Now that we’ve all survived another Earth Day, it’s time for Inside Climate News to start delivering the bad news by the truckload again.

The Arctic's frozen permafrost holds some 15 million gallons of mercury. The region has nearly twice as much mercury as all other soils, the ocean and the atmosphere combined, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. That's significantly more than previously known, and it carries risks for humans and wildlife. "It really blew us away," said Paul Schuster, a hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey in Boulder, Colorado, and lead author of the study.

Mercury (which is both a naturally occurring element and is produced by the burning of fossil fuels) is trapped in the permafrost, a frozen layer of earth that contains thousands of years worth of organic carbon, like plants and animal carcasses. As temperatures climb and that ground thaws, what has been frozen within it begins to decompose, releasing gases like methane and carbon dioxide, as well as other long dormant things like anthrax, ancient bacteria and viruses—and mercury.



"The mercury that ends up being released as a result of the thaw will make its way up into the atmosphere or through the fluvial systems via rivers and streams and wetlands and lakes and even groundwater," said Schuster. "Sooner or later, all the water on land ends up in the ocean."

Stupid nature. Who thought up that system anyway?

Back a few years, when I spent a week in Arctic Alaska, the thaw in the permafrost was already a serious problem for the people living there. Because it was a major barrier to the vicious winter storms, having it soften up meant great chunks of land mass were being washed away. Not only that but, for the subsistence hunters in the area, the permafrost traditionally functioned as a wintertime refrigeration unit. The meat gathered from seals on the pack ice—which is another problem, but for another day—would be buried in what the people there called “the Eskimo freezer.”

Beyond that, scientists have been warning for decades that there were all manner of things that would’ve been better left frozen in the earth. (In 1998, scientists found partial specimens of the virus that caused the 1918 flu pandemic in bodies that had been buried in the permafrost in Norway.) Now we find that, in addition to massive amounts of carbon that our atmosphere does not need to have released into it, there also is this huge amount of mercury, more than the scientists anticipated finding.

The mercury risk won't be isolated in the Arctic either. Once in the ocean, Schuster said, it's possible that fisheries around the world could eventually see spikes in mercury content. He plans to seek to a better understand of this and other impacts from the mercury in subsequent studies. The permafrost in parts of the Arctic is already starting to thaw. The Arctic Council reported last year that the permafrost temperature had risen by .5 degrees Celsius in just the last decade. If emissions continue at their current rate, two-thirds of the Northern Hemisphere's near-surface permafrost could thaw by 2080.

Of course, the current administration* is right on the job, as usual. Its plans to fight the climate crisis are coming into focus and one key element is…nationalizing the coal industry.

Wait, what?

From Bloomberg:

Now, more than a half century later, Trump administration officials are considering using the same statute to keep struggling coal and nuclear power plants online, according to four people familiar with the discussions who asked for anonymity to discuss private deliberations. Under the approach, the administration would invoke sweeping authority in the 68-year-old Defense Production Act, which allows the president to effectively nationalize private industry to ensure the U.S. has resources that could be needed amid a war or after a disaster. Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, urged President Donald Trump to employ the statute in a letter Wednesday. "If you don’t have the grid filled with the power that’s needed 24/7, you’re in trouble," he said in an interview. It’s "an emergency national concern and for the national defense of our country."

Harvard University. "This statute did not contemplate the sort of use that apparently now the administration is considering."

Rather than scouring tout les Toobz for all that vintage Republican snark accusing the previous administration of “picking winners and losers,” I’ll just point out that moving heaven and earth—you should pardon the expression—to keep the coal industry alive is both futile and destructive. Getting the government into the actual business of causing the climate crisis is probably the logical last step for the anti-science denialism that has become an article of faith among conservative politicians, a step right off a cliff in Alaska that wasn’t there five years ago.



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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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