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Peat bog records of atmospheric mercury deposition

Abstract

There have recently been many investigations using atmospheric mercury deposition as an indicator of the impact of industrial development, especially in the Northern Hemisphere. Thus, mosses have been used as indicators of airborne mercury pollution1,2, both wet and dry deposition have been analysed for mercury3,4, and mercury concentrations in 18O/16O dated ice core samples from the Greenland Ice Sheet have been determined5. Heavy metal investigations of this kind from both Antarctica and Greenland are reviewed in ref. 6. I present here mercury fluxes calculated from measured concentrations in 210Pb-dated peat bog samples. The peat cores were taken from two widely separated ombrotrophic peat bogs in Denmark to elucidate the recent development in the atmospheric mercury deposition rate around the industrialized areas of Europe.

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Madsen, P. Peat bog records of atmospheric mercury deposition. Nature 293, 127–130 (1981). https://doi.org/10.1038/293127a0

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