Greenland Ice Cores Trace 15-Fold Arsenic Spike to Montana Copper Mine

Greenland – Ice cores drilled in a Greenland snow trench helped trace a roughly 15-fold spike of arsenic and other toxic metals in Arctic ice to a copper mine in Montana, more than 2,500 miles away.

Video released with the research, credited to Nathan Chellman of the Desert Research Institute, shows members of the research team drilling ice cores inside a snow trench in Greenland.

A DRI-led study published in Nature Sustainability on November 10, headed by Joe McConnell and Nathan Chellman, analysed 10 ice cores from Greenland, the Russian Arctic and northern Canada. It found arsenic and other toxic metals rose about 15-fold in Arctic ice between about 1886 and 1918, a pattern the researchers matched to emissions from the Anaconda Copper Mine near Butte, Montana, then one of the world's largest copper producers.

The team estimated peak emissions of about 11,000 tons of arsenic and 4,400 tons of lead a year, and said more than half of Americans and about 11% of Canadians then lived downwind of the pollution. It also found emissions fell sharply after electrostatic precipitators were installed at the Anaconda smelter around 1919, about a decade after the technology was patented.