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Mercury up in the air
New monitor near Silverton to aid in research
Herald Staff Writer
Photo by YODIT GIDEY/Herald photos
Claybrooke fixes the cover of the mercury monitor installed near Silverton on June 30. The monitor – atop an 8-foot-high platform – consists of a glass jar enclosed in a metal box, the roof of which retracts when a sensor detects precipitation.
Click image to enlarge
Roger Claybrooke and Kelly Palmer show the new and old methods of downloading information from a rain gauge near Silverton on June 30. Claybrooke is a meteorologist with the National Atmospheric Deposition Program. Palmer is a hydrologist with the Bureau of Land Management.
Roger Claybrooke and Kelly Palmer show the new and old methods of downloading information from a rain gauge near Silverton on June 30. Claybrooke is a meteorologist with the National Atmospheric Deposition Program. Palmer is a hydrologist with the Bureau of Land Management.
Photo by YODIT GIDEY/Herald
From left, Eric Herchmer, Clay Kampf and Roger Claybrooke connect a new rain gauge with other water and air monitoring devices near Silverton on June 30.
SILVERTON - A Bureau of Land Management hydrologist watched last week as a mercury monitor was installed near here. The goal is to expand on earlier research that found high concentrations of mercury in snow and rain in the San Juan Mountains.
The setting is a meadow in a subalpine spruce-fir forest at about 11,000 feet elevation.
"This monitor will allow us to compare mercury deposition here - where there's a high amount of precipitation year round - to Mesa Verde, a low-precip area," Kelly Palmer said. "Mesa Verde precipitation has some of the highest concentrations of mercury in the country."
The monitor - atop an 8-foot-high platform - consists of a glass jar enclosed in a metal box, the roof of which retracts when a sensor detects precipitation. The sensor notes when it stops raining or snowing and the roof slides back to protect the jar from contaminants.
Hydrochloric acid in the jar binds with the mercury to prevent it from evaporating. The jars are collected weekly and sent to Frontier GeoSciences in Seattle for analysis.
"After the mercury study by the Mountain Studies Institute in 2007 and 2008, we felt we should take a closer look," Palmer said. "After all, we're charged with protecting the pristine quality of Class 1 airsheds such as Mesa Verde and the Weminuche Wilderness."
Scientists suspect the main source of mercury is power plants in the Four Corners.
Over time, data on weekly and total mercury accumulation will give scientists a good picture of the situation in the San Juan Mountains and allow them to compare results with 120 similar sites in the country, including two in Alaska, Palmer said.
The site near Silverton is not being made public to avoid possible vandalism, she said.
All the sites meet standards of the Mercury Deposition Network. The network is the wet-mercury deposition branch of the National Atmospheric Deposition Program, or NADP,
a cooperative composed of federal and state agencies, academic institutions, private organizations and Native American tribes.
Later this summer, the Environmental Protection Agency will install an apparatus next to the mercury monitor to measure gaseous mercury, an airborne form of mercury that reacts rapidly with precipitation or particulate matter and can be deposited in wet or dry form.
Roger Claybrooke, a meteorologist with the NADP, and a half-dozen BLM and Forest Service seasonal employees did the hands-on work June 30. In addition to installing the mercury monitor, they replaced an old rain gauge on a separate platform a few yards away. A third platform holds a monitor that measures sulfur, nitrogen and organic content in precipitation.
The Claybrooke team also wired the instruments on the three stations to talk to one another. The rain gauge data should correlate with that of the mercury monitor on the amount of precipitation and when it fell.
"The monitor is going to be a big help in determining the trend of mercury deposition over time - I'd hope for at least 10 years," Palmer said. "If we find there's a lot of mercury and that it's a problem, the next step would be to find the source."
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