Melting glaciers release pollution from past decades
Alpine glaciers are now releasing nasty chemicals that settled on them decades ago and have since been banned
By Jessica Hamzelou Bad hair and shoulder pads are not the only things from the 1980s that we’d rather not see again. Nasty chemicals banned in that decade are also on the list. Unfortunately, melting Alpine glaciers are generating a revival of toxic organic pollutants. Christian Bogdal and colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich studied levels of pollution in sediment at the bottom of the Oberaar lake in Bern, Switzerland. The flow of pollutants into the lake peaked in the 1970s, mainly due to the production of plastics, electronics, pesticides and fragrances. The levels declined during the 1980s and 1990s when people realised that these compounds were toxic and they were banned. However, they found that banned chemicals, such as pesticides that have been linked with Parkinson’s disease, have been pouring into the lake at an increasing rate since the 1990s. …
