The history of surprising Arctic pollution

Scientists still know that contaminated dust particles from medium-high cities migrate to the North Pole and form an ugly cloud, but a study by the University of Utah has shown Surprising evidence shows that polar explorers also witnessed this phenomenon since 1870.

Tim Garret, assistant professor of meteorology and lead author of the project, said: 'Some colleagues' reactions when we first mentioned that people witnessed this cloud at the end of the in 1800, this sounds wild. Who would have thought that the North Pole could be contaminated at the time? Instinctively, most of us believe that 130 years ago, the earth was very clean. '

The work will be published in the March 2008 edition of the American Meteorological Community Newsletter.

By studying throughout the historical materials of previous Arctic explorers, Garret and his colleague Lisa Verzella, former graduate student at the University of Utah, can find evidence that shows a cloud of dust. has clung to the ice to form a slightly gray layer of dust containing metal molecules. Clouds and dust are most likely a byproduct of metal smelting and coal burning during the Industrial Revolution.

'We looked through open documents, including a report in the second edition of Science in 1883, in which the famous Swedish geologist Adolf Erik Nordenskiold was the first to describe the cloud. This blind. We also searched in books that describe the Arctic expeditions translated from Norwegian and French. ' Garrett said.

'These historical documents show that more than 130 years ago, the Industrial Revolution covered the sky and snow of the far north.'

History of pollution of the Arctic

Garrett and Verzella said the first report on the Arctic cloud pollution is often attributed to US Air Force meteorologist J. Murray Mitchell, who in 1957 described 'the large sphere of cloudiness at flight level ' in the task of recovering weather from Alaska across the North Sea in the late 40s and 50s.

Mitchell's description was verified and credited in the 1970s when University of Alaska, Fairbanks scientist Glenn Shaw and colleagues Kenneth Rahn and Randolf Borys of the University of Rhode Island were the first to discover the cloud. High concentrations of heavy metals include vanadium (a slightly whitish hard metal, a sign of burning oil).

In a later work, Rahn and Shaw wrote: 'Arctic cloudy clouds are the end product of the process of massively moving polluted air from different sources of average height to the northernmost regions, with rules The tissue is so big that the most optimistic person cannot figure it out. '

Garret said: 'I think pollution must be observed in the Arctic before the 50s, so I have to find out if this is real.' So he invited Verzella to study historical documents to conclude whether there were written evidence of early Arctic pollution.

Verzella discovered a number of reports published from the late 1800s to early 1900s that mentioned a whitish haze in the sky or a gray or black dust on the ice surface . But Nordenskiold was the first to ' draw attention to the cloudy phenomenon ' during an expedition to Greenland in 1883, according to researchers' conclusions.

Even on an earlier expedition in 1870, Nordenskiold had observed 'a cloud of fine, gray dust and turned black or dark brown when wet, distributed throughout the ice on the mainland, forming a layer that I estimate about 0.1 to 1 mm. '

He discovered that the dust contains 'metal molecules that can be removed by magnets, and some under the influence of welded tubes, giving the reaction of cobalt and nickel.' He believes that this is ' cosmic dust ', most likely originating from meteorites. However, the densities of metal molecules, nickel and cobalt make its origins close to industrial pollution from the more central regions.

Last year, some other researchers found that dust also exists in sample ice cores.'Greenland's recent ice cores show that the rapid rise of dust derived from coal dust and sulfate starts at the end of 1800 but the highest level of sulfate in the 1970s, the highest level of coal dust between 1906 and 1910 ', Garrett and Verzella spoke in their work. High amounts of sulfate salts indicate the burning of oil, while the amount of coal dust indicates the consumption of coal, consistent with pollution sources in the 20th century compared to the 19th century.

In his 2006 study, Garret concluded that particle pollution caused global warming in the Arctic to become more and more severe. The same thing happens in the 1800s?

'It is reasonable that the effect of particle pollution on the Arctic climate 130 years ago may be even more serious now, because during the Industrial Revolution the technology was more dirty than it is today. Of course, the emission of CO _{2 is} now larger and has accumulated over the last century, so the effect of CO ₂ warming is greater than 100 years ago. '

In fact, after burning raw fuel sources became more efficient in the mid-1900s, the level of pollution in the Arctic was significantly reduced compared to the previous one. However, according to Garret, we are witnessing another process of increasing pollution because of large amounts of waste from developing industrial countries like China.