How Does Mercury Affect The Environment?

Mercury Many studies have been performed to acquire specified effects of the toxic metal, Mercury, contaminating our ecosystems. Mercury is a toxic metal that can be fatal to human-beings and animals. Over the past years, many researchers have sampled water and different fishes to examine the concentrations of inorganic mercury. It has been studied that Mercury gets into the environment multiple ways. “Globally, approximately 6600 metric tons of Hg are emitted to the atmosphere annually, with 33% go to 36% attributed to direct anthropogenic emissions (3).” There are two ways that mercury can be deposited into the environment, such as wet deposition (associated with rain and snow) and dry deposition (cloud and fog deposition) (3). In this …show more content…
Surface water contains methylmercury ranging from 1% to 35% of total mercury (3). Mercury vapor is transformed into water-soluble forms, mainly by oxidation to divalent inorganic mercury, Hg2+ (2). Then it is returned back to the earth's surface in precipitation (2). Since Mercury is deposited to surface water it is subject to methylation by microorganisms; therefore, methylmercury enters the aquatic food chain. (2) Plankton and other smaller organisms, start the food chain by taking in the inorganic mercury, which are later consumed by larger fish. These large predator fish tend to have a higher concentration of methylmercury in their tissue (2). The total mercury concentrations in carnivorous fish ranged from “17.0 to 269.8 lag-kg-1 wet wt. (N=61) in 1990 (Kehrig et al. 1998) and from 63.0 to 556.0 lag.kg- 1wet wt. (N=20) …show more content…
The reduction of mercury being absorbed by the sediment has to be reduce to be less harmful to humans and aquatic organisms (5). Natural attenuation, no containment are implemented to contaminated systems, has showed to have less disadvantages in comparison to other treatments (5). The advantages of this remedial method is that there are no sediment resuspensions, it is low in cost, and there is no change in benthic conditions (5). To achieve this process, photoreduction and microbial reduction are two of the important ways to naturally reduce HgII (5). Vapor mercury produced by the reduction of methylmercury and HgII, quickly evaporates into the atmosphere, due to high volatility, (5). “That evaporation is a major natural attenuation of mercury in some aquatic systems (5)”. Though there are other processes, due to their disadvantages of an alteration in the environmental system and sediment resuspension, this natural attenuation has seemed to be more appropriate than capping and dredging