“There are surprisingly high levels of mercury in the glacier meltwaters we sampled in southwest Greenland,” said Jon Hawkings, a postdoctoral researcher at Florida State University and and the German Research Centre for Geosciences. “And that’s leading us to look now at a whole host of other questions such as how that mercury could potentially get into the food chain.”
The study was published today in Nature Geoscience. The international study began as a collaboration between Hawkings and glaciologist Jemma Wadham, a professor at the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute for the Environment.
Initially, researchers sampled waters from three different rivers and two fjords next to the ice sheet to gain a better understanding of meltwater water quality from the glacier and how nutrients in these meltwaters may sustain coastal ecosystems.
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