Ice Core Perspective on Mercury Pollution during the Past 600 Years
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Past emissions of the toxic metal mercury (Hg) persist in the global environment, yet these emissions remain poorly constrained by existing data. Ice cores are high-resolution archives of atmospheric deposition that may provide crucial insight into past atmospheric Hg levels during recent and historical time. Here we present a record of total Hg (HgT) in an ice core from the pristine summit plateau (5340 m asl) of Mount Logan, Yukon, Canada, representing atmospheric deposition from AD 1410 to 1998. The Colonial Period (∼1603-1850) and North American "Gold Rush" (1850-1900) represent minor fractions (8% and 14%, respectively) of total anthropogenic Hg deposition in the record, with the majority (78%) occurring during the 20th Century. A period of maximum HgT fluxes from 1940 to 1975 coincides with estimates of enhanced anthropogenic Hg emissions from commercial sources, as well as with industrial emissions of other toxic metals. Rapid declines in HgT fluxes following peaks during the Gold Rush and the mid-20th Century indicate that atmospheric Hg deposition responds quickly to reductions in emissions. Increasing HgT fluxes from 1993 until the youngest samples in 1998 may reflect the resurgence of Hg emissions from unregulated coal burning and small-scale gold mining.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".