Arctic pollution's surprising history

“I thought that pollution had to be observed in the Arctic prior to 1950, so I decided to find out if that was true,” says Garrett. So he hired Verzella to search historic records to determine if there was written evidence of early Arctic pollution.

Verzella found a number of published reports from the late 1800s to early 1900s that mention a whitish haze in the sky, or a gray or black dust on the ice. But Nordenskiold “was the first to explicitly draw attention to the haze phenomenon” during his 1883 expedition to Greenland, the researchers concluded.

Even during an earlier expedition in 1870, Nordenskiold observed “a fine dust, gray in color, and, when wet, black or dark brown, is distributed over the inland ice in a layer which I should estimate at from 0.1 to 1 millimeter.”

He found that the dust contained “metallic iron, which could be drawn out by the magnet, and which, under the blowpipe, gave a reaction of cobalt and nickel.” He believed it to be a “cosmic dust” possibly from meteors. However, the concentration of metallic iron, nickel and cobalt made it much more likely that the origin was industrial pollution generated at mid-latitudes.

Last year, other researchers found that the dust is present in ice core samples. “Recent Greenland ice cores show a rapid rise in anthropogenic soot and sulfate that began in the late 1800s, but with peak sulfate levels in the 1970s, and peak soot between 1906 and 1910,” Garrett and Verzella say in their study. A higher composition of sulfate suggests oil combustion, while higher soot suggests coal combustion, consistent with the main sources of pollution generated in the 20th versus 19th centuries.

Early Arctic Warming

In a 2006 study, Garrett concluded that particulate pollution from mid-latitudes aggravates global warming in the Arctic. Did it do the same back in the 1800s?

“It is reasonable that the effect of particulate pollution on Arctic climate may have been greater 130 years ago than it is now, because during the Industrial Revolution, technologies were dirtier than they are now,” says Garrett. “Of course, today carbon dioxide emissions are greater and have accumulated over the last century, so the warming effect due to carbon dioxide is much greater today than 100 years ago.”

In fact, after fossil-fuel combustion became more efficient in the mid-1900s, the levels of particulate pollution in the Arctic dropped dramatically from levels earlier in the century. However, Garrett believes that we might be seeing another increase due to higher emissions from developing industrial countries such as China.

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