During May and June, 2009, collaborators from the University of Manitoba (UM), Canada, and the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese of Academy of Sciences (ITPCAS) initiated a five-year mercury cycling investigation project in Lhasa and Nam Co lake on the Tibetan Plateau. Canadian monitoring expert, Dr. Debbie Armstrong, is a technician and scientist at the UM and experienced in mercury sampling and analysis in the Arctic. With her support, a continuous atmospheric mercury analyzer and an ozone analyser were installed at the Nam Co research station. Researchers also conducted a pilot sampling program for river and lake water from Nam Co basin to obtain some baseline measurements for total mercury which were analyzed on the JENA Mercury instrument later in Lhasa.More water samplesare also planned along the waterway with the Indian summer monsoon onset, as the increased flow in the streams and rivers will illustrate the period of the year where the mercury levels are expected to be the highest annually.
Mercury is a serious pollutant and can cause bioaccumulation through food chains. In 1998, Canadian scientists discovered in the high Arctic atmospheric mercury depletion events (AMDEs), which are believed to pollute the land and water with mercury thus effecting vegetation, food web and ultimately, the people living in these regions. Since then, this phenomenon has been measured and documented in both subarctic and Antarctic Polar regions, leaving the Third Pole region blank in human understanding of the phenomenon. Thus the Namco Multi-disciplinary Observation and Research Station (NAMORS) was chosen by Canadian scientists as a cooperation platform for joint mercury investigation in the Nam Co Lake of 4730 m a.s.l. As a saline lake mainly fed by glacial melting, the Lake is isolated from any other sources of input plus, with quite low and variable lake temperature throughout the year.Understanding the biogeochemical cycling of mercury in the Lake is thus conducive to the evaluation of water security in the Third Pole region centered on the Tibetan Plateau.
