounds for hazardous waste. Some of the highest levels of mercury contamination in the U.S. exist in Superfund sites. Cynthia Gilmour knows this first-hand. As a microbial ecologist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, she has worked in several.  But short of digging up the polluted sediments and dumping them elsewhere (an expensive and ecologically risky proposition), not many methods exist to get rid of the problem.

“If we use the traditional technologies of removing that and putting it in a landfill, we don’t have a wetland anymore,” says Upal Ghosh, an environmental engineer from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who works with Gilmour.

This fall, Gilmour and Ghosh explored a new technique: using charcoal to trap it in the soil.

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Methylmercury Microbes More Widespread Than Realized

Thursday, September 12th, 2013
New places scientists discovered can contain the microbes--Archaea and Bacteria--that create the dangerous neurotoxin methylmercury. (SERC & ORNL)

New places scientists discovered can contain the microbes–Archaea and Bacteria–that create the dangerous neurotoxin methylmercury. (SERC & ORNL)

Microbes that live in rice paddies, northern peat lands and beyond are among the several types of bacteria researchers at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and Oak Ridge National Laboratory have just learned can generate highly toxic methylmercury.

This finding, published Wednesday in Environmental Science & Technology, explains why methylated mercury, a neurotoxin, is produced in areas with no previously identified mercury-methylating bacteria. Methylmercury—the most dangerous form of mercury—damages the brain and immune system and is especially harmful for developing embryos. Certain bacteria transform inorganic mercury from pollution into toxic methylmercury.

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Better Know a Trace Element: Mercury

Monday, January 11th, 2010

An interview with Cindy Gilmour, mercury researcher.

Cindy Gilmour doing mercury research in a marsh

Senior scientist Cindy Gilmour studies how anaerobic bacteria – found in places like the marsh soils above – transform mercury into methylmercury. Methylmercury poses a bigger problem than inorganic mercury because it bioaccumulates.

This January the Maryland Healthy Air Act goes into effect. It aims to significantly reduce emissions of air pollutants from the state’s coal-fired power plants. Mercury, like sulfur dioxides and nitrogen oxides, is one of the pollutants that can be released into the atmosphere during the combustion of coal and other fuels. The new law requires mercury emissions to be reduced by 80% now, and 90% by 2013, relative to a 2002 baseline. Maryland is just the latest to join a growing roster of states that have adopted tougher emissions regulations.

Cindy Gilmour will pay close attention to the impact of these new regulations on mercury levels in the Chesapeake Bay and its watersheds. Gilmour is a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), in Edgewater, Maryland. She took a few minutes to answer some questions about the science of mercury, why it’s of concern and what she does to monitor it in ecosystems.
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