Natural emissions of mercury to the atmosphere in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The only Canadian inventory of natural source emissions of mercury (Hg) was prepared in 1981, but is now considered unreliable. As a result, the primary reference relied upon by Canadian regulators concerning the relative contribution of natural sources to environmental Hg contamination is a global inventory that was published in 1989. The relevance to Canada of a global inventory that included volcanic emissions is questionable. Therefore, a new inventory of natural Hg emissions in Canada was undertaken. Consistent with earlier inventories, natural Hg emission sources included wind erosion of soil, sea salt spray, forest and brush fires, biogenic Hg vapour emissions from terrestrial vegetation, and evasion of vapour from soil, ocean surfaces (within territorial limits) and lakes and rivers. Meteoritic dust was also considered. Recognizing the variability and uncertainty in available data, probabilistic methods were employed to derive mean estimates with 90% confidence limits. Estimated total annual natural source emissions of Hg in Canada averaged 1.1 × 10 6 kg with lower and upper 90% confidence limits of 0.54 × 10 6 and 2.3 × 10 6 kg. Evasion of Hg vapour from terrestrial vegetation and evasion from soil predominated as natural sources of Hg in Canada; other sources were minor or insignificant. The estimated mean annual emission was approximately one third of that estimated in 1981. It was impossible with currently-available data to quantitatively differentiate natural emissions of Hg from those that are re-emitted following previous anthropogenic release and deposition. Therefore, the estimates provided herein include an unquantifiable contribution by re-emitted anthropogenic Hg.Key words: natural, mercury, emissions, atmosphere, Canada.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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".