Researchers study mercury in the Great Salt Lake by Radka Konkolova

The water is unthinkable part of our lives. It creates approximately 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface and is important for every active creature. But it can be there will be still less and less drinking-water-supplies. This is thanks to global warming, various exhalants and water, air and soil pollutions. And because these three elements we need and use the most, pollution and pollutants can have very bad impact of our health or even lives as well as on lives of animals and other nature. We should take more carry about these resources.

Take Great Salt Lake. It is the biggest brine lake in the North America, even the biggest brine lake all over the world. It has got a prehistorically ancestry. But in the past it was much bigger and less salty. The salinity was caused by the contraction of the area the lake was spreading on. So now this lake is much brinier than ocean and seas and you can see swimmers bobbed in the water like corks. Yeah, I think it is very interesting, because this lake has got almost the same inhabitants as the seas have, for example shrimps. But the salinity doesn’t cause the problem. The problem is that the Great Salt Lake contains high levels of mercury, which can be very dangerous for people and animals eating those shrimps.

Scientists are doing some researches now in order to find out the source and impact of mercury on birds and other creatures. I think everybody knows that mercury is dangerous element and can cause many troubles and problems with health, it can even cause cancer or similar diseases. Of course there are some resistant creatures which can live with water polluted by mercury. They are for example algae (which cause horrible smell, like rotten-eggs, when decaying), bacteria, bugs and shrimps. And these very shrimps can mean potential danger for more than 9 million birds which every year stop by this lake when flying to or from “warmer countries”. And what is worse, the fact that the inorganic mercury is thanks some bacteria changed to more dangerous form, what is methylmercury. So researchers make researches on ducks’ eggs and water inhabitants with the hope they will find out if the mercury is made by the lake and have natural background or by nearby plants and pollutants. But the negative impact on birds is still neither confirmed nor denied.

But the wish of all of them is that something can be done with this and the situation will get better.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080808/ap_on_sc/poisoned_lake;_ylt=AhPw08EpvONUBLn7oSjst72s0NUE

by Radka Konkolova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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edited by Beata Biskova